Captain’s Log Days 11-19

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Captain’s Log Day 11

It’s another long drive day for us, we’re trying to get from Stone Mountain (near Atlanta) to Harrisburg, PA today – and Chaplain CT sometime tomorrow.  We’re quite expert and breaking camp by now; it takes maybe an hour to pull up all the sleeping bags and fold all the couches and tables back out, to shower and freshen up, to reload fresh water tanks and dump the other tanks.  We spend another hour in a local Walmart replacing basic supplies and then we’re on the road.

The kids have figured out how to keep themselves busy on the drive.  We’ve got a TV and a Wii, and some amount of reading.  There’s singing and tickle fights, and lots of napping.  There’s food-making and grumbling about dish cleanup.  We camp out in the middle of Pennsylvania.  We pass the 3500 miles traveled mark, the 1/2-way point.

Captain’s Log Day 12

We break camp at daylight without waking the kids, and drive maybe two hours before the kids bother to roll out of bed.  RV “camping” is a real trick.  We make it around New York with only 1 truly crazy driver incident; a bright red pickup truck came blazing up the left side and was clearly out of room to pass us, but did so anyways.  He sliced across at a 45-degree angle in front of us. Had I not slammed the brakes and swerved we clearly would have hit the truck; and such a hit would have rolled him.

We finally pull into my Uncle Bill’s farm in Connecticut around 4pm.  We settle the RV, then meander down to the river behind the farm, where one of my cousins is RV camping.  We swim in the river, cook burgers on the campfire and sit around visit until way past dark.

Captain’s Log Day 13

We hang out in the farm all day; some of the kids swim in the river or fish or shoot fireworks off after dark.  I mostly hung out and caught up with the family news.  Shelley & I attended the local church wine-tasting, which was basically a chance to drink a bunch of wines that somebody else bought, and do more catching up on family news.

 

Captain’s Log Day 14

Shelley & I borrow a cousin’s car and drive to Cape Cod for the day.  OMG’s a car is SO much nicer to handle than Nessie!  We take the slow route up the Cape stopping at every tiny town and inlet.  Shelley’s family owned a summer house in Dennis Port 50 or 60 years ago and Shelley was tracing her roots.  We managed to stick our toes in the Atlantic and really unwind.  Shelley & I both like driving, so it’s another really peaceful down day.

 

Captain’s Log Day 15

Up early, we force all the kids to take showers (and change clothes; 2 weeks into vacation and our standards are getting pretty lax) and we hit the road.  Breaking camp is now a pretty standard operation.  By rotating drivers and Shelley driving until the wee hours we make it almost to Indiana.

 

Captain’s Log Day 16

We pull into the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign around noon.  I’m giving at talk at 6, and UofI is paying for dinner and 3(!) hotel rooms for us (one for each couple, and one more for the 3 kids).  Real showers for all again!  Yeah!!!  The talk goes really well, its my Debugging Data Races talk and its a good fit for the summer course on multi-core programming.  Shelley and I manage to sneak a beer afterwards.

 

Captain’s Log Day 17

Again we manage to break camp in short order and do another long day of driving through Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.  By now we’ve got a rhythm going; Shelley takes the early morning driving shift while everybody sleeps in, then Luke and I alternate shifts until evening (while Shelley naps), and Shelley takes the late night shift.  I think we’re covering around 800 miles in a day.

 

Captain’s Log Day 18

Today it’s the rest of Nebraska and Wyoming, then Utah.  My Dad manages to call me out in the middle of I-80 no-where land, to the bemusement of all.  We hit high winds on and off all day.  At least once I was driving with the steering wheel cranked over a full 180 degrees (and was down to 45 mph) just to stay on the road.  18-wheeler’s would blow by us, knocking us all over the road.  First the bow wave push us hard to the right, on to the shoulder.  Then the wind-block (and my 180-degree wheel position) would drive us hard back onto the road and into the truck, then the trailing suction would pull us harder into the truck – even as I am cranking the wheel the other way as fast as I can… and then the wind would return.  It was a nerve-wracking drive.  Shelley took over towards evening.  Around 11pm the winds became just undrivable even for her.  I was dozing when suddenly we got slapped hard over, almost off the shoulder.  Even driving at 40mph wasn’t safe.  An exit appeared in the middle of nowhere – even with an RV park (mind you, it’s typically 30 miles between exits *without services*).  We bailed out.  All night long the RV was rocked by winds, like a Giant’s Hand was grabbing the top of Nessie and shaking her like a terrier does a rat.

 

Captain’s Log Day 19

Morning dawns clear and still.  We hit the road again early, as we’ve a long drive today.  It’s a quiet drive through to Reno, and then we hit some really crazy drivers again – a combo of construction zone, short merge lanes and stupidity (outside the RV) nearly crushed a darting micro-car.  The construction on the Donner Pass was perhaps even worse; we managed to get forced into clipping a roadside reflector on the right (less than a foot away from the mountain stone versus pushing an aggressive SUV into the naked concrete on his left).  Finally past all the madness we get to the clear road down from Tahoe and through the Bay Area – but it’s all Homeward Bound on the downhill slide through our home turf!

Home At Last!!!

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Some parting stats:

We passed through 22 states (24 for Shelley & I, as we also get to count Rhode Island and Massachusetts).
We drove about 6900 miles.
I bought about $3000 in gas, and $1300 in tires.
We saw 4 close family members in Tucson, 7 in Texas, my brother in Atlanta, and at least 16 in Connecticut (I lost the exact count!).
I did about 20 loads of laundry after returning (the washer ran continuously for 2 days).

Cliff

 

Captain’s Log Days 8, 9 & 10

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Captain’s Log Day 8

We’re on the road by 10am, this time a full day’s drive to Montgomery AL from Katy TX.  I forget how big Houston freeways are; at one point I count 9 lanes *in each direction* (18 total lanes!).  I’ve never seen so much concrete.  It’s otherwise mostly uneventful, though.  Traffic is fair to light and the road is good.  We stop at a random lakeside park by Lake Charles for lunch.  It smells of the ocean and has an alligator pond/cage/viewing area.

