The breakup of the blog

The breakup of the blog really didn’t work. I have been so busy with work that I didn’t post at all. I had been traveling a lot lately, Seattle, Mexico, back to Seattle. All in all I was gone about a month. Seattle is probably the coolest US city I’ve been to, not as rain-soaked as many say. Both times I was there (a 4 day trip and an 11 day trip) for work it drizzled a bit but for the most part it was pretty nice. I would love to go again, it seems like the Pacific Northwest is somewhere I could stay for a while. Supercomputing was great as always, awesome food, cool projects, fun times. We did have time to hit the REI store, several of us climbed the pinnacle (which I had never done before). [](http://buraglio.com/pics/ncsa/SuperComputing05/SC05%20-%2088.jpg) I did the [NCSA](http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/) booth this year as well as worked with [SCinet](http://scinet.supercomp.org/) on various things. I had the best seafood that I’ve ever had in my life, if you are a fan of seafood I HIGHLY recommend taking a trip to the Washington coast area. [Some pics from the trip.](http://buraglio.com/pics/ncsa/SuperComputing05/) Something else announced, [ Force10 networks](http://www.force10networks.com/)has acquired a pretty cool little company; [Meta Networks](http://www.metanetworks.org/). For those that don’t know, Meta Networks makes a very cool IDS card that can do 10gig with minimal overhead to the host OS. At [SC|05](http://www.sc05.org/) they announced the purchase and gave a little talk regarding the product. Livio Ricciulli, the founder of Meta Networks was there to help with the product, which was used by [SCinet](http://scinet.supercomp.org/) to help secure the very high performance network. VERY cool stuff indeed. I like the idea of the programmable card (that can do a LOT of cool stuff) a little more than the way that [Endace](http://www.endace.com/) cards operate, although the endace 10gig cards are very nice as well.