Everyplace we go is different. Some places put all their stuff in datacenters and remote into it. Others put all their stuff in datacenters and have people come in to work directly on it. Still others stack 17U of server and storage equipment on shelves in an ancient round-hole rack too shallow to accommodate normal dell rails. Which is the situation we had here.

But other than an unexpectedly difficult hardware install, things went pretty well, with nice people on all fronts, and we ended up with a pretty favorable result overall. I’m fairly happy with how the work went.

Phoenix is … surprisingly non-hypoallergenic. Like, most desert cities there’s not enough flowering plants and grasses and flowering trees to load the air with pollen, but in Phoenix my allergies were on a little bit of a tear. We walked around downtown Scottsdale (sort of a northeast suburb of Phoenix), and I was surprised by just how much plant life they’d transplanted into what’s naturally a desert. Lots of sand and gravel and cacti, but also lots of people with big leafy trees and green lawns. That part wasn’t much fun.

When I left for Phoenix, the temp at Reagan was about 35F. When we landed, it was 85F at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. Thursday was in the upper 80’s too. Other than the allergens, that place is some sort of crazy paradise in winter. Came back to 37 at Dulles… had some trouble adjusting.

Got a couple of decent pictures this trip, but most expose the limitations of my camera.. They’re up at the gallery.

Flight info: going out we flew on a 757-200. Seat width 17.1, pitch 32. Very uncomfortable. Flight attendant hit my knee with her cart while I was napping. Not enough leg room, not enough anything-else room either. The flight out was a bit over 5 hours. Coming back was on an Airbus A319. Width 18.0, pitch 31. Despite the smaller legroom, the inch of seat width made a big difference in comfort. It was a pretty decent trip back, with no knee-cracking or other related issues, and since we were heading east it was only about a 4 hour flight. The flight was pretty rough though, with about an hour of fairly significant shaking back and forth because of the turbulence, and it felt like the air was a bit thin, but it could have just been breathing troubles from the over-perfumed passenger a couple rows back. Seriously, why would you douse yourself with perfume knowing you’re about to get on a crowded airplane?

Phoenix was a nice place to visit … in November. Wouldn’t want to be there in July though…

At work, we’ve got exchange calendars. They do everything from meeting and room scheduling to events and outings and all that stuff, with meeting invites carrying along the necessary info to make stuff work in general. It’s pretty slick, but it only works with outlook and outlook web access.

Which is all well and great, except that it means to use it I’ve got to have our OWA page sitting in a browser window open all the time. No reminders, nothing else. See, I’m a Linux sysadmin, and I don’t even have a windows box on my desk. No windows, no outlook.

Now, most places you can get away with doing stuff like that by running Evolution and using the owa interface to interface with exchange calendars and it works, but with our company, there’s some tweak or customization to the login page that causes exchange to simply not work with it. I’m not sure on the details, but it’s a bit of a problem either way. So that route’s out. Also, evolution blows a little bit as a mail client.

So, I thought what I’d do was I’d run thunderbird for email and not worry about calendaring. Which worked great for me for the first three months I was here, until I started having more than one meeting a week and had to actually schedule and keep track of things for myself appropriately. As my daily and weekly complexity levels rose, I needed a calendar. So I turned to Lightning, the thunderbird calendar plugin.

And you know, Lightning was working ok. Not any really huge problems with it except that the calendar was only on the local system, not synced with exchange or anything else. Of course, that meant I couldn’t check the calendar from owa at home, or anywhere else… it was only any good to me on my local system at work. Which wasn’t really great for me, because I keep a slightly odd schedule and need the calendar to reference to remind me what I’m doing tomorrow. So I was still maintaining two calendars — the OWA one and the lightning one, so I could have web-accessibility and still have pop-up reminders and such.

But maintaining two calendars manually is a pain, so I sought out a different solution. The obvious answer was to tap Google Calendars inside of lightning using the lightning GDATA provider to replace the local lightning-native calendar.

And that’s when the headaches really started. You see, Lightning’s gdata provider does something weird, or maybe it’s just lightning itself. Some meeting invitations work perfectly in lightning, directly. They just go into the google calendar, they work, and things are great. But then others, you try to accept them and they crap all over the place. For example, the “accept” button will show up, you click it and nothing happens. Or you click accept and thunderbird freezes. Or you click “accept” and it adds it to the local calendar, or if you don’t have a local calendar pops up a box asking you to pick the calendar to add it to but not listing the google one. But you can still drag-and-drop such invites into the calendar. Just that if you do, it decides to send new invitations to everyone on the attendees list, because rather than interpreting that as “accept the invitation” or “add this event to the calendar” it interprets it at “take this event, add it to the calendar like it’s your own, and send out appropriate invites as specified in the invitation”.

This … you see, this is annoying as hell. The only way I can convince the google calendar to accept the invite without spamming everyone on the list is to basically duplicate the event manually, for myself only. Now instead of maintaining two calendars by clicking “accept” in lightning then “accept” in owa, I’m maintaining two calendars by clicking “accept” in lightning, getting annoyed when it doesn’t work, manually recreating the meeting info, then clicking “accept” in owa. Calling it “retarded” would be offensive to retarded people everywhere.

So now I’m pretty far down the rabbit hole. Most of the events that I’m tracking are in my google calendar, but that means they don’t get the exchange-pushed updates to things like locations and cancellation statuses. And that’s not all of the events that I’m keeping track of, just most of them. And none of this even begins to address things like tying into my phone.

