Present Perfect

If your suit's no good - who you gonna call ?

Last Saturday I was picking up Kristien from the airport. I was driving down the long stretch of Marina, before going onto Litoral. I stopped for a traffic light, and while I was waiting for green, all the street lights were turning off a nd on in rapid succession, as if someone in the city's control room was rebooting the whole light system. This went on for as long as I was driving down Marina, and possibly longer. An eerie experience...

If your suit's no good - who you gonna call ? Last Saturday I was picking up Kristien from the airport. I was driving down the long stretch of Marina,...

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...

Coincidental geek poetry

FUDCON claimed its first hospital victim last night. Luckily I left the bar before it got to that point, going back to the hotel at 22.00

I guess I should have gone for a different jet lag strategy, only being here for three days - go to bed early and wake up early and stay in the European rhythm.

However, I wanted to finish the bash completion autogeneration I was working for last night for my Python Command class, which I use in
moap and savon. Doing that helps a lot in discovering the commands as you go.

So I ended up staying up until midnight working on that, and woke up this morning around 6.30 and continued working on it. I've got a reasonably good first stab at it implemented. It handles commands, boolean arguments, and arguments that take values, though it doesn't yet know when it should complete with files. So, time for another moap release soon...

Am at the hackfest now, watching David Zeuthen explain his new Fedora LiveCD tools. Looks pretty good, I'm hoping to make a GStreamer and Fluendo live CD using these tools.

Coincidental geek poetry FUDCON claimed its first hospital victim last night. Luckily I left the bar before it got to that point, going back to the hotel at 22.00 I...

I haven't even written anything yet to wrap up my LCA experience, I still have Sydney beach sand in my shoes, and still not recovered from my Eastern jetlag - and here I am in Boston, MA for FUDCON 2007. Thanks to Greg for having me over and taking care of the logistics! I'm sure the jolt from Eastern jetlag to Western jetlag will catch up with me soon enough.

The hotel is swank - the only downside is that there is no free Internet. In this day and age, I think it should come for free in a hotel. I was looking forward to use my Nokia 800 to get all my travel info and get around, but ...

On the upside, I met up with my old primary school and scouts buddy Ward, who lives here in Boston and works part-time for the FSF. He took me out to a nice Vietnamese place, and afterwards his wife April joined up with us and we went to a few bars, and then to the completely free (as in beer) ice skating rink at Harvard. Even skates are provided in one of the three bins.

There's a lot of new faces I have to get acquainted with. There are a few GNOMEy people that I know, and Owen Taylor and Bryan Clark just walked in (and are going to do a Mugshot talk (congrats to them for being number one "mugshot" Google hit by the way!). When I originally tried Mugshot, it asked me to restart my desktop session - which I of course refused. By the time I actually rebooted my machine, the mugshot client was complaining that it was out of date and needed an upgrade. And, of course, a subsequent desktop restart. Which I refused. So I never got to understand what the fuss was about.

Looks like it's time to give it another try - Bryan explained some interesting use cases that may actually make sense for what I want to get out of my online experience.

But it'd better not ask me to restart my desktop session!

More later...

I haven't even written anything yet to wrap up my LCA experience, I still have Sydney beach sand in my shoes, and still not recovered from my Eastern jetlag -...