I am back and mostly recovered from my business trip to DC. I attended the USENIX LISA 2006 conference. I hadn’t been to LISA since LISA 2001 (which had an excellent talk by William LeFebvre about running CNN’s web servers on 9-11). This time I focused on the tutorials which were quite good though I wish I had taken a day for talks or shorter tech sessions. Particularly, I would have liked to see this year’s keynote but they unfortunately scheduled it during one of my classes. It also would have been nice to have some time to site-see. At least I got to ride the metro up to Shady Grove to have lunch with DrFaulken and some of his coworkers, most of whom I have met before and/or IM with (names withheld to protect the innocent).

Even though I didn’t get any site seeing time, I did notice a couple of new structures in the Washington/NoVA skyline. The first turned out to be the National Museum of the Marine Corps (pictured at the top). From the interstate, it sort of looks like a sinking ship in a sea of trees. From the pictures though, it looks like a more impressive structure. The museum opened to the public on November 13th and the 118,000 square-foot structure sits on a 135-acre site adjacent to the Marine Corps base in Quantico. The Washington Post has more information.

The second structure that was erected since the last time I visited DC was the Air Force Memorial. The three spires were constructed of stainless steel with the tallest standing 270 feet high making the structure very visible from the highway. From that distance, it looks like it was designed to be holding something instead of just the air itself. According to the private foundation that organized its construction, it was designed to represent a flying maneuver known as the “bomb burst.” I will have to take their work for it. Again, the Washington Post’s City Guide has more information on the memorial.

All in all, it was a good trip with lots of learning. I only came away with a headache from one night’s festivities (bonus points to anybody who can come up with the Norwegian drinking call that roughly translates to English “look at the ceiling” I was a little beyond remembering things at that point) so that was a plus. And I have a couple of new places I would like to visit the next time I return to the nation’s capitol with site-seeing time.