Robot Dreams

I made it back from Lake Tahoe in one piece. This was one of the few times that the travel was a real pain. Leaving from Ohare, Chicago, I managed to get delays in both directions. And given the propensity of Chicago weather it was for totally different weather phenomenon. On the way out, I was trapped Sunday night by a thunderstorm and tornado watch. Not that I don't mind the delays most of the time but two aspects of this one made it really painful.

First I was caught in the plane, so I was delayed for 3 hours inside the plane which was in line to take off in the middle of the taxi ways. Second, that delay put me arriving at Reno at 12:30am, and what's so special about that time? That's the exact time the last shuttle bus from Reno to Lake Tahoe was leaving. So I'm in the plane thinking that I'll have to stay overnight in Reno to wait for the first morning bus, yuck. As luck would have it the arrival was at 12:10am, so instead I was jogging through the Reno airport to catch that bus. I made it with 2 minutes to spare

Second on the way back in on Thursday afternoon, the pilots where nice enough to attempt to speed things up and try and get to Ohare before the weather would arrive and cause delays. And what weather would that be, perhaps another thunderstorm, after all it's almost Spring. No such luck for me, instead it was in the form of a snowstorm in the 4 to 6 inch range. So in the span of 3 days the weather goes from Spring to Winter and I catch both transitions.

And now for something completely different... As a form of relaxation I tend to write code in languages I usually don't use for work. This weekend I took up doing a bit of Python to try and get the Boost BuildBot operational again. And what could be so hard about that? After all it should be as easy as downloading and doing the usual configure stuff. Well I'm not the kind of person to be satisfied with the operation of much of the software out there, and hence my gravitation toward the Boost group. So my challenge for the weekend was to figure out how to use BuildBot without installing it.