Back from vacation

I was badly overdue for a vacation, having not gotten away in four months, so for the last week I was wandering about Vancouver Island and visiting friends. I love British Columbia; it reminds me of home. The Pacific Northwest climate always feels more natural to me than the Northern California climate.

This year, we got out to the west coast of the island. Waves crashing on rocks and sand is soul-calming, but even more impressive was touring the temperate rainforest and bog. If you're ever on the west coast of Vancouver Island near Tofino, go walk the rainforest trails. It's an amazing experience.

I also got a chance to wander Protection Island, a small island in the Nanaimo harbor (and thus in the Strait of Georgia) large enough to have a gravel road network that the residents navigate largely with golf carts. It's a ten-minute ferry ride from downtown Nanaimo and the ferry runs every hour. I'd love to live there. The atmosphere is wonderful; artistic and small-neighborhood than rich mansions, away from the bustle of Nanaimo, but still close enough to have easy access to all the benefits of a city.

We had a wonderful time, with plenty of opportunities for long conversation or quietly enjoying each other's company.

Stanford's relatively generous with vacation for a US employer, but I still wish I could work for an employer with European benefits and get away a little more often. Although to be honest the limiting factor isn't so much the amount of vacation I get as it is the amount of work that builds up. Starting tomorrow, I dig myself back out again.

Debian etch released while I was out of touch, which is a great surprise to come back to. That will mean a ton of work, of course, but I like the look of etch and we're already running so much etch software via backports.org that it shouldn't be too bad of an upgrade. This also means that I can start working on all the package uploads that were put off pending the etch release (although to give people a chance to set up the archive software, I'll probably not start until towards the end of the week).

Congratulations to Sam Hocevar on his election as Debian Project Leader. After long consideration, he was my top-ranked choice; hopefully the good feeling I had about him will be correct. It's very difficult for the DPL to change anything substantially, so I'm not expecting too much, but perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised.