just finishing up here at MTV B29 – the SunLabs building that used to be my HQ when I, too, was a Labs employee.

Spent yesterday in a whirl ; more TLC break out session in the morning, then tried to locate a colleague (Iain) who relocated to the USA a few years ago. No dice.

Then I came up to B26 and chatted with Whit and Glenn about security fundamentals, chatted about the SDN security model (with which they both seemed very impressed, pleasingly) and thence to chat with Michaele (another ex-boss) about Sun-on-Sun and WIBNI Sun IT was re-using SunPS’s best-of-breed architectures?

Seems like common-sense to me.

I then had a pleasant and slightly anarchistic chat with Marilyn about how we can stress-test Sun’s internal security policies and procedures (we think we have a plan) and went to dinner.

I am still having problems driving in the USA, doing anti-clockwise three-point turns in the car, staying alert to keep-right, and getting used to the less-disciplined lane usage. I still find it thoroughly bizzare that sometimes to turn right at a four-way intersection you have to be in the leftmost lane, in the same lane you’ld use to turn left – except for those occasions when you’re at a cloverleaf and have to be in the right lane irrespective of which way you are turning instead.

I miss roundabouts. They are a great API for road junctions. I could go so far as to say that they make British drivers lazy, but then we make up for that by having considerably more informations on our roadsigns – colour codings, symbols, etc.

Anyway: the dinner went well – from 1800h through 1030h – and I would say that we had about 25 security people there at the peak of it. I spent my time being a society hostess, introducing people to each other, starting conversations going and then flitting away, etc; I suspect quite a lot of work got done over the course of the $500 meal.

Got back to the hotel and had 5 hours sleep before getting up, packing, and belting up the 101 to meet Casper and Whit for coffee at the Verona, and “breakfust” at the Fountain. We went over the plans for the upcoming Solaris code-review, talked about what internal PR we need to spin to raise awareness of it and to ensure that it becomes a regular feature of Solaris engineering life, and worked our ways through corned-beef hash and eggs.

Nice start to the day.

I spent a pleasant but fruitless hour trying to track down @i{Jolt Cola Candy} so unless I get it at the airport, I’m sorry Dave but I shall have to try again, next trip.

Casper and I (and my boss) are all catching flights at around 1600h, so I will but out of this office at 1215h in order to ensure an early checkin, and (hopefully) a good seat. I was going to try and make it to the PS Architecture Council this morning as an observer, but reckoned that (a) by the time I got to Newark, it’d be time to leave, (b) it’d be more beneficial to hang out with Whit, and (c) Brad is actually on the council, and is reasonably sane, so most of my areas of concern would be covered by someone who actually had clout anyway.

Now: onwards to victory and a long, tedious, uncomfortable flight. I miss my cats. God, I wish there were some way to circumvent the actual travel part of world-wide travel.