TITLE: The First Day of the Rest of OOPSLA
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 26, 2004 11:00 AM
DESC: In many ways, OOPSLA begins for me today.
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BODY:
With the Educators' Symposium over, I now get to enjoy the
rest of OOPSLA worry-free.  The conference proper begins
today, with some great speakers and panels on-tap.  As is
now usual, the Onward! track will get most of my attention
between invited talks and networking.

<IMG SRC="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/running/vancouver/mountain-view.jpg"
     WIDTH="125"
     ALIGN="right">

Vancouver really is a nice conference city.  The view to the
right is one third of the panorama outside of my 15th floor
hotel room.  This morning I ran about eight miles, into the
city to the south and then around False Creek, an inlet from
the bay to our west.

I do like water.  I'm not one of those folks who feels an
indomitable urge to live on the sea, but I love to be near
it.  (Though after my run, I did come back and pop
<A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000002O2B/102-7120639-9907355?v=glance">
   Son of a Son of a Sailor</A>
into the CD player...)  The sounds of waves lapping against
the shore line, birds flocking over head, and the gentle
swoosh of a morning crew team out for a training run of
their own certainly bring a sense of peace to a run.

That said, it's easy to forget that not everything about the
coast is light and beauty.  Port cities are, at their edges,
industrial places: big steel ships and beyond-human scale
concrete piers.  Here in the heart of Vancouver things aren't
so bad, with the coastline dominated by marinas and restaurants,
but even still I ran through a couple of industrial areas
that didn't look or smell all that wonderful.  I'm glad when
the real world occasionally reminds me not to surrender to
my weakness for romance.

Well, off to
<A HREF="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/rick/default.asp">
   Rick Rashid's</A>
conference keynote on the future of programming.  Rick's not a
programming languages guy, but he has written a little code...
He developed the Mach operating system, which sits at the core
of a number of operating sytem running on my laptop right now!
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