Adventures

Eloquent words will fail to describe the beauty of the cherry blossoms in Washington D.C. so let me be brief and say the experience is impalpable.

Great travel experiences, no matter how big or small, always leave you with something of special value. Maybe it was a tangible souvenir or artifact, a poorly taken picture with immense sentimental value, a memory, idea, or receipt from dinner at a great restaurant with excellent company. Depending on the trip, simply getting back home safely may be the lasting highlight.
After returning from a spontaneous week long trip to the town of Chilibre in the Republic of Panama I look back at the experience and consider what I returned with. The list below is a short synopsis of some of my experiences and random thoughts about the trip and traveling.

• Tarantula spiders can run, surprisingly fast.
• In a tropical jungle sleeping with ear plugs will cut down on the noise from chirping bugs might not help the quality of sleep considering the screeching bat flying around the room will go unnoticed all night.
• While on vacation I finished the book “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau. His inanely articulate writings about the pond remind me of my own writing style. From now on things will be different.
• Always bring a medium sized towel.
• Your grand adventure may be paltry in comparison to someone else’s adventure but then if everyone had the same adventure would it still be adventure?
• The best thoughts and pictures exist only in my heart and mind.

In case you were wondering about the Fort Lauderdale pictures below, they were taken during my 10 hour layover in Florida.

If you detected a hint of apprehension in my last post you weren’t mislead. So let the record be set straight – SysAdmin Day 2010 was a blast. My feeling toward the SysAdmin meet up is similar to the feeling after having installed a program upgrade for a user and having it be accepted with open arms and minimal follow-up support. Especially when in the back of your mind you were expecting the follow-up to be an afternoon of “Well the old program did x, y, and z like a, b, and c” with a few “Are you sure you can’t leave the old program installed?” mixed in for cheer. Dilbert sums up an accurate representation in the following clip of such a situation.

But I digress, SysAdmin Day was awesome on so many levels. First, it was encouraging to meet such a diverse group of admins  from departmental IT techies to gurus at Google and Etsy. Regardless of system size and complexity everyone was open to talking shop or kicking back and meeting new people. There were numerous people from all over the world who attended the meetup because they were in the city for DebConf (I had no idea Perl was still so, alive! *wink*). Second, it helped foster the desire to give back to the community and made me just a little more thankful for some of the open source projects I’ve come to love and depend on. Last, well, I may not frequent bars but The Ginger Man was great (a large part due to the company). My only regret was not being able to hear better above the crowd noise and having only a couple short hours to know a bit more about my fellow IT workers.

It’s Friday night and in just under 2 hours I’ll be at the Standalone Sysadmin’s SysAdmin Meetup in NYC. Just to prove I’m conforming to the east coast and being proud of my geek roots this entry is being typed up from a Starbucks near NY Penn Station. It’s a long way from where I was 2 years ago at this time and I feel like a little fish in a big pond… one that has lots of concrete, pigeons, and other fish just trying to make their own way.