Present Perfect

At Europython this year I met a guy called Stani whose name indicated he was Belgian. And indeed he was. We got to chatting and it turned out that, besides being a Python hacker with some interest in trying out GStreamer, he was also an artist. He told me about some of the - to me fascinating - projects he had worked on before. And he revived my interest in writing some GStreamer demo code that could help him figure out some of the specifics in GStreamer better (which I don't think I ever wrote anything about, so here's where I left it at after Europython. It currently has a simple player application lifted from gst-python, but abstracted, organised and commented a bit better, and including a wxPython frontend as well from Stani.

Anyway, that's not the point. I subscribed to his blog after Europython but nothing much came in. Until yesterday - apparently he won a design contest for the commemorative 5 euro coin in Holland. He did the actual work using only Free Software, and the result looks impressive.

It is rare for a person to be gifted with both the creative range of ideas and the actual skills to carry them out. It is something I strive for and never quite achieve. Congratulations Stani!

At Europython this year I met a guy called Stani whose name indicated he was Belgian. And indeed he was. We got to chatting and it turned out that, besides...

Yesterday was spent doing a company event (climbing trees in 'el bosc vertical') - I had to rub my eyes when I got on the bus to see the bus close to full, some 45 people leaving from the World Trade Center. We've come a long way.

I had a flight booked on Saturday morning leaving at 8:00 AM in a vain attempt to get to Christophe's wedding on time. I wasn't able to arrange for transportation getting off the plane (Kristien 'working' at the radio and other friends not going to the service) so I took the early flight for no good reason at all in the end.

There was also a birthday party last night, with food starting at 22:00 and, in Spanish tradition, with 30+ people attending, at least an hour between the 'last coffee' and 'standing outside' moment - which was at 1.30

Does one cut his losses at 1.30 AM for a 6:40 AM wake up or just keep going ? I went with the latter and joined the group in going out, which, in Spanish tradition, involved people proposing various places, going to a few, and settling on something that actually has room in the area of some place we actually wanted to go but didn't have room. We shook the booty until 4:45 AM - I wanted to give myself at least one full sleep cycle.

Woke up into a coma, dragged myself out of the house, kept myself awake with loud music in the taxi and in the waiting area, and continuously dozed off and woke up again when my head fell on the plane.

With the plane arriving 20 minutes early, I was able to get on the regional bus - without having to wait for it, and leaving just as I had gotten on - that leaves just outside the airport, takes 55 minutes to go to my house where it has a stop exactly in front of it. A rare trip where all elements align to make it a swift one, even if the conditions were less than ideal.

So, today's best moment ? Figuring out for a second if there's any way I can prolong my comatose state and attempt at dozing, setting my alarm to 40 minutes into the future, and then sprawling myself across the backseat, with The National on headphones, dozing off with the rumble of the engines, sunkissed by an October morning sun filtered into warming specks by the dirt on a window that went unwashed for a month.

Comfortably numb.

Yesterday was spent doing a company event (climbing trees in 'el bosc vertical') - I had to rub my eyes when I got on the bus to see the bus...

This weekend we were invited to one of Kristien's friends' birthday party. It was dress-up, and the goal was to dress like people who don't have any money and are invited to a formal dance.

This was a perfect match for my cross-dress-shoe habit, so I wanted to go one step further. I ended up getting two really cheap blazers in a recycling store (one red, one blue), and cut a diagonal through their backs, and sewed them back together:

It came out rather nicely for a quick sewing job, I'm considering taking the other two halves and actually spending some time finishing it well for a trip to New York.

This weekend we were invited to one of Kristien's friends' birthday party. It was dress-up, and the goal was to dress like people who don't have any money and are...

Faithful readers already know I am not the biggest fan of dentists. Last year in August I had an urgent problem, and my regular Spanish dental office apparently was closed all of August, without any information on what to do if I had an urgent problem, not on their voice mail and not on their website (which by the way was so broken that it scaled the flash animation to 10% of the page width, but I digress).

I ended up in the emergency dental office on Passeig de Gracia, and there I was helped very well by a very good young doctor. I felt I finally found the perfect dentist.

That is, up to the point where I got an infection on one of my teeth, and she told me it would cost anywhere between 2000 and 4000 euro to get the tooth pulled and a bridge or an implant made, and that it wasn't covered by my health care.

I guess that's when I decided to be stupid and try and get it fixed in Belgium. And for that I needed to make sure my health insurance was still ok in Belgium, and for that I needed some E-three-digit form that I still don't have my hands on after 9 months.

When last month the left part of my body started feeling strange I thought it was time to just go find a dentist and get it fixed, coverage or no.

My wishes for a dentist are pretty simple. It has to be a woman (from my experience I find they are usually more emphatical), I prefer them relatively young (I have this vague hope that they are more likely to be up-to-date with the latest technology) and it helps if they speak my language. Now that I live here in Brussels though, of course most dentists are French. And probably not that easy to get to.

So in the end I found

In the end it was a reasonably painless experience, the tooth was in fact pretty damn brown, and there was a huge sack of puss hanging from it. It almost felt OK. And she gave me reasonable answers to all my questions.

Faithful readers already know I am not the biggest fan of dentists. Last year in August I had an urgent problem, and my regular Spanish dental office apparently was closed...

Lately I've been able to knock down my door-to-door time travelling between my apartment in Barcelona and the one in Brussels to around 4 hours. Today I managed a sleek 4:03. I only count trips that don't involve taxis because taxis are cheating. (Getting Kristien to come pick me up is ok though - love is something I fought for, not paid for. Getting someone else to pick me up without paying them for it in cash is ok too.)

Things that help:

• living a 12 minute drive from the airport in Brussels
• living close to the first Aerobus stop in Barcelona
• on-line checkin (shaves quite a few minutes of queueing off the total - time that can be very unpredictable and mostly decides your leaving time - and has the additional advantage of allowing you to carry whatever weight of stuff in your hand luggage, which will not get checked, as long as still *looks* like, you know, hand luggage)
• luck with the Bicing-bus connections
• instead of asking for window or aisle, asking for 'as close to the front of the plane as possible'. Makes for quicker getaway. Not very useful if your airline does not dock at the gate on arrival - you all get on the same bus in that case.

Things that hinder:

• traffic jams in Belgium
• plane delays - I'll have some graphs soon on my 3 most used airlines; obviously, though I hate traveling in the morning, the risk of delays is higher in the evenings because delays accumulate throughout the day. My worst delay was three hours and then a no-fly because 'one of the engines makes unstable noises and the engineers are trying to fix it' - I was happy to only board the plane after hearing they re-routed a plane from Russia to pick us up.
• not arriving at the gate
• security silliness - it definitely took more time right after the start of the 'no liquids' phase, and I remember before that point Barcelona didn't even check boarding passes before going to security

It's also interesting to see how wildly airlines vary in the time they allow between turning off the fasten seat belts sign and turning it on again. Obviously, this is my Zoney Hacking Time, so this matters to me, though I get strange looks when I try to explain this.

Heard this week over the speaker system of the plane: "Ladies and gentlemen, as we are currently refueling, we ask you not to fasten your seat belts yet please." OK, obviously I was curious - one gets jaded after years of flying. But this instruction was so deliciously new and as yet unheard, I had to hail a flight attendant and inquire into this strange instruction. "Oh, yes - we ask not to fasten seat belts just so, in case something goes wrong during refueling, people can get off the aircraft more quickly."

I think I was sorry I asked.

Lately I've been able to knock down my door-to-door time travelling between my apartment in Barcelona and the one in Brussels to around 4 hours. Today I managed a sleek...