Yes, well, I still have valiantly managed somehow to not post about California and stuff I have more than once thought about and even blogged about blogging. I suppose now I have blogged about not blogging.

Otherwise, the apartment was still here. First things first, I got my network back in order. Pesky network. I’ve been fighting a lot with Solaris over the past couple of days. Honestly I have no idea why everyone sings its praises, because I think it sucks. Sane logging is nowhere to be found. Oh, it’ll tell you that a service is trying to be started/stopped/started/stopped, but it won’t tell you why. Wouldn’t you think that important? And, it doesn’t always like to completely reboot. It just hangs for no good reason. I have to manually reset with a dumb paperclip a time or two. SSH is wack sometimes and will ask for my private key password multiple times, even after I’ve entered it and ssh-agent is running. Samba is crazy slow. Practically unusable under Windows 2000, my testbed. I added a re-shared the directories on argento (via an nfs mount) and it was lightning fast. I don’t know why Solaris hates me. Also, the snapshot directories don’t show up with normal names under Windows. I don’t know what that is either. Also, I keep forgetting that you can’t take snapshots during a resilvering, which is terribly annoying. </rant>

California on the whole was quite amazing/terrific/awesome/spectacular/exceptional/wonderful. Definitely a lot of people networking, learning, and getting to do cool new things (and with it bookoos(sp) more things to do and manage and keep track of). Like I’ve said before, I am still amazed by the California landscape. I’m pretty sure my first trip, I didn’t ever think/realize that there were mountains. There are. Little ones and big ones and pretty ones. Lots of trees, really nice weather, and generally a very temperate climate. Even so, for all its proximity to the Pacific along with its vast coastline, it was much more dry and brown than I would have thought. Like West Texas BrownTM. For as much farm, cattle, and tree grove land that I saw while driving through the valley, I would have expected there to be more rain and greener pasture grass. Even up near Yosemite, it was quite dry, I thought. I passed over many a water canal, which I pretty much think to be preposterous. The whole concept is so foreign to me. Why don’t they cover the canals?

Driving through all that land also made me think about how big California is and how rural the majority of the landmass must be. It’s like the 5th biggest economy in the world or something, so I’m sure that agriculture plays quite a large role. But when I think of California, I think LA/SF/Hollywood. I don’t think small to medium farmers trying to make a living, driving very large and very expensive farm implements and driving diesel guzzling trucks. I wonder how all the farmers feel about the exorbitant gas prices in Cali. I do think, though, that it was cheaper in the rural parts than in the city.

The people I met were quite normal and temperate people. Of course, I just interacted with people from Google, but they weren’t all crazy, liberal people. I’m sure there were a hand full, but that’s to be expected everywhere. Which, I would imagine that the liberalness is prevalent in any major city. And even while more so in California, and less so in Texas, bigger cities I would think would breed a liberal slant to things.

I am happy to be back (in my own bed and the like), but was definitely sad to leave. I did get kindof sick, but I also got kindof better kindof quickly, so all is kindof well.