Present Perfect

Moving here made me realize I am more adaptable to an environment than I thought I would be.

Spain presents interesting differences and you learn to take the good with the bad as you go, adjusting your expectations and behaviour slightly.

Last week I wanted to wash up right before leaving to work. Except there was no water. You learn to shrug, take some drinking water and do the minimum amount of cleaning, and you ask the concierge on the way out.

Today, I was waiting on the bus to work. Seven public transport buses passed our bus stop, all empty. You shrug and start walking to work. My best guess is the 3GSM conference has problems handling the load and just paid TMB enough money to send their regular line buses to help shuffle people around. Screw the regular users :)

Mike lost power in his place for a few days. He turned up for work with an unusual chin stubble. I regularly have power outages as well, and some of them end up damaging or destroying power supplies and hard drives. My computer wouldn't boot anymore before I left for Boston, and I already had switched a lot of components to eliminate the cause - power supply, CPU fan, hard drives, ... In the end I thought I'd make sure with a power supply from work, and that one did work. So apparently I have two broken power supplies, and I got a new one this weekend. Problem solved.

When I rode my bike into town going shopping for parts, I passed by Passeig De Gracia, one of the fanciest shopping streets in the city. There was an old guy (60ish, white hair) waiting for the traffic light to turn green, and he was only wearing swimming pants. Sure, that happens once in a while, in the middle of the city. Except, getting closer, I saw that his grey swimming pants weren't, in fact, swimming pants. Rather, it was a tattoo made to look like swimming pants. So his - incidentally pretty huge, even in non-action - penis was dangling in the buff, with a huge piercing through it. I was already past him by the time my synapses had registered the visual trickery, too late to turn around and take a picture without being noticed.

Monday we went for some excellent rabbit. On our way back from the restaurant we passed by preparations for the repainting of pedestrian crossings. This is how they mark the area to be painted.I hope that car got a complete paint job and not just the hood.

One of the best things about Spain this month though was coming back from -12C in Boston, and going to Ciudad Condal the next day for excellent tapas, and eat them out on the street. In February, heart of winter.

Moving here made me realize I am more adaptable to an environment than I thought I would be. Spain presents interesting differences and you learn to take the good with...

Got off a plane this morning after a scant 5 hours of sleep. This after repeated days of waking up at 6 in the morning. I think I will catch up tonight. Happy to be back at +12 C instead of -12 C. Although I must say a frozen Charles river had its charm.

Meanwhile, I was goaded by daniels into making myself a southpark hackergotchi for Freedesktop.

I will keep it short for now, and just drop in a reminder about things to write about later.

I am liking my Nokia 800 a lot - thank you Nokia for considering me. Surprised there is still no Vorbis support, so that will be my number one task for this thing.

The past weekend has made my TODO list grow even more. Among other things, clean up pirut's autotools setup (because the pirutspin guys made me take a look at their verbatim search-and-replace copy) and submit a patch for that, update some Fedora packages, do a release of Savon soon, set up an SELinux-stops-a-known-exploit example, build ppc gstreamer packages, finish off a local patch that adds help links to the Flumotion UI messages, create GStreamer/Flumotion/Elisa live CD's, look at the OLPC camera kernel driver to turn off auto-balancing of hue/saturation for the space invaders game, and find a Barcelona bagel store with cream cheese.

Now excuse me while I go home and vegetate watching a possibly good new series called "Heroes"...

Got off a plane this morning after a scant 5 hours of sleep. This after repeated days of waking up at 6 in the morning. I think I will catch...

Over the last few years I was using CVS not only for a bunch of personal projects, but also for keeping logs of how I configure certain machines, spec files for packages for submission to Fedora, my own packages, GStreamer packages, config files, patches to other projects, small test applications...

A few months ago, the apestaart server got moved physically, then transferred to a new machine. A good week after that, I did some GStreamer packaging, and I couldn't update from the server anymore. I thought it was just a matter of switching CVS Root. But no. Log in to server. No /home/cvs.

And the old server was still accessible, but had most things already wiped. So, a good four/five years of history gone :/

Of course, I've already suffered a more traumatizing experience with data loss in the past, so emotionally I was just about able to cope with this one.

The experience has two upsides. First of all, this has definitely swung the karma balance between our sysadmin, Wiebe, and me clearly over to me. He's picked me up a bunch of times at the airport, offering on his own initiative, which is a definate treat. One of those times was after midnight, so I was in the red. Not anymore now. Which, after last month's mole weekend (more later), has left me with a nice Belgacom shirt.

The other upside is that, given that I had to start from scratch, I finally jumped to subversion. I tell you, switching to subversion is a lot easier if you don't have a CVS repository to run cvs2svn on. Coupled with a nice trac install, the public bits are now easily browsable. You can probably even file issues, just like you can for this guy.

Now the hard part is logging in to 10+ machines, comparing the local CVS checkout's copy (which can have local modifications) to this new repository checkout and deciding which bits to keep...

Over the last few years I was using CVS not only for a bunch of personal projects, but also for keeping logs of how I configure certain machines, spec files...

Last Friday as I left work I was zipping up against the cold. Now, my vest has two zippers (it has some extra flaps which I suppose are there for style, though it's fun to match the wrong zipper ends on purpose and look like an art house painter), and I was wearing a surf fabric sweater with a zipper as well.

Without looking I zipped up quickly and instead of hearing the comforting sound of a zip well done, it made that tearing noise zippers do when the teeth are not locking even though the zipper goes all the way up. Oops. I had matched my vest's left end with my sweater's right end.

Normally when your zipper didn't close up properly you pull out one of the two ends all the way back down. I did so with my vest end, but when finally reaching the end with my one arm over my head and the other on the inside and out down, my body slanted to the left for balance, I was still stuck because the zipper wouldn't go past the entry chain.

I did not want to ruin my vest and sweater, so the only way out was to call someone to come over and help me get the other chain all the way down as well by pulling on the other side. Of course, I had to kill him afterwards to keep the embarassment a secret. So if you don't see Jamal today - you know why.

Last Friday as I left work I was zipping up against the cold. Now, my vest has two zippers (it has some extra flaps which I suppose are there for...

There are days where my Spanish is quite acceptable. Last week we had Kevin and Christina over for dinner, and we spoke Spanish all the time. We also went to grab a bite after tango class with some of the other people in class, and we could join in the conversation just fine. Sure, I make a bunch of grammatical mistakes, and I should really spend some time on learning tenses, but overall it was ok.

And then there are days where it just doesn't work out. This week I went to buy batteries, and asked "Tienes baterias triple-A ?" The guy looked at me without flinching and asked "baterias o pilas" ?

At least he had the decency to correct me in this way instead of sending me home with triple-A drum sets.

There are days where my Spanish is quite acceptable. Last week we had Kevin and Christina over for dinner, and we spoke Spanish all the time. We also went to...