Day 1  20 Oct 2002

Made it onto ship.  

Steve Oualline is a short fat guy with a habit of shrugging his
shoulders when he giggles.  He's working on a book of 'how not to code
in C++'. He's mostly coding for portable phones these days, but he
told me a pretty amusing story about developing for a machine which
used high-pressure water to cut tennis shoes soles out. The company
involved had already paid for it, so they shipped every shoe sole they
produced back to the company while they were debugging it.  One day,
they get a phone call from the manufacturer, and the guy is pretty
mad. Turns out that they'd selected "9R" for a debugging shoe sole,
and this guy had a pile of 10,0000 9R shoe soles. But, alas, no
lefts. The old stamping machine had cut two mirror-image soles out at
a time. So when the machine went into production, it spent the first
couple of months cutting out 9L soles.

Met Randal Schwartz, Doc Searls, Theodore Ts'o. Saw Linus Torvalds and
his family, but too star-struck to speak to them. Heckled our Maximum
Leader to good effect. Hooked up with the juggler on board and we'll
probably get a chance to pass some club before the end of the cruise.