While I typically encourage the kids to drink a lot (to survive the desert heat & dry), I don’t check on how much they eat, just that they eat a reasonably balanced diet.  So I missed out that Matt hadn’t eaten all day, and was constantly staring heads-down on his IPod on silly flash games.  Well, towards afternoon he starts feeling sick, and near dinner he barfs and refuses to eat or drink anything.  He cannot even keep down tiny bits of bread or Gatoraide; the 2nd barf happens on our bedsheets and pillow.  At this point he decides to camp out by the RV toilet and do any more barfing into that (uggh!!!  poor guy!!!!), and we decide to cut it short and look for camping for the night.  By dinner he’s still unable to keep anything down; we grab to-go food from a collection of fast-food joints and keep rolling to the nearest campsite.

We get 1/2 way between Mobile & Montgomery, AL and pull over into a nice full-service RV park.  Shelley & I decide to camp outside in a tent, so Josh can get off the floor (he’s 17 and 6ft tall, lean and flexible… and does not fit in any of the RV pullout/fold-down beds, so he’s been sleeping in the aisle).  We want Josh off the floor so Matt can make an emergency run from his foldout bed to the bathroom without interference.  It’s beastly hot and humid outside, but I figure it will cool off as the night wears on.  Boy was I wrong! It remains 80+ & 80% humidity all night long outside, while the kids were sleeping in air-conditioned luxury.  And we get a late night visit from the camp kitten – he’s adorably cute and caterwauls at us, and starts climbing the tent with his razor claws until Shelley takes him for a walk.  He follows her like a shadow all over the park until she finally has to lock him in the campground bathroom.

 

Captain’s Log Day 9

Finally dawn breaks and we move back into the cool RV air.  Ahhh, blessed relief.  Also, Matt is much better – it’s a common kid 24-hour tummy bug.  I start him back in on the BRAT diet, with sips of water – and now he’s very hungry, a good sign.  He continues to improve throughout the day and is eating normal by dinner.  We pull up camp (we’re getting quite expert at this) and head for Stone Mountain, GA.

Stone Mountain is a giant mountain-sized chunk of granite outside of Atlanta, with a park and a lake.  It’s been carved with a 50ft high sculpture and has been slowly improved over the years to include many hiking trails, a sky tram system, lots of outdoor adventure activities and an amusement park.  Apparently the “ducks” (amphibious vehicals) are fantastic.  We are going there for the July 4th extravaganza – and as a sign that I’m on vacation, I barely know that today is the 3rd and I’ve no idea what day of the week it is.  We get there about 3pm and check in to a nice RV camp site.

Shelley cooks a fantastic spaghetti dinner.  My brother Eric drives out to camp with us, bring his best friends’ two small girls (ages 6 & 7) with him (he’s been watching the girls when the parents are working since they were 2 & 3) and we all enjoy a nice picnic dinner.  As the evening rolls on we’re deciding on whether or not to see the laser & fireworks show this evening (there’s a bigger one tomorrow) – when the thunderstorm hits.  It’s a real downpour, big lightning and thunder, blowing wind, the works.  We wait that out, and then try to take a walk about the park.  Eric & I, the two girls and my middle two kids walk over to the clubhouse (to check out the water-taxi ride to the main park area) but the rain has other ideas.  We make it to the clubhouse but we’re fairly wet, so we treat the girls to hot chocolate while we dry out.  We wait for the rains to end but it’s no good – the rain has turned into a steady drizzle; we just as wet by the time we make it back and there’s no end in sight.  We give up any idea of tent camping or seeing the laser show and settle for watching a Disney movie (the Sword in the Stone) and having a lazy evening with all 10 of us huddled in the RV).  Sleeping arrangements are “cozy” to say the least!  But at least everybody is dry.

 

Captain’s Log Day 10

It’s the 4th of July!  We breakfast, cleanup & head over to the water taxi. The rains have stopped and the sun is out.  It’s gonna be a hot & humid day. The water taxi is nice, it’s cooler near the lake.  We make it to Stone Mountain’s main attraction area and decide to walk to the bell tower.  The park is already busier than Eric has ever seen it before.  There’s a large Indian family setup under the bells already (and I see more people of the same persuasion walking over to the tower all morning – I think they figured out a cool shady semi-private place to hang out at all day).

We’ve walked maybe a half a mile and it’s not even noon and we’re already soaked with sweat when we make it back to the Plantation Inn.  The Inn isn’t open for lunch (although the AC is nice), but the helpful counter lady tells us there’s RV parking closer in.  We walk up to Memorial Hall.  Immediately two things strike me as really odd: there’s at least 1000 people hanging around looking for food (and more pouring in all the time), it’s 11:30 and *none* of the dozen or so restaurants are open yet – and there’s bus & RV parking open
right in front of the main Hall.

I hand the kids my credit card (to get lunch at noon when the restaurants open) and Shelley and I hightail it back to the RV: across 1/2mile of hot trails & roads, ride the water taxi (we miss the one in front of us by literally seconds even with me sprinting across the landing area), and finally the 1/4 mile hike from the taxi dock to the RV.  We pull the hookups as fast as we can and roll out & down the road.  Nessie does NOT sprint, she *proceeds*, but we made her proceed as fast as possible.  We took the short way around the lake, only to discover the road was closed: the attendant at the barricades explains “the road fell in a hole”.  Nothing to be had for it; Shelley makes a 3-pt turn on a narrow park road and we go the long way around.  Finally, a full hour later, we make it back to the bus/RV parking in front of Memorial Hall – and Lo! it’s open.  We take the most premier parking spot in all of Stone Mountain, at noon-thirty on the 4th of July.  (A short time later one other RV takes the next spot, then the road is closed behind us).

The amazing thing about the Stone Mountain concessions was the astronomical price for food; hotdogs: $7-$10, drinks also $7 or so.  (And they denied a hot and hungry hoard for at least an hour???).  But finally we all sat down and finished our food and plotted our next move.  Shelley, Eric & I all want a big hike.  Last Christmas Shelley & I hiked the Grand Canyon down to Phantom Ranch and back out in two days, and Eric has hiked both the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail end-to-end.  We head out for the top of Stone Mountain on a hot & muggy day.  There’s lots of other folks with the same idea, but it really is a long hot hike.  Most of my kids bail out after a mile or so, voting to go hang out in the AC (which is really a good plan); Eric and his two young charges make it to the path-up cutoff but it’s a killer hike in the heat so they turn around also.

