Suddenly, Columbia???

I’m writing this from the second gate change in Charlotte airport waiting for a flight to San Francisco, haven been driven up by Tammy from Columbia. Now, my intended weekend was to relax after a rather stressful deployment to Nashville1 and then roll into work on Monday to finish off a project that has been hanging over me for…oooh, about three months.

The snowstorm put a pretty stop to that. Instead of flying home on a leisurely basis on Friday afternoon, I had to rush back to the airport in Nashville on Thursday night…but all the flights to RDU had already been cancelled, so instead I found myself flying to Columbia, SC, to spend a rather impromptu visit (and I think I caused sadness by not having brought any board games with me. So, a note: along with the passport, always carry an emergency board game). It was a fun weekend! Just not the one I was expecting.

And instead of gingerly making my way back to Durham today, it’s San Francisco. My first-ever visit to Silicon Valley. This has the potential to be exciting, but I can’t help but feel that it would have been better if it was next week instead of right now…


  1. ask me sometime about how I managed to avoid re-writing the Spark Thrift Server by writing a one-line Scala function that turns a Spark Dataframe into a Hive DDL string and some hasty Hive Metastore schema changes. It’s exciting! Or…not. [return]