Present Perfect

The scene: a top floor appartment with terrace. A dashing young man is transcribing bank account statements to his computer. A strikingly beautiful young girl is going through two baskets of socks, trying to match pairs.

young girl (prodding skin under chin)

When I push hard here it hurts

young man (caught in a fit of laughter)

So stop pushing, problem solved ?

young girl

Hey ! I'm having cancer and you don't even care !

Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined it would have been so easy and fantastic at the same time to be living together...

The scene: a top floor appartment with terrace. A dashing young man is transcribing bank account statements to his computer. A strikingly beautiful young girl is going through two baskets...

Flew to Belgium and back for the weekend on account of a wedding of the guy who stole my job. Was great to see people again, including my ex-boss and even the ex-ex-boss. Nice to catch up with gossip as well. Photos of the wedding will make it online soon. And you know, just being around people you know are your friends and being able to fall back into the old social routines just makes you feel good from time to time.

This time I wasn't feeling the slightest bit sad at all to not live there anymore, I just wanted to get back home to Barcelona as quickly as possible after the wedding. Tried meeting up with my parents, too, but circumstances and their lack of organisation skills decided it was not to be. Same for a family gettogether on Sunday - they informed me three days in advance that there was to be one, and I could attend if I managed to get out of bed after the marriage. The next day they had decided to shift it to the evening, for a reason that probably was valid more than a month ago. Sigh. Just as well I suppose - sleeping later is always nice. Well, it is when your girlfriend doesn't wake you up :)

Sunday before going back we went to a Jazz festival in Brussels, in a nice park, with Kristien's parents. I couldn't attend the undoubtedly great barbecue in Peter's back yard with everyone I care about. Oh well, a bunch of them are coming over next week anyway.

And this week Tamara and Timothy have come over, and we're thinking of maybe going to a Tango evening. There seems to be an international Tango Festival close by as well, coincidence ?

Over the last ten days I also read two Dan Brown books on suggestion from others - Da Vinci Code and Angels and Daemons. Apparently he's very popular at the moment. I only realized how popular on Sunday evening when I was queuing to get on the plane, and the woman to my left was reading an English copy of the Da Vinci Code, and the guy on my right was reading an Italian one. They weren't too bad, just a bit too similar to each other, and the "puzzles" were easy to guess. You can tell he knows how to tell and twist a story though.

Anyway, I've decided to pick up reading again, and started with a classic of classics - the original A. A. Milne's Winnie-ther-Pooh.

Flew to Belgium and back for the weekend on account of a wedding of the guy who stole my job. Was great to see people again, including my ex-boss and...

People have asked me what to do about my upcoming birthday now that I live far away.

Well, the best I could come up with was to
create an Amazon wishlist. Hey, if it works for hadess, it can work for me.

I hope that helps the people with moral issues :)

People have asked me what to do about my upcoming birthday now that I live far away. Well, the best I could come up with was to create an Amazon...

Doctor Edgar Villanueva, for your viewing pleasure, with live translation. I have to say I was sort of disappointed about Bruce Perens acting like a suit and upstaging him and basically reading out loud a huge question. It wasn't necessarily wrong or bad to bring up the point that using laws to force Free Software might not be the proper solution. But making it into a little show felt like the wrong way to do it. By contrast, the Doctor gave a very lucid answer, well articulated, clearly showing that this guy has very good ideas and expresses them very well too.

I hope he learns English, so he can make his talks even more interesting.

And I hope next year we do live translation subtitling :)

Doctor Edgar Villanueva, for your viewing pleasure, with live translation. I have to say I was sort of disappointed about Bruce Perens acting like a suit and upstaging him and...

Day two of GUADEC, setting up stuff in the morning is really smooth now. Though getting up at 7.30 still sucks. Next year we have to have some other people actually do the streaming using our stuff, so we can hang out and sleep :) We even had time to make sure we had the sound correctly, and the wicked parabolic mike to get audience questions should work now too.

Lots of supportive comments from everyone both on and off the GUADEC grounds. One guy mailed me with a screenshot saying "Yes, the stream is working and simply rocks! I felt like beeing there."

That's exactly what we're aiming for. This is our first time streaming video, and we've already taken notes for everything we can do better next time (especially, getting high-res slides in the stream, for one thing), but it's very motivating to spend time discussing "what sort of rocking things will we have ready for the next time" instead of "oops, what did we do wrong ?". We made it. All the while our little server that could was running close to 3% CPU. Hm, we need a bigger testcase I guess.

Some random statistics: yesterday's viewer's ratings high score were achieved by none other than Dave Camp, who had 60 people watching, and people asking questions for him on IRC which were proxied through some of the gnome hackers.
Given a stream roughly close to 60 kbyte/sec, that accounts for almost 29 mbit/sec. The server is on a 100 mbit/sec. I hope nobody here on the university minded much.

Day two of GUADEC, setting up stuff in the morning is really smooth now. Though getting up at 7.30 still sucks. Next year we have to have some other people...