It ends up as Shelley, Laura (age 15) and I heading on, and we decide to head for the bird sanctuary.  It’s another couple of miles and we gave most of the water to Eric & the girls.  The three of us head down the far side of the mountain to a kids playground and finally drag ourselves into the park and help ourselves to the water fountain.  We drink a quart each, and fill a couple more quart bottles we’re carrying.  We hike the 1/2mile more to the bird sanctuary – mostly carrying on now because of what Shelley would call “Mission” – her ex-Marine training to “complete the Mission” no matter the cost.  i.e., we’re all too collectively silly to claim the end goal is ridiculous, so we hike it anyways. It’s a decent enough little woodsy trail, with plenty of songbirds – but far to beastly hot to really enjoy.  By the time we make it back to the kids’ park we’ve drunken all our water (another 1/2gal between the 3 of us), so we reload (and re-drink our fill) and back up the mountain to cross it in reverse.  We make it back in good time, although it was really pushing our the limits to
hike so far on such a hot day.

There is much lounging around and napping in the RV’s AC to wait out the heat of the day.  Matthew (age 12) introduces the two little girls to the joys of Minecraft.  Eric & Laura nap.  Everybody else surfs the (very very slow) park Internet, eating popcorn & chips.  Finally as the heat starts to fade and twilight sets in we get enough gumption to make & eat hotdogs.  Then we pack it up and prepare to leave the relative safety and peace of the RV for the slowly building hoard.

The lawn below Memorial Hall faces the giant sculpture carved into the face of Stone Mountain.  The only open spaces are at the very front, so that’s where we head.  I estimate 100,000 people eventually filled that lawn; in any case it was a colossal crowd.  It was also actually quite a peaceful crowd; no rowdies (no alcohol allowed), zillions of little kids running pell-mell, picnic blankets, soap bubble makers and glowing flashing LED lights.  It’s cooler now, so we settle down on our blankets and chairs, listen to the music and wait for the show.  At various times I let Josh or Karen & Luke wander off for snacks (a little nerve-wracking that; they are out of sight in the crowd within seconds and gone for 30mins or more, but everybody returns fine).

The fireworks show starts promptly at 9:30 and is possibly the best I’ve ever seen.  There’s a laser & light show on the mountain, there’s a Civil War tribute, (there’s ads for all of Georgia’s major sports teams), there’s music and of course fireworks.  The actual fireworks where downright amazing; you get a double-echo from the Bang! works, one directly and one bounced off the mountain.  They used plenty of the big fireworks and absolutely tons of rising sparks kind; the entire mountain was a sheet of fire for minutes at a time. The finale left us breathless.

Unwinding back to the camp was a slow but uneventful crawl; I’ve sure we beat the campers on foot (who had to wait for the river-taxis and the report was to expect a 2.5 hr wait).  Eric took his to charges home and we collapsed tired but triumphant for a full nights sleep.

Cliff

 

Captain’s Log, Daze 5, 6 & 7

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Captain’s Log, Day 5

It’s another early morning drive, this time we’re heading to San Antonio and then on to Luling TX for more relatives.  We’re still marching on through the great desert Southwest, but there are more signs of green now.  Some trees mixed in with the sage, and less cactus.

The ride to Luling is long but uneventful.  We give Luke another turn at the wheel.  The road is calm enough that we let Luke chug on for miles, and then we’re heading into San Antonio.  Suddenly the world is full of crazy drivers!  People are cutting in front of us, or darting around, or force-merging (on short merges) and giving us no space.  Luke brakes as he can, but we’re an 8 ton vehical!  We take at least twice as far to stop as a car!  We finally make it to a parking lot.

We have a great dinner in San Antonio with Grandpa & Grandma Weiner, and then we have to brave rush-hour traffic.  Shelley takes the helm this time, and a good thing too.  I’ve never seen such craziness.  We watched a pickup 4-wheeling it over the burm to cut traffic (and yes he set the dry grass on fire, we watched the smoke rise for a long time), we had endless numbers of people fight tooth-and-nail to get in front of us, only to switch lanes back a second later when some other lane had a slight advantage.  We have a little
sporty thing flash over from left to right, with us doing 60, with less than a foot spare across our bumper!  It was all over in an instant, and he missed us, but another foot and we woulda crunched him big.  It was a grueling two hours to get out of S.A.  Luling, where we spent the night at Grandpa’s house, was great.  We yakked all night while the kids worked out their cabin fever.  All in all, another fabulous Grandparent visit.

 

Captain’s Log, Day 6

Next morning, crack-o-noon, we headed out for my sister’s place in Katy (really far west Houston).  It’s another straight shot down I-10, and I-10 is in pretty good shape even out to Luling; as we approach Houston it widens to 6 lanes.  We start watching real weather appear; there’s a line of heavy thunderclouds forming up to the left and right of us and we’re heading right for them.  The wind starts to pick up and really buffet us; we slow down to 60 and then slower.  People are starting to park on the side of the road, but we want out of the impending storm.  Rain alternates between slashing and nothing.  The clouds get dark, low and ominous.  I start to see green clouds, and clouds moving the wrong direction.  I pull out Shelley’s “smart phone” and look up the local weather.  Sure enough, with vast modern technology, 4G wifi, low-power android-enabled cloud-backed internet weather smart-phone tech we discover what we already know: there’s two large thundercells on either side of I-10.  They happen alot during south Texas summers as warm wet Gulf air meets cooler midwest air.  And these storm cells often spawn tornadoes.  But after 20 mins of staring at awe-inspiring clouds and getting slammed by 40mph cross-winds we manage to roll through the middle of them and out the other side.  The rest of the trip in is entirelty uneventful, except for the trip down memory lane for me.

We get to my sister Ruth’s without incident and my kids rush in to play with her kids.  Then we have a comedy of errors trying to get power run to the RV.  First our old power cable gets hot and the RV power cuts off (which means the AC cuts off on a hot humid Houston summer day).  Then we think the outlet is bad, then we try to test the outlet with an old drill (drill not working), my laptop power supply (cannot see the little blue light in the sun), and finally a real tester (outlet is dead).  We switch outlets, then Aunt Ruth tells me the switch for that outlet is flakey, and it surely is; we quick-cycle the RV AC repeatedly without realizing it, and pop a 15amp house breaker.  We change outlets again, we change power cords again, we run the new cord through the garage to an internal 20amp circult, and finally it holds.  The RV stays well AC’d for the next 2 days.

Grandma’s over (*my* Mom this time) as she lives a few miles from my sister.  And we hang out and visit all day.  There’s wine & lasagna for dinner, and hot showers and full beds for all.

