Sam's L33t Journal

Vacation accomplished!

At Sandy Island Camp, I spent most of the time relaxing and reading and catching up with my parents (neither of my siblings made it this time). I didn't get out on the lake at all. It was beautiful, though, and I enjoyed reading on the beach.

Late in the week, I came down with the worst cold, like an Everlasting Gobstopper of disease, a different flavor every day! (Including some of the worst congestion I've ever had, plus bizarre symptoms like persistent hiccups.) And then Julie also caught it just in time for international travel. Got through it somehow, with a lot of cough drops and mint tea.

(My mom thinks I'm sick all the time now... it's just that when I'm under the weather I tend to take the time to write something in my blog.)

Despite being under the weather, the London trip was certainly fun. Julie's folks put us up in a really nice hotel, and it was good to spend time with family and friends. I enjoyed seeing the niece again, she's going through a shy phase but seems as cheerful as ever. (Hopefully we avoided this cold jumping to her or anyone else.) All the adults in the family seem to be spectacularly busy with work, though in a good way. We got in some London tourism that I had little time for on my first conference trip (Tower of London tour, viewed the city from the London Eye, climbed the Monument to the Great Fire, went on a pub crawl, window shopping at Harrods). We even got the chance to catch up with Xave and Sarah on their London sabbatical (in the moments before they headed off for a holiday in France).

London was pretty cool.

I really liked the Google office there (at Belgrave House, accross from Victoria Station). Seemed like a really cool place to work, and the food was fantastic (including a juice bar with one of these nifty machines).

Was good to see Xave again. We spent some time wandering the city, visited the museum at Bletchley Park and the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. We saw Tom Stoppard's The Hard Problem (broadcast in cinema by National Theater Live), doesn't hold a candle to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead but it was reasonably good. And we also saw a production of Wicked at the Apollo Victoria Theater, that was a really good show and the staging was brilliant.

The European Lisp Symposium was a very interesting conference. I particularly liked the talk on Clasp, an LLVM-based Lisp implementation featuring tight C++ interoperability. (It's not quite there yet performance-wise, but some of the features excite me: Being able to write Lisp macros in place of C++ template libraries, being able to introspect C++ code in Lisp, being able to compile C++ modules into Lisp code and then use LLVM-based debugging and profiling tools that work across that boundary in a seamless way. Good stuff.) Also, the talk about the Woo HTTP server (a pure-Lisp implementation that beats Node.js on performance benchmarks) was impressive and full of interesting ideas. And I enjoyed my colleague's talk about debugging SBCL garbage collection.

I really enjoyed London, I got the sense that I'd enjoy living there as much as I enjoyed visiting. Wonderful food, beautiful architecture, friendly people, really pleasant to travel around.

My trip back was uneventful, after some annoying flight delays (a few passengers missed the flight and their luggage had to be removed, then another passenger had to disembark for medical reasons, forcing them to search the luggage again).

Work's been interesting. Lots to do.