First Class to San Francisco

Yeah, I tried to save money for the lab and booked the cheapest flight from Indianapolis to San Francisco to attend the nth MPI Forum. It was only $120, but really really stupid. The flight consisted of two legs, Indianapolis ti Philadelphia (YES PHL! East coast *hmpf*) and then Philadelphia to San Francisco (>6 hrs). Oh man, I didn’t realize this when I booked. My colleague took a more expensive direct flight which left one hour later while arriving three hours earlier :). Ah, anyway – I got a complimentary first class upgrade on this flight – so it was awesome. Flying first class is actually better than working at home because there are people who serve you drinks and food (obviously as much as you want). The only missing thing was Internet – but anyway – it’s better than an office. I got a lot of work done and the flight clearly ended to quickly.

Just for documentation services, here is the lunch that US Airways served (not quite like in a restaurant but actually not bad). I was again updated recently and they had really excellent fish.

Me@Apple

Oh man, I would have never believed it. People who know me that I’d never do that voluntarily – but I’ve been at the Apple headquarters to get a very special present for a very special person. I also visited my good friend Doug who now works at Apple :). Here are some proof-pictures that I’ve really been there. It’s not worse than me@Microsoft I guess ;).

1 Infinite Loop  is their actual address 🙂

the headquarters

December MPI Forum

Today was the first official reading of my Nonblocking Collective Operation proposal for MPI-3. It was a bit to short but it went really good. There were lots of discussions about clarifying the text, but the semantics are mainly fixed now. It looks like everything can be fixed before the next meeting. A picture made by Rolf is here:

[click for full-size picture]
Now, when it gets interesting – I should probably start an MPI blog about new features for MPI-2.2 or MPI-3 :).