 

Captain’s Log Day 7

We all sleep in late.  We have pancakes & bacon for breakfast.  We run a few errands and then see the movie Brave (which is really good, BTW).  I end up connecting with an old college buddy and her boyfriend (Facebook!) so we invite them over for dinner.  Turns out the the boyfriend is also an old college friend, so suddenly it was Texas A&M U reunion night.  They are both divorced with one teenaged daughter each (compared to my 4), and enjoying life again after divorce.  We have a long evening of beer, hotdogs and college memories.  The kids Xbox continuously, or get their internet “fix” or play on the trampoline, or have drawing contests or otherwise monkey around.  It’s a really great “down time” lazy day.

Cliff

 

Captain’s Log Daze 3 & 4

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Captain’s Log, Day 3

Next day we take a lazy breakfast and then decide to visit the Biosphere with Grandpa.  We head out to Nessie and observe the new tire is looking mighty flat.  Humm….  we hook up the air pump… and it’s at 80 psi, spot-on the normal max pressure.  Looking further: the inside tire is flat.  CRAP.  But wait!  It really WAS fine in Casa Grande, I checked it before we drove off.  And pretty quickly it’s clear that the rubber value stem is leaking, probably
banged too hard during the change and now it’s going flat overnight.  We call up Ed.  He agrees to change it under warranty… but he doesn’t want to drive out to meet us.  But he Does The Right Thing, and calls GCR Tire, a Tucson local who WILL come out to Grandpa’s.  Ed’s covering the whole cost.  So now we’re basically stuck at Grandpa’s waiting on GCR Tire (who’s promised to get there “in an hour” and it’s already 10am).

Meanwhile something triggered in Shelley’s brain about tires aging, so I go read up on them.  I learned something new today: all tires age.  After 6 years you should replace them, completely independent of tire wear.  Pretty much no tire is expected to last 10 years except under “ideal” circumstances.  And tire manufacturers have to stamp the date of manufacture on the tire, so you can tell how old your tires are.  (read up on it, but it’s the week & year of manufacture as a 4-digit number in an oval after the “DOT” stamp).  So we go look at our tires (mostly meaning Shelley crawling under the RV in the 110-heat to read between the dualies).  Sure enough, the youngest tire is 8 years, and the oldest is 12 years old.  Good tread, but expected to blow at any moment.

Crap, crap, crap.  Another round of planning & family voting.  We decide to limp over to Big-O tires to replace the remaining 5 tires, never mind fixing the old one.  GCR Tire shows up for the repair while I’m finishing negotiations with Big-O (and yes I asked GCR and no they did not have the tires we need in stock).  So the GCR guy politely fills our inside tire (it’ll last maybe an hour) and we roll over to Big-O.  We drop everybody off at Costco, where we do some shopping and eat a delicious Costco lunch (which is actually pretty dang cheap and a decent enough hot dog), and wait 2 hours for me to blow another $900 on tires.  After a while we’re back at Grandpa’s house with 6 brand-spanking new tires, waiting for a thunderstorm to pass before we go swimming.  It’s too late for the Biosphere, that will have to wait for another visit.

The thunderstorm takes too long to pass and we miss swimming also.  We have some more family over for a nice dinner, then we hit the road again for more night driving.  This time we’re heading for Carlsbad Caverns.  It’s a long haul out of Tucson but utterly uneventful.  We even give Luke (19 yrs old!) a turn at the wheel.  He’s a natural driver and handles this big rig fine.  We make a long drive of it but Carlsbad is just too far to make in one day.  We end up in the backside parking lot of a Walmart somewhere just inside the Texas border (Walmart mostly has a “RV friendly” policy).  It turns out that while our GPS has many useful features, finding RV campsites is not one of them.  Also when we turn off I-10 and head into the countryside we lose all cell phone service and can’t call ahead.

Captain’s Log, Day 4

It’s a 3hr early-morning drive or so to the Caverns.  We get there just before the heat starts getting oppressive again.  This time we decide to leave the generator on and the AC running while we spend the hot part of the day underground.  I used to see this all the time and wonder about it: RV’s with the generator going constantly.  Now I get it – Nessie will be in tolerable shape when we return to her, but without the AC Nessie would heat up like a tin
box in the hot sun.

Several of my kids are really nervous about entering the Caverns; they’ve had some scary cave experiences in the past.  We have to gently encourage several down the switchbacks into Carlsbad, but they master their fears and soldier on down into the cool cave air.  Carlsbad does not fail to deliver.  The Caverns are immense on a scale that’s hard to imagine; all of downtown San Jose could comfortably fit in them.  The trails wander on for miles in there (the sections closed to the public are probably 100x larger than the miles of public sections).  There’s a section where the roof soars over 300ft overhead and single rooms covering many acres with lines-of-sight of perhaps a quarter-mile underground.  And it’s all a fairyland of cave growths and little pools, with eerie lighting everywhere; flowing stone sculptures with names like “Temple of the Sun” or “Doll Theater”.  For the younger generation: it’s the largest Minecraft cave you’ll ever see.  :-)

We ride the 800ft (!) elevator lift back to the surface and decide to stay for the evening bat swarm (it’s still to hot to drive).  Every evening at dusk between 250 thousand and a few million bats leave to go eat mega-tons of insects up and down the local rivers (the numbers fluctuate so much because the bats migrate frequently).  We hang out in the local gift shop & cafe for a few hours (always a bad plan when on a budget), then try to watch a movie in Nessie (AC keeps it tolerable in there, but it’s still pretty warm), and finally evening rolls around.  We settle in to listen to the rangers and then finally the main show: 250 thousand bats fly out of the cave like smoke on the wind.  There’s a faint odor of bats in the air, and an endless murmuring of chirping bats and the little winged creatures are flitting everywhere overhead before flying off the escarpment edge and off into the darkness.

We do another (not so long) night of driving, stopping at midnight in Fort Stockton, TX.  We get a longer nights’ sleep tonight, even if the location isn’t as glorious.

Cliff

 

Captain’s Log Days 1 & 2

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Captain’s Log, Day 1

Today’s the day for the start of our epic 3-week 7000-mile cross-country RV trip of doom!  I’m up (fairly) early as I need to pick up all my kids – and their extra clothes, toiletries, games, meds, etc – by 9am.  Then I take them back to my house to begin packing in earnest, except for Josh who I need to take to the eye doctor’s to replace his glasses (broke under warranty) and Laura – who left her drawing pad behind.  I also need to drop my ex-Sprint AirWave back at the UPS store, and go by the pharmacy for a month’s worth of meds, and get fresh fruit for the RV, and… and … and … you get the picture.

