JB, Jan and Ian go whitewater rafting – in the snow!

Hearing rain pounding on your hotel room roof in the middle of the night is rarely a good sign when you’re going rafting the next day. Seeing several inches of new snow on the Idaho-Montana passes as you drive to the river certainly doesn’t bode for a warm and cozy day on the river. And this was mid-June. The wonders of mountain weather in summer.

We were rafting on the St Joe River in Idaho. The promised class 3 rapids meant it was a not-too-nasty river, but should have some fun waves and drops. It was certainly remote, wild country, still showing many of the signs of a winter battering by winds and snow.

Our bus arrived at a campsite on the river and we all got changed into wet suits, rubber booties, fleeces and splash jackets. The air temperature was a chilly 45F-ish, but that was slightly balmy compared to the 38F water. Target One for my day suddenly became – avoid swimming.

The first half of the trip was pretty tame, but very beautiful. Floating through almost primeval, incredibly dense temperate rain forest, spying bald eagles up close, and paddling through small rapids to keep warm isn’t a bad way to spend an hour. We all got a little wet, and this certainly reinforced Target One – my icy paddling hand was a constant reminder of this.

We pulled out for a lunch spent scrummaging for food and huddling around a fire. It started to rain lightly, and a damp wet suit isn’t a cozy companion on a cold day. There was plenty of tasty food though, and constant cups of hot tea helped fight off hypothermia. But after a somewhat too long hour or so break, I was racing to get back out on that freezing cold river. To paddle and get warm.

And we did plenty of paddling. The rapids became fun, with water cascading through tight canyons with steep, granite walls. We dodged huge rocks, scraped felled trees, and took one rapid sideways, I think even surprising our guide we got through unscathed!

We’d happily negotiated one of the biggest rapids, and just as I was starting to relax my paddling stroke, a funny thing happened. The raft suddenly got lighter. I looked over my shoulder and saw Jan, not sat on the side of the raft, but floating a couple of metres away, with an astonished look on her face. It was a slightly surreal, lingering moment, and then our guide was reaching out his paddle and pulling a dripping Jan back into the boat. A little chillier too, no doubt.

No one needed any encouragement at the pullout to rip off their wet suits and get back into dry, warm clothes. And sit on nice warm bus. And drink a nice warm beer. OK – I’m hallucinating here, the beer was cold, and I skipped in favor of a short nap in preparation for the 4 hour drive home.

Rafting is a hoot, and it’s a fact of life that sometimes you have to endure cold weather and water to get the best water. If only that darn snow melt would slow down a little. Still, the rest of summer will be spent floating down dam-fed rivers like the Rogue. In warm weather. Without wetsuits. With cold beers a very welcome addition!

JB came to Richland …

We’ve spent much of the last two weeks entertaining JB. It was sure a busy time. We started in Seattle, went to Portland (via Chinook and White Pass – long story and drive!), Timberline on Mt Hood, on a Columbia River jet boat, wine tasting at Red Mountain and Walla Walla, a night in Wallace, Idaho, rafting the St Joe river in Idaho via a snow-covered pass in Montana, and a drive down the Columbia River Gorge back to Portland.

We had great food at Flying Fish and Dahlia Lounge in Seattle, the South Park Grill in Portland, and pretty decent tucker at Tagaris and Antonys in Richland. And we ate hundreds of juicy, fresh cherries from the locals farmers. Some outstanding wine was tasted at Barnard Griffin, Fidelitas, Three Rivers, Seven Hills and Forgeron. And we went to the legendary Battelle Salmon Bake, where $5 gets you a fine chunk of salmon and as much Ice Harbor beer as you can drink! Life rarely gets better :-}

It was a lot of fun and great to see Julie. Some random photos are in the accompanying photo album.

Data Intensive Computing @ PNL new web site

We’ve now got a web site on our Data Intensive Computing Initiative for those of you who are interested in finding out about the work I’m involved in. The web site should get regularly updated as the progress on the initiative is really starting to gain momentum, which is great news and a lot of fun to work on.

Review: Lucinda Williams, Portland

Despite several failed attempts in Sydney, I’ve never seen Lucinda Williams live. When she released her new album, West, and announced dates at Portland and Seattle, the opportunity was too good to miss. So with our friend Julie from Sydney, we headed down to Portland for the Sunday night gig.

The crowd was growing restless about 9.40pm when the four-piece band came on stage. The concert started promisingly, rolling through renditions of some of the best songs from the last few albums. Drunken Angel and Right in Time all stood out in my memory for raw and powerful renditions.

It was an hour or so before any songs off West emerged. And as the band’s tempo and energy picked up, it was becoming increasingly apparent that they weren’t in the mood for performing the sorrowful, haunting songs from that album. Come On, Unsuffer Me and Wrap Your Head Around That followed in quick succession. But that was it for the album.

