Day trip to Reading
Sep. 8th, 2016 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylUp at a fairly civilised hour to catch the train to Reading. Arrived with enough time to get to my meeting ten ahead of schedule and found that one of the people who'd been staying locally was late, after getting caught up in Reading's notoriously bad traffic.
The meeting was productive and I learnt a lot. I was particularly intrigued by a Linux TLB flushing bug which occurred because, when a new architecture specific feature had been added for the s390 platform, the matching functions for other architectures had been left empty, causing silent failures and odd corruption in very specific circumstances.
Wrapping up with a couple of interesting presentations, those of us from other parts of the country caught a taxi to the train station. The journey was remarkably unhindered by traffic, but when we reached the station we discovered that fatality at Southall around 2pm had disrupted all trains in and out of Paddington, with large numbers of cancelations and delays up on the boards.
With a couple of hours until my train — I'd booked a later train to reduce costs and to give me plenty of time to the station — I went for a wander around the centre of Reading. Not having spent much time there since I moved away, I could tell that lots of things had changed, but I couldn't tell precisely how — my impression was very much of clothing stores and food outlets replaced by shops that were similar but slightly different, making everything feel both familiar and strange at the same time.
Returning to the station, I found my train running on time and passed through the barriers. Gradually the arrival time started to slip, briefly changing to delayed, and then settling into a constant 20 minute delay relative to the current time. I settled down with my laptop and got on with writing up the day's events. When my train finally arrived an hour or so late, I'd made good progress and I was able to finish the rest of the work by the time we reached Exeter.
The meeting was productive and I learnt a lot. I was particularly intrigued by a Linux TLB flushing bug which occurred because, when a new architecture specific feature had been added for the s390 platform, the matching functions for other architectures had been left empty, causing silent failures and odd corruption in very specific circumstances.
Wrapping up with a couple of interesting presentations, those of us from other parts of the country caught a taxi to the train station. The journey was remarkably unhindered by traffic, but when we reached the station we discovered that fatality at Southall around 2pm had disrupted all trains in and out of Paddington, with large numbers of cancelations and delays up on the boards.
With a couple of hours until my train — I'd booked a later train to reduce costs and to give me plenty of time to the station — I went for a wander around the centre of Reading. Not having spent much time there since I moved away, I could tell that lots of things had changed, but I couldn't tell precisely how — my impression was very much of clothing stores and food outlets replaced by shops that were similar but slightly different, making everything feel both familiar and strange at the same time.
Returning to the station, I found my train running on time and passed through the barriers. Gradually the arrival time started to slip, briefly changing to delayed, and then settling into a constant 20 minute delay relative to the current time. I settled down with my laptop and got on with writing up the day's events. When my train finally arrived an hour or so late, I'd made good progress and I was able to finish the rest of the work by the time we reached Exeter.