My basic desire is to have a single, central calendar, which I can see from my cell phone, from my mail client on any system I use, and from a web interface. I want to be able to click “accept” and accept invitations. I want to be able to do this without having an extra system just sitting there being my own personal calendar sync system. And honestly, if lightning could understand all the invitations I get and send them all to the gdata provider, I’d have close enough to what I want. Or if lightning could just talk to exchange directly.

That is all.

The flight both ways was on an Embraer E175. That plane’s a bit smaller than other planes I’ve ridden, but pretty comfortable given the extra inch of seatroom over a 737, with a bit better than 18 inches of width. Only a 31 inch pitch though, so not all that much legroom… but wasn’t bad all in all. Remembering to bring the PSP with helped pass the flight time, too.

We stayed at a Marriott right across from the Mall of America, but I opted not to go into it because I didn’t want to add to the stuff I’d be taking back home. The hotel was nice, and one of the guys traveling with us has the whole “elite” status thing that got us into the concierge lounge for freebie breakfasts and desserts, which was nice. I’ve started thinking about maybe signing up for some sort of meaningful rewards/elite program myself, based on the experience…

The first night we were there we went into downtown Minneapolis, right during rush hour and through a construction area. It was a bit rough, traffic-wise, but nothing compared to DC at 5 pm on a Friday. Apparently there was a Timberwolves game that drove the traffic levels up a bit. We ended up eating at this place called JD Hoyt’s, which is apparently fairly well-known, and is the home to an in-house charcoal grill and a ridiculous 2 inch thick porkchop. It’s insane, and was insanely good. I think that was about a $60 meal, between the beer and the food. We all definitely overate a bit, though, and I was definitely feeling a bit overfed and sluggish after that.

Second night we were there, we went into Saint Paul, and ate at a place called Great Waters brewery. Reasonably good food and pretty good beer, and it was cheaper and less overeating-inclined. I was pretty happy with it… think it was about a $35 meal with a couple beers.

We also had lunch at a pretty nice little place a mile or so away from the datacenter we worked in that was also a brewpub, but I wasn’t in the mood for beer so I couldn’t say how it was. I think overall on the trip I spent about $110 on food. Perdiem rate for 3 days is like $165, so I came out ahead still … even after adding on the cost of snacks, internet and my Friday night dinner at home I’m still coming out a bit ahead. That’s pretty nice.

Minneapolis and Saint Paul aren’t bad cities, as far as parts of the country I’ve been to go. A couple of nice highway vistas, reasonably nice friendly people, and a lot of brewpubs. I wouldn’t mind spending more time there…

Next trip: 3 weeks away, we’re going to Phoenix for yet another node installation.

Well, the install went pretty well, with a couple minor hangups. The first one of those is that I’m huge, and riding economy class is no fun for someone like me. I basically can’t ride in window seats, and am pretty constrained in the aisles.

We flew out from Dulles to Dallas-Fort Worth airport on a McDonnell Douglas Super-80 (2-3 seat layout, width: 18, pitch: 33 or so). I was on the aisle seat of the 3-side, so right in the middle of the plane pretty much, and didn’t have anyone next to me. That flight was pretty tolerable … I had enough legroom, the seat was a little crowded but comfortable enough, and I wasn’t all up in anyone else’s space.

The trip back was a bit rougher. We flew back on a 737-800 (width: 17.2, pitch: 31-32). I was supposed to be in a window seat in a normal row (as opposed to an exit-door row), but it didn’t quite work out that way. The people whose space I was destroying were nice enough to switch seats with me so I’d have the aisle. A little more space there, which was nice, but the trip was still pretty uncomfortable. Incidentally, we flew into Reagan on the way back.

Dulles airport is an interesting place. The “moon buggy” shuttles to the terminals are like crazy bus/train hybrid things, which is neat. The terminals themselves have a lot of light and airspace, and generally feel open and fresh. Seating in the terminal waiting areas is also surprisingly comfortable.

DFW airport was sort of annoying to me. It’s laid out in these crescent-shaped terminal halls, such that you can’t really see what’s more than about 200 feet down the hall from where you are. The ceilings are kind of low, and the place is generally aesthetically unappealing as a result. Not a lot of air, not a lot of light, and no sense of visual openness, even though it’s one of the largest airports in the country.

Reagan is a pretty interesting place, because it’s like right in the middle of everything. It’s got a metro station pretty much built into it, which is insane. The architecture is interesting, with these huge odd-colored vaulted cathederal-ish ceilings in the inbound terminal. It’s bright and visually interesting inside, and I liked it for the little bit of time I was in there.

The city of Dallas (or I guess the Dallas metro area) was pretty “meh”. Honestly, we didn’t get a whole lot of time to spend in the city itself, or doing much of anything … we got in late Wednesday, spent a lot of Thursday doing work, and left early Friday morning. But what I saw of it was pretty shockingly exactly like the rest of America that I’ve seen … there were Wal-marts, K-marts, Best Buy and Circuit City and Office Max and Radio Shack stores, auto malls, all the usual uninteresting crap. The notable differences were the existence of a place called “Whataburger” (or, as my colleague ruefully noted at the end of his lunch there, “what burger?”). We also had some barbecue at a place a couple miles from the hotel that was pretty decent, served by a woman who wielded her carving knife with the sort of expertise that filled me with a simultaneous respect, fascination and borderline fear. Other than that, not a whole lot to say about it.

Our next trip takes us out to Minneapolis, the tail end of next week. It looks like they regularly fly Embraer ERJ-175’s on that route (which look to be 18.25 width 31 pitch seats, according to the info I’ve found). Never even heard of one of them before, so that should be interesting… sounds like the seat’ll be a bit more roomy width-wise at any rate.

So, that’s the wonderful world of travel. Really sort of … just there. Per diem is pretty nice though.