Then an odd moment happened. It seems some of the reviews about the somewhat dark (but to me quite brilliant) material on West might have taken their toll. Lucinda described how she was happy now, newly engaged and, reading between the lines a little, didn’t seem to like her labeling as a writer of sorrowful and confessional songs. So with the volume on the amps turned up to 11, she blasted out a new song, Honey Bee, about the new man in her life. To be honest, I thought it was awful. A simple little rock ditty that I could hear played by a local band of 21 year olds in my local bar.

In total the band played for 2 hours. Especially in the numerous encore’s, they played some excellent rock and blues, although it did occasionally have a self-indulgent feel to it. A couple of songs simply fizzled out, as if no one in the band could quite figure out how to coordinate an ending.

I wandered out with mixed feelings into the cool Portland evening. It had been a good show, some classic songs and skilled musicianship to admire. But it wasn’t the show I’d expected or wanted to see. If I want to see a rock or blues band, I’ll go and see a really good one somewhere.

I go to see Lucinda Williams to hear her rasping voice interpret the beautiful lyrics she writes, and be taken on journey through the songs of one of the finest songwriters around. A journey of light and shade, subtlety and power, sorrow and joy. But this was a rollercoaster ride that left little time for contrasts.

There’s lots of good rock and blues bands out there, but there’s only one Lucinda Williams. We came out west to see the latter, but I doubt it was the best that it can be. I’ll keep trying though.

Stuart Lake Hike

Leavenworth is surrounded by some magnificent day hikes, so every time we’re there we try to choose a new one to explore. So on a 90F+ Sunday in early June with our friends Tami and Phil, we decided to go to Stuart Lake, a 9 mile roundtrip journey in the Alpine Lake Wilderness. Loaded with lots of drinks, lunch, sunscreen and bug spray, we started about 10.30am for what turned out to be an scenic and moderately strenuous day.

 

Most of the climb was in the first half of the hike, following a raging, winding creek up to a wetland plateau. A final climb over remnants of deep snow banks took us to the lake shore, a shimmering, deep blue body of water sitting beneath the snow-capped peak of Mt. Stuart. Phil had fun spotting odd varieties of ducks and a swooping osprey while we ate lunch at the lake. We didn’t linger for too long though as vicious mosquitoes and diminishing supplies of bug spray forced us to head down.

 

Despite the heat and multitudes of bug bites, this was a wonderfully scenic hike. Next time we’ll follow another trail, and take abundant supplies of super-strength repellent to keep the evil mosquitoes away!

Some nice Software Architecture teaching ideas

Greg Wilson at the University of Toronto has been using my book and fellow Aussie John Reekie’s to help him teach a Software Architecture course. In his blog, he describes how he got the students in the course to compare and contrast two open source software products that on the surface do similar things (e.g. two editors, two JavaScript engines), but under the covers are built very differently indeed.

Some of the student reports are posted, and the outcomes look really positive. I’ve always suspected that open source technologies could provide a rich set of examples for teaching various aspects of software architecture and design, and Greg has demonstrated this to be possible. If I were teaching a subject like this (which I’d really like to), I’d be emulating this approach.

On a broader note, it’s a shame that architecture isn’t more widely taught, as it’s absolutely key to building successful software products. Over the years, I’ve found the lack of understanding and appreciation of architecture issues to be often alarming. In particular, when assessing the capabilities of superficially similar technologies (e.g several workflow engines, several content management systems), the ‘if it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it’s a duck’ principle is widely applied.

Well, I’m sorry, but in software terms, this type of thinking just doesn’t work. It might (figuratively) walk and sound like a duck, but under the feathers it’ll have a different architecture, be built to perform and scale to meet particular usages and loads, might be easy or hard to configure, manage and operate in a fail-safe manner, and so on. When people buy a car, they understand that all cars are different under the covers, and compare and contrast accordingly. Why this thinking doesn’t carry over to software technology assessment, I really don’t know?

But I suspect it has to do with the amorphous qualities of software. You can’t easily assess its design by lifting the hood and poking around. You have to dig deep and do serious analysis. Just the sort of analysis that Greg is getting his students to do in their course.

Nice work, Greg. I’d be keen to think about how we can encourage others to use such innovations in their software architecture courses.

A new blog!

I quite like this Live Spaces blogging stuff. It’s easy to have photos accompany my ramblings, and I suspect the photos are mostly much more interesting than the words for the casual passer-by in cyberspace.

But for ‘word heavy’ postings, I don’t really like the lay out, or the fact that I don’t think I can give each blog entry a unique URL. And in summer, when I mostly spout on about wine and food, photos are less predominant.

So I experimented, and have decided to move my non-travel and work posts from this blog to a blogger hosted site. So, if by the remotest chance you have any interest in what wine and beer we’re drinking, where we’re doing it, what we like and don’t, and where and what we’re eating, feel free to have a look here.

I look forward to seeing you both there ;-}