Meanwhile Shelley is busy doing last-minute packing of Nessie, our 7-ton 31′ Class C RV – all the fruits & veggies & cold-stuff go in in the last minute.  While I’m running around frantically driving kids all over creation, Matt figures out he’s got a total of 3 pairs of underwear at my place, so Shelley is out driving him to get some undies (and other stuff we need) while I’m running my errands.  Despite all the crazy start and hasty lunches we actually hit the road as planned right at noon.

So on this trip we have: Me & Shelley (a red-head), my eldest daughter Karen, Luke (another red-head), my son Josh, my 2nd daughter Laura (also a red-head but no relation to Shelley) and my youngest Matt.  We’re off to see the country and all my scattered relations.  I’ve got my Dad (& Jane) living in Tucson AZ the kids’ other grandpa Zade in Luling TX (outside of San Antonio TX), my sister (Aunt Ruth) and mom (Pat Ireland) in Katy TX (outside of Houston), my brother in Atlanta GA, and my Uncle Bill and his 4 daughters (all my age) and their 15 kids (all my kids’ ages) in eastern Connecticut.

We’re starting out of San Jose, heading over Pacheco Pass to I-5, then south towards LA – but we badly do NOT want to hit LA right at rush hour, so we eventually cut over to Bakersfield and then follow some long long slow farm road across the central valley to Barstow… and up to Calico, a ghost town.

Now when Shelley was a kid, her mom would drive this very road (to visit her grandparents in Vegas) and they would stop by Calico once a year or so.  She has some fond memories from her childhood so visiting Calico is somewhat of a pilgrimage to her.  We arrive there right at dusk and can’t find anybody manning the entrance booth, so we sheepishly drive (our 31′ RV) quietly into the town – and promptly find the RV campground.  It’s basically deserted (there’s 1 other camper there, and space for maybe 100 vehicles), has power hookups and bathrooms with showers and running water… and it’s free, at least for people
arriving as late as we did.  We got out, stretched our legs and enjoyed the beautiful pink sunset over the red red hills, made sloppy joes on Nessie’s stove and ate on the picnic tables in picture-perfect weather.  Laura got the neighborhood dogs to howl back at her, Karen & Luke made videos of the epically blowing Laura’s hair, Matt climbed the hills and Josh & I ninja-sparred.

It was a picture-perfect ending to the 1st day.

Captain’s Log, Day 2

We walk though Calico the next morning.  It’s cool desert morning air, with some wonderful history.  The town’s been cleaned up a fair amount since Shelley was last there but remains a really nice tourist trap.  Mission accomplished, we head out for the long hot desert drive to Tucson to visit my Dad (Grandpa).  It’s a *long* boring drive down I-40.  Shelley is an awesome long-haul truck-and-horse-trailer driver, so driving this RV thing is a piece of cake.  (and while I’m up getting Shelley a nectarine, Laura types in my blog: “Moo” and “He has yet to notice.”)  Karen is talking about whale sperm shampoo (*not* sperm whale shampoo)… and the generator cuts out – it’s overheated.  That means the main compartment AC cuts out.  Oh – did I mention that on the long uphill grades the cab also AC cuts out?  (I assume because the engine is working too hard?).  So we pressed on in the 110-degree heat, across I-40, down “highway” 95 (looks like asphalt thinly spread over desert dirt, there’s a whole lotta “dips in road”).  Back on I-8 and heading west, and 2hrs out of Tucson and we’re all baking on-and-off (as the cab AC cuts in and out, and the cabin is slowly climbing above 90degrees)… when we blow a tire.

Yup, 20 miles from Nowhere, AZ, down that long & lonely road… we suddenly pick up a shake & shimmy… and a list.  We hove Nessie over to port and off the side of the road.  I tremulously step out to survey the damage.  Outside right rear tire has blown big, completely come apart.  It’s 1 of a dually, and the other is squashed under the load but holding.  Time for some quick thinking; we are baking and a long way from anywhere… and lame.  We check the phones: we have cell service; Thank You T-Mobile.  We call AAA.  They don’t do RV tires but they do give us the number of RV Medic in Casa Grande… which isn’t open after hours.  We get the answering machine & another number to call… also no answer.  So now we’re calling all about (at least 3 phones making active calls at this time, plus Google map’s are in hot action).  We decide to limp into Casa Grande.  We dump the tanks (not the black!) and push the kids over to the “good” side to lighten the load.  We also batten down the hatches, as Shelley points out that if the remaining tire blows we’ll “drop hard”.  Casa Grande is about 20miles down the road, and we decide that 40 mph is probably a good max-speed so we start off.

Then the dust-storm hits.  NO I AM NOT KIDDING.  We’re lamely limping along when the wall of dust hits, obliterating the “Blinding Dust Storms” road sign.  So now we’re limping blindly along getting buffeted by 40mph winds and dust (and tumbleweeds ARE blowing by, queue lonely wild-west music please) when the rain hits.  Yes: thick dust on our windshield AND ITS RAINING NOW WITH THE BLOWING DUST.  Nessie soldiers on.  20min later we pull off I-8 and out of the storm and head down some lonely farm road… but with the lights of Casa Grande clearly in the distance.  We pull into the first big lot we see (Big Tires empty lot) step out and see a rainbow.  Back around to calling RV Medic we get a human, we tells me to call Ed W’s who DOES do after-hours work.  $200 minimum charge.  Ed (who also requires 3 or 4 phone calls to reach) promises he can work on us, but can we get to town?  No problem.

While we wait at Ed’s shop for an hour (his mobile guy is on another call), Grandpa & Grandma drive up from Tucson and take the 3 younger kids back to their place and feed them all manner of treats.  We (4 remaining) older kids mosey over to a nearby restaurant and get dinner and some heat relief.  Another hour later and I’m $400 poorer and sporting a brand-new tire.  We pile in and make it to Grandpa’s.  Much sighs of relief, and a good nights sleep was had by all.

Cliff

 

Progress + Vacation

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It’s been a freak’n month since I last blogged!  Where’s the time gone???

