Portland

First off, as promised in the last post, my sister and Matt are having a (drumroll please) baby girl! They’ve picked out a cute little name and I can’t wait to start buying little pink things. I went to the ultrasound and the 3D technology was very impressive.

We went to see Mayson and Carly’s new arrival today. They had a baby girl in October and named her Lindsay (after Carly’s cousin, not yours truly). She is super cute and very well behaved — given her name that may all change very rapidly . Jeff and I held her and I think I need to hit the gym since my arm was shockingly sore. Here we are with the happy family:

I spent the past week in Portland at Supercomputing. Yes, it is exactly as it sounds. All of the world’s nerds gathered at one location at once: Nerdvana. 12,000 nerds precisely. I spent my days in the Canadian booth playing air hockey with random stopper-byers and talked about high performance computing. The evenings were spent at vendor parties. I heard it wasn’t as good as past years but I’d be hard pressed to complain and it was impossible to tell there is a recession going on. Al Gore gave the keynote speech on Thursday. I was pleasantly surprised that my exhibitor pass got me in to see him. He was  predictable, lots of talk of climate change and the disastrous state of the world, but he was funnier than expected (global issues aside).

He influenced me to offset my carbon from my flight down to Portland:

I had never spent much time in Portland before this. The city is full of nice old buildings and great shopping (no tax!) and autumn is a great time to visit with the temperate climate combined with colorful leaves. I had no idea Portland has the highest vagrancy rate in the US. Hopefully the conference helped as it brings an average of $13M of revenue to the host city.

One random story from Portland. I had the luxury of having a glass of water beside my bed. At home this is not possible without paws in there knocking the glass over. I woke up in the middle of the night (dehydrated – see note above about vendor parties) and reached for my glass of water. Turns out I must have been sleeping on my arm and it was numb. As I was raising the glass to my mouth, my arm lost all feeling and I was unable to keep the glass upright and proceeded to uncontrollably pour the water all over the bed.

It is nice to go away, but it’s always nice to come home. Had a great weekend with Jeff and Willow. We watched movies, went to Aubree’s housewarming party, finally checked out the new Crossiron Mills mall (great work Sharma- it’s awesome), visited with Mayson and Carly and played some squash.

ps. Happy Belated birthday dad!

pps. Jeff’s mustache is really coming along: