Just a quick weekend summary:

• Things started off on Friday with my favorite dinner at Six Arms: Cheeseburger and fries and Raspberry beer. After that it was drinking at Chapel then Chop Suey.
• Saturday we went to "Bite of Seattle" and chose the Seattle Times booth where that newspaper's food critic had assembled. After that we biked the Tapeworm trail in Renton which was hot, dusty and suburban. After eating my favorite dinner AGAIN, we played scrabble, then headed home.
• Sunday we made a last minute decision to hiking at Wallace Falls and barely finished the 12 mile loop before it got dark. It was extra fun because I took Mia our house dog along.

Today I'm back at work and thrilled to be no longer on-call!

Today at work:

John! You should know the answer to this one -- you have a degree in Combinatorics and Optimization! -alv

Do you ever wonder why the Amazon.com website is always "up" and ready to take your order while other systems like UW's Quest frequently go "down" on weekends and holidays? Yes, one reason is that we at Amazon write much better software than the rest of the world. Another reason is, as I mentioned in above linked post, that when Amazon.com is down, we cannot take orders and the company loses money. FURTHERMORE the employees of the company are accountable to the shareholders of the company who don't like losing money. Now at UW when Quest is down it is only lowly students who are inconvienienced and NOBODY is accountable to students (heaven forbid). Anyway, those are good reasons, but the real underlying root reason is that Amazon always has people on-call to fix production problems as they happen. This past week and weekend one of those people was me.

Being "on-call" means you must carry a pager at all times and respond to pages (at any hour of the day or night) for issues of a certain severity with your group's production systems. I ordered my pager a few weeks ago and it hasn't been easy to fit it into my limited remaining pocket real-estate. Phone, ipod, keys, wallet, and now pager.

Now fitting the pager into your life is another issue. This implies making a few changes for the period you are on call. I think it's pretty clear you can't stray too far from a computer or phone line while on call. So no back-country hiking this weekend. Nobody really mentions this one but, I don't think you can stray too far from clear headedness either. I didn't stop going out this week, but have avoided consuming more than one drink each time.

It was a bit scary to go on call for the first time, but the first time I got paged I remember feeling more proud than scared that somebody somewhere trusted me with the care and feeding of all of Amazon Web Services. Of course these dramatic emotions soon wore off but I'll try to remember them. P.S. I think it should be pretty clear that is my personal blog posting and not some kind of official Amazon.com statement.

This was the long weekend of hiking. On Saturday Matt, Ben and I did some hiking "lite" at twin falls, 30 min. east of Seattle. The boardwalked official trail was pretty boring so we hopped the rail and hiked up through the bush towards the top of the falls. If you ever go I recommend it because most of the falls isn't visible from the trail -- all the good stuff is out of sight. We jumped around on the rocks for a while, tested out the glacier-cold water and even climbed right to the edge of the chute. Hopefully Matt will post the pictures soon.

Today I went to Norse Peak with my housemate Monica and her dog Mia. The hike was way tougher but just as fun. This trail is about 1 minute away from Crystal Mountain ski resort and at the summit you get a 360 degree view which includes Mt. Rainier. But first you have to hike up a steady 11% grade for 5 miles (3 hours) to the top! Picture coming soon.

Microsoft's new Visual Basic Express beta is shipping with a sample application that uses Amazon's Webservices.