Mostly I’ve been furiously coding.  ‘wc *java’ of our ‘src’ directory now reports 31500 lines.  We’ve cleaned up and CSS’s the web interface.  We added LevelDB to handle zillions of small K/V pairs (larger ones go to the local file system directly, and of course we still handle S3 and HDFS natively (either using an existing hadoop install, or directly *being* a distributed hadoop)).  We’re still 100% peer-to-peer, even for the direct HDFS stuff.  Last week I hacked a concurrent Patricia Trie (leaving the making of a *distributed* concurrent Trie for later, but now I know how to do it…). Then we ran all 36Gig of Wikipedia data through WordCount, using that Trie – it took less than an hour on 1 node.

This week it’s about running a Linear Regression *distributed*, using distributed Fork/Join as the programming paradigm.  Also, integrating a HashMap-in-a-Value (so we can pass about & maintain the Map interface in the Value piece of our K/V store – think: distributed JS objects), plus the final bits of VectorClocks (all behind the scenes; the VCs will let us do atomic update and strong coherence of Keys but they’re a horrible API to expose).  We’re building a toolkit approach to solving the problem of building a reasonable database over the Cloud.  Either (distributed) Patricia Tries or (distributed) Concurrent Skip Lists for range queries, plus JS-like objects in Values, plus atomic (transactional) update of individual JS objects using a Compare-And-Swap like approach (instead of locking: CAS is much faster under load, as threads can optimistically make progress).

More on all of the above later this week – as we have a hard deadline to finally *open* our Open Source project.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve been hassled plenty about calling ourselves Open Source and not (yet) having any open source… we’ve been trying to get the basics done first… but the real news:  I’m finally going on Vacation!!!

Yes, Nessie, the 31′ 7-ton Class C RV of Doom is being prepared for our 7000 mile Epic Cross-Country Journey.  I’ve been wanting to do this for a decade now: take the entire clan (7 of us!) across country, touring all the junk tourist traps we can and visiting our scattered family as we go.  We got family in Tucson AZ, San Antonio TX (well, Luling really), Houston, Atlanta, DC area, and Connecticut.  I’m giving an invited lecture at UIUC on our way back, and have been assured I can use that lecture as a reason to declare this a “business trip”, and deduct all the gas and mileage costs – I figure about $3500 in gas alone.  We stopping at Stone Mountain in GA over the 4th of July, visiting my brother and camping at the lakeside facing the mountain where we’ll watch the fireworks and lazer show from the RV roof.  We’re going to visit Carlsbad Caverns.  We’ll pass through DC and maybe attempt the Smithsonian (not sure about that one; depends on the schedule and how badly I want to fight the RV through DC traffic).  We’re visiting my Uncle’s classic family farm in Connecticut where my 4 cousins live – all my age, all married with 3 to 4 kids each… all about the same age as my 4 kids.  We’re talking now about 15 to 20 neices and nephews, plus Aunts & Uncles galore, and of course pigs and chickens and horses.  It’ll be a regular zoo.

So if you see a large white whale heading east on I10 with a frazzled Shelley or my excited 19yr-old at the helm, honk, wave Hi and give us a wide berth…

Cliff

 

Quote(s) of the Month from Kevin Normoyle (Sun/Sparc & Azul L2 Cache Designer Extraordinaire, Cache Coherence Advisor to 0xdata):

Reminds me of CS101, on one of my first programs.  The grader wrote in big red letters over my big comment block:
“Don’t document your bugs, Fix them”

So I asked Kevin if I could quote him, and I got this response back:

ah that’s fine…I spout “Advice” left and right to everyone… Many dismiss it as “Rant”.  There’s always that fine line between being a Prophet, and just another crazy guy standing on the corner yelling.  One could argue that everyone who every posts to Twitter is an “Advisor” of some sort, to the world.

Sound advice, from a (reluctant) adviser to the world.

http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~shanir/nir-pubs-web/Papers/OPODIS2006-BA.pdf

The D3 Bomb

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The Diablo3 bomb blew through my house this week, destroying work schedules left and right. Every kid (& Dad) played hours of D3.  OMG’s, I can remember D1 – way back in ’96 before the Diablo’s were numbered.  I must be older than dirt.  Also, being CTO of 0xdata means a zillion customer visits last week (thanks to our plugged-in CEO Sri).  Git claims 600 lines of code from me, down from my weekly average of 3000… blah.  Coding is good for me, I need to do more!

Meanwhile, work at 0xdata is actually proceeding really well despite my lackluster week.  We’re reading & writing HDFS natively.  As I write this, we’re now able to read & write S3.  We’ve got the semantics and design of what is basically the Java Memory Model ironed out for the Cloud (although the implementation is still being worked on).  We’re starting to launch Paxos-based H2O clouds in Amazon EC2.  We’re running larger test suites.

What little coding I did was relating to making Key-delete work right.  The issue is racing Puts followed by Deletes, and delivering a strongly consistent answer when UDP packets are getting lost or re-ordered.  A late-arriving Put cannot “resurrect” a deleted Key and that requires keeping some VectorClock smarts on the deleted Key, instead of just removing all knowledge of the Key.

We’ve got the Git repro opened up to a handful of people and we’re debating when to open it fully.  I’m voting for “wait a little longer”; in particular I want to iron out the design of the execution engine more.  I.e., “word count” on HDFS should not just run fast & well, it should look good also.  I might get overruled on the timing of this, but in any case look for our Git to open up “soon” – some weeks or less.

In other news, I got my $500 deductible returned to me from AllState (which they got from the other drivers’ insurance).  We sold my fiance’s junker car and upgraded her to a car with only 70K miles (down from 225K miles!  The unkillable Nissan Maxima’s brakes finally failed).  I switched the family over from Sprint to TMobile – it’s a better family plan (for me anyways), and that means I finally upgraded my antique phone… to another antique!  Yes!  I managed to dodge the smart-phone brain-drain that’s got all my colleagues one more time.  :-)

Cliff

 

What’s Going On?

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As alluded to in my last blog, here’s my fun hack de-jeur: “Whats going on?”

I’ve got a multi-node setup with UDP packets slinging back and forth, and each node itself is a multi-cpu machine.  UDP packets are sliding by one another, or getting dropped on the floor, or otherwise confused.  I’m in a twisty maze of UDP packets all alike (yes, I played the game back in the day).  Then something crashes, and pretty quickly the network is filled with damage-control packets, repair & retry packets, more infinite millions of mirror reflection packets.  What just happened?  I press my handy little button and…

… a broadcast of “dump, ship and die” hits the wires (a few extra times for good measure).  All my busy Nodes stop their endless chatter and dump the last several seconds of packets towards my laptop, slowly & reliably, via TCP.  Each node has been gathering all the packets sent or received to (well, the first 16 bytes of each) in a giant ring-buffer, along with time-stamp info and the other party involved.  After I ship all this data from every node to the one poor victim (that I pressed my button on), every other node dies (to prevent further damage).

