Present Perfect

I'm in your lone star state
eatin' your lone star waffles
and they ain't very sunday-go-to-meetin'

Quick runthrough for the folks back home

• The hotel has us making our own waffles. Take a cup, fill it with dough, pour it in iron, close iron, turn iron and timer starts. 2 minutes later, a fresh waffle. Too bad it tastes like nothing more than bread.
• first night was a food and drinks party at a bar with a shark tank in the floor. Open bars really are the grease of a conference. J5 taught us the necessary tipping etiquette to improve our cocktail quality, and Wim and I spent the rest of the night practising it and asking the waitress to make up cocktails for us.
• I took a visit of the RANGER supercomputer which is right here in the uni - around 16000 blade servers working together. After that, I had a real American burger with whurley (who followed through on his plan to take down his blog, because his site is down atm). In the process I got my hands eaten:
• I did not pay for any food five days straight. Plane food on monday and friday, hotel breakfast, conference lunch, and corporate dinners. OTOH, I missed out on a real Texan BBQ because free is more attractive.
• Fry's is huge. I found a wireless card that happens to work under Linux and supports airodump-ng. I also brought home a Bluray disc (to try on my new TV about to arrive next week), a nerf gun and a Gigabit switch (which seems hard to find in stores in Belgium these days, because everyone wants wireless). Note to jrb: the theme was, in fact, "music" - I just didn't notice.
• Good to see a bunch of usual suspects again, including fcrozat, blizzard, jrb, behdad, yippi, lewing, Keith (I don't think the man has an irc nick), mjg59, davej, and of course Uraeus (apparently the only person I know with a capitalised nick) and wtay

I'm in your lone star state eatin' your lone star waffles and they ain't very sunday-go-to-meetin' Quick runthrough for the folks back home The hotel has us making our own...

When I moved to Spain, I was surprised to see that Paypal didn't let you change the country of your home address.

Well, it's 2008, and I want to add my new address in Belgium to my account. Guess what ?

"When moving from country to country, you will need to close your existing account and open a new account in the country where you will be residing.

For example, if you move from the U.S. to Canada, you will need to close your U.S. account and open a Canadian account. If you move from Canada to the U.S., you will need to close your Canadian account and open a U.S. account."

It's 2008 and nothing changed on the Paypal website.

When I moved to Spain, I was surprised to see that Paypal didn't let you change the country of your home address. Well, it's 2008, and I want to add...

I'll be in Austin this week at the Linux Collaboration Summit. I'll be going to represent Fluendo in its various forms, from the codecs over codeina to Elisa and Flumotion. If you're there and feel like collaborating, or just want to grill me on multimedia, drop me a line!

In related news, since the dollar is so "good" right now, I'm considering finally buying an audio player. My requirements are:

• works with linux
• plays flac and vorbis
• has *at minimum* a 60 GB hard drive
• is available in some store for direct purchase

Feel free to suggest players that work; the best I've found up to now is a Cowon iAudio 5 w. 60 GB. I thought iRiver was a good brand to get too, but I can't find anything above 40 GB

Up to now I've been using my N800 as a music player, but to be honest, the media player on it is just terrible. Even with the new 2008 OS it still has serious usability problems and I pretty much only use for playing complete albums because of them.

(I know there are alternatives, but none of them are terribly good either. And I just can't be bothered to write my own :))

I'll be in Austin this week at the Linux Collaboration Summit. I'll be going to represent Fluendo in its various forms, from the codecs over codeina to Elisa and Flumotion....

Hell: lying awake at night in fever dreams, 38.5C fever, the night before you have a two day "strategic business session" where we discuss our future plans.

Heaven: having an absurdly luxurious hotel suite for the task, lying in a nice hot bath tub, warming my chilly shivering bones, with a view on the valley on the left side and watching Firefly on the laptop.

In unrelated news, this weekend I'm obviously going to FOSDEM, doing a test run of our new apartment which is close-to-ready (all the floors are covered !), and my co-founder Julien is staying over with his family. I hope they enjoy the camping experience :)

We're not the only ones from the Fluendo family there - Loic is doing a Pigment talk in our favourite GNOME room, and right after that Alessandro will be giving an Elisa talk - make sure to come by and heckle him about DVB support! :)

I was under the impression that our sunny defector Jan Schmidt was giving a talk as well that I wanted to link to, but apparently teuf forgot or something and now Jan doesn't feel honourbound to still give his talk. I'll ask for a private audition instead then, and you should do so too, and take the opportunity to congratulate him on some excellent GStreamer releases!

Hell: lying awake at night in fever dreams, 38.5C fever, the night before you have a two day "strategic business session" where we discuss our future plans. Heaven: having an...

So, I had a 3 hour delay on my 21:00 flight last night out of Barcelona. Never mind how badly the company informed us even when I was telling them what was going on, that's a different story (involving me asking the question, "So you're saying that it is possible for a plane to leave Belgium at 21:05 and arrive in Barcelona at 21:00, flying 1400 km while travelling 5 minutes back in time ?" to which the droids replied "yes, of course.". Clearly they were not listening)

So, my plan was to sleep in late, and I advised relevant parties of my plan.

Wake-ups that prevented me from sleeping late:

• Kristien's alarm waking us up
• Kristien kissing me goodbye
• My mom calling - I rejected the call
• My answering machine calling me to tell me my mom called
• Lunya, our cat, jumping on the bed

I gave up sleeping at 10:10, though the goal was to sleep until at least 11:30 to get my 8 hours.

So, treating this the way I do platform incidents, here are the resolutions:

• Figure out a way to get Kristien to only wake me once
• Ask my mother nicely again to never call me before 12:00 unless it is really urgent
• Call Vodafone and figure out a way to configure my answering machine to not call me (maybe I should do that together with asking them for the third time to STOP SENDING ME PROMOTIONAL SMS'S AT 3.30 IN THE MORNING - even though now that I'm not on alarm duty anymore they don't actually wake me up anymore)
• The cat problem is due to us living in Kristien's apartment which is in fact one big room, so there's no way to keep the cat away from the bed. That should be solved once we move into our new apartment Real Soon Now.

Other suggestions to protect my sleep are welcome.

So, I had a 3 hour delay on my 21:00 flight last night out of Barcelona. Never mind how badly the company informed us even when I was telling them...