The Last Survivor gathers up a bunch of very large UDP packet dumps and starts sorting them.  Of course, you can’t just sort on time, that would be too easy.  No, all the nodes are running with independent clocks; NTP only gets them so close in time to each other.  Instead I have to sort out a giant Happens-Before relationship amongst my packets.  I am helped (above and beyond some sort of home-brew wire-shark) by my application understanding it’s own packet structure.  I *know* certain packets must be strongly ordered in time, never mind what the clock says.  For example, I only send out an ACK for task#1273 strictly after I receive (and execute) task#1273.  Paxos voting protocols follow certain rules, etc, etc.

In the end, I build a very large mostly-correctly-ordered timeline of what was just going on, as seen by each Node itself, and then HTML’ify it and pop it up on the browser.  Voila!  There for all the world to see is the blow-by-blow confusion of what went wrong (and generally, the follow-on error “recovery” isn’t all that healthy, so more broken behavior follows hard on the heels of broken behavior).

Basically, I’m admitting I’m a tool-builder at heart.  As soon as I realized that standard debuggers don’t work in this kind of situation, and wireshark couldn’t sort based on domain-specific info (and pretty-print the results, again using domain-specific smarts), I went into tool-building mode.  As of this blog, I’ve found several errors in my cloud setup already; e.g. a useless abort-and-restart of a Paxos vote if a heartbeat arrives mid-vote from an ex-cloud-member (that’s alive and well and wants to get back in the Cloud), and some infinite-chatter issues getting key replication settled out as nodes come and go.

On other fronts, my car came back from the body shop, only to turn around and go back to the engine shop: the timing belt had slipped.  The work was done under warranty and I’ll go pick up my car on Monday.  I can hardly wait!!!

My GFs car’s brakes have been squealing for weeks; they finally started shuddering and we decided it was time to fix them.  She’s driving a 1993 Nissan Maxima with 220K miles on it; weird things start breaking at that age, but mostly the car just soldier’s on.  But it was time for the brakes.  We pulled the rear pads & looked at the rotors: one of them was shot.  Fortunately a new rear rotor was only $25, plus another $22 for pads (tax, brake grease, still under $50).  We couldn’t get the dang pistons to move back! We tried at least 5 different wrench/jig/clamp combos to no avail.

We figured the pistons must have been jammed with debris, so with great trepidation we pulled the brake fluid line, the emergency brake cable and pulled the whole unit to my workbench.  I popped the piston out manually.  It looked clean and good… and had this funny thing in the middle… stupid me, failed to check the internet again… it’s the anti-slip mechanism for the emergency brake.  You have to *spin* the piston to screw it back into the cylinder.  Sigh.  It took us another 1/2hr to find the right tool to spin the dang thing, but it finally went in without too much trouble.  After that it was another hour to reassembly all the parts, and then we had to bleed and bleed and bleed the line.  As of this writing, the pedal is still to soft, I suspect we need to bleed it some more.

Daughter is at the Old Salts Regatta, plus a ton of driving to meet people for 0xdata, plus a much needed dinner out… and down 2 cars (GF’s brakes-in-progress and my car in the shop), made for a very complicated week.

Cliff

 

hack, life, hack, life

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{life,hack}*

Some Real Life and Hacking interleaved this week.  I added file-upload via the browser, and then ran into a problem with a misconfigured machine poisoning my Paxos voting.  It’s not Paxos, but I kept endlessly triggering a new round of voting, for no good reason.  That took a day to settle out on a reasonable approach.

AllState came out to look at my car, and haul it off to the shop… for 3 weeks.  Ugh.  Bent the door reinforcement beam, so I need a new door.  The Evo’s been a rock-solid reliable car with 120K miles on it (and yes I drive it like an Evo should be), so I’m not going to skimp on the repair.  But 3 weeks driving my family beater van.  Ugh.  Also shot about half a day to talk with the various people (appraiser-scheduler, appraiser, claims manager, body shop).  (fyi – the beater van is a Toyota previa with 165K miles on it, purchased explicitly to train teenage drivers; its slow & reliable and cheap).

I got our new hire to do a nice hack for better HTML generation from inside the Cloud.  We want a way to let H2O developers (that’s mostly me, Jan Vitek & the new guy right now) churn out HTML pages with internal stats on the Cloud.  So we need an easy way to write fairly pretty HTML, and also fill-in-the-blanks with some Plain Olde Java Code, and install with no extra files (a single JAR install) and be rock-solid reliable on ANY network & browser config (means: No JavaScript! for those security-conscience networks), and be debugable in-house (means: no downloading large packages e.g. JSPs, etc; been there, done that, watched several good engineers lose their lives debugging that crud).  So what did we come up with?

You write a Java class for each unique browser page:

public abstract class HTMLIndex extends HTMLUtils {

You have one big HTML String for the page:

final static String html =
HTML.dtd
+ "<html>"
+ "  <head>"
+ "     <title>Welcome to H2O</title>"
+ CSS.tables
+ "  </head>"
+ "<body>"
+ "<p><a href='Store.View'>Surf the local K/V Store</a>"
+ "<p>The Local Cloud has %subnet_size members"
+ "<p><a href='Upload'>Upload a file</a>"

(ugh: not sure how to get code to not auto-html-ize here.  It’s a plain Java String with plain HTML embedded in it).  Notice a few boilerplate strings already folded in, including some CSS.  Notice I got href links in there, other html and that funny %subnet_size token.  This isn’t the whole HTML string for this page, more later.  But first:

You write the fill-in-the-blanks function, filling in the %subnet_size token with H2O.Cloud._subnet_size:

public static H2ONanoHTTP.Response serve( H2ONanoHTTP server, String uri, Properties header ) {
  String source = html;
...
  source = replace(source,"subnet_size",H2O.Cloud._subnet_size);
  return server.wrap(source);
}

Simple, dumb, frightfully easy to use.  I’m sure it’s been thought of a zillion times before.  (and thanks to NanoHTTP for a 1-file web server)  Oh, and for tables your HTML string looks like:

final static String html =
    + "<p>The Local Cloud has %subnet_size members"
    + "<p><a href='Upload'>Upload a file</a>"
    + "<p><table>"
    + "<tr><th>Local Nodes<th>CPUs<th>FreeMem<th>TotalMem<th>MaxMem<th>FreeDisk<th>MaxDisk</tr>"
    + "%tableRow{"
    + "  <tr class='%rowClass'>"
    + "    <td><a href='Node=%host'>%node</a></td>"
    + "    <td>%num_cpus</td>"
    + "    <td>%free_mem</td>"
    + "    <td>%tot_mem</td>"
    + "    <td>%max_mem</td>"
    + "    <td>%free_disk</td>"
    + "    <td>%max_disk</td>"
    + "  </tr>"
    + "}"
    + "</table>\n"

And the fill-in code:

    for (H2ONode h2o : H2O.Cloud._members.values()) {
      // only replace the table line, we will insert the values later one by one
      source = multiReplace(source, "tableRow");
      String host = h2o._inet.getHostAddress();
      source = replace(source,"rowClass",(alt++&1)==0 ? "rowOdd" : "rowEven");
      source = replace(source,"host",host);
      source = replace(source,"node",host);
      source = replace(source,"num_cpus" ,            h2o.get_num_cpus () );
      source = replace(source,"free_mem" ,toMegabytes(h2o.get_free_mem ()));
      source = replace(source,"tot_mem"  ,toMegabytes(h2o.get_tot_mem  ()));
      source = replace(source,"max_mem"  ,toMegabytes(h2o.get_max_mem  ()));
      source = replace(source,"free_disk",toMegabytes(h2o.get_free_disk()));
      source = replace(source,"max_disk" ,toMegabytes(h2o.get_max_disk ()));
    }
    source = remove(source,"tableRow");

That ‘replace’ function does the obvious thing.  Very nice.  A for-loop in the Java-code to fill in the HTML table.  Clean, simple to use.  Yes I am stupidly happy about this hack.  Thanks Petr.

More Real Life: changing jobs means changing insurance.  I COBRA’d the skipped month between jobs, but it doesn’t kick immediately (instead it kicks in retroactively).  This means all those bills I take for this entire month have to be re-filed with each individual provider so they can be back-billed to COBRA.  Also, all my providers need to know about the COBRA this month, and about the new plan next month.  TOTAL pain in the butt.  My teenager crushes her glasses weekly, typically using her face to cushion  her headlong rolling dive in the grass, or to put that wrestling move over on her siblings, or to test the power of belt-sanders & power tools, stuff like that.  I glad she’s enjoying life vigorously but there’s a limit to how far an epoxy repair job can go, so I finally had to pony up for another $400 pair of glasses… during the COBRA-hell-month.  My youngest is in for another round of orthodontics.  My cholesterol prescription ran out.  My colonoscopy (after insurance) is running $600.  And so on: each is another shot at my wallet when I’m in the 1-month no-paycheck limbo, and the fact that COBRA cashed my premium check is just ironic.

My hack(s)?  First was a major cleanup of my async RPC stuff; greenfield coding is great and all that, but after some QA & a little hammering it needed to go from “fun hack” to “production ready” which needs a whole ‘nother level of thinking.  I’ll save the other major hack for next blog.

Last bit of ‘life’: I’ve been listening to the music group Bond.  Awesome stuff and easy on the eyes…  ;-)

Cliff

 

Hit and Run

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I was driving in Palo Alto with 2 of my kids in the car heading towards Fry’s, looking to get the largest monitor I could reasonably buy.  I was driving down one of the many fairly narrow 4-lane side streets, heading towards El Camino Real when a driver pulled into my blind spot.  With a block-and-a-half to go to the red light, the driver very slowly started to overtake me… then he started edging into my lane.  I honked and edged up and over to give me some space… with now much less than a block to go the driver suddenly floored his vehicle and came over into my lane (his lane was ending quickly, being filled with large yellow Caddie parked at the light).  I hit the brakes but couldn’t get any more over (no shoulder, sidewalk full of telephone poles and other crud).  Crunch… I was fairly certain he had hit the Caddie, and I knew he had hit me.

I checked my kids, all ok.  I looked out the window at the other car & the Caddie.  He was between the Caddie and me, and was trying to back down the street – but got blocked by cars coming up behind him.  He stopped moving and started getting out of his vehicle, so I took a breather and got a clearer look – there were lots of cars, lots of honking; my car looked drivable and in the way and there was a Jiffy Lube at the corner, so I waved to him and rolled around the corner and parked.

I got out and headed over to his car… and he was busy yelling and screaming at the Caddie driver (who had been parked at a red light the whole time!).  He looked at me and got back into his car and rolled up to light and around the corner, clearly to join me at the Jiffy Lube… and took off instead.  Gone.  I was dumbfounded, and stood looking at his vanishing car like an idiot.  One of the Jiffy Lube guys came up to me and asked if I was ok; I nodded and went over to check out the Caddie guy.  He was a timid old man and was really shook up by the screaming-at he just had.  It was clear his vehicle was blocking the road and looked untouched.  I stuck with him until he felt better, then he got in his car and drove off.  I walked back to mine to survey the damage and double-checked the kids.  Sure enough, a big dent with lots of missing paint.

Then the Jiffy Lube guy volunteered that he had heard the crash, had come around the corner, had watched the driver chew out the Caddie… and decided the driver looked “off”.  He had the plate number written down and encouraged me to call the cops.  So I did; and sure enough in about 5 minutes a Palo Alto policeman showed up.  He was very polite and called in the plate#, and started taking statements.  In another 10 minutes he reported that they had caught the guy!  Then he offered me a chance to eye-witness the driver where they had stopped him… so I followed the cop back across Palo Alto and did a slow drive-by… and indeed it was the same guy.  They offered me the chance to press charges – but they also reported he didn’t seem drunk/drugged – so I decided to do this with just insurance instead.  Maybe he was just having a bad day.

Today AllState came out and looked at my car, and hauled it off to the body shop.  Maybe in a week I have a car with a fresh paint job?  Kudos to the Palo Alto police department; that was quick work catching the guy.  Kudos to the Jiffy Lube guy who had the brains to get the plate number.  And I did eventually get my monitor.

You didn’t think I was going to talk about technology, did you?

Cliff