Present Perfect

Intro

I gotta rush away she said
I've been to Boston before
And anyway this change I've been feeling
Doesn't make the rain fall

Boston

Back from the Gnome summit. It was great. In the end jetlag got the best of me, and I didn't do as much as I would've liked. I found a nice picture of myself on Nat's site. Nat invited Ben, Amy and me over for Crazy Hat Night (you go out wearing a silly hat, apparently the Bostonians aren't used to this). I had a very surreal conversation with Nat on his balcony. I was asking stuff about Ximian and how they were doing and what the goals were, and how GStreamer fit in and how Nat thought GStreamer would be taking over the world if we did it right.

The surreal thing about it was he was wearing a chef's hat while I was wearing a very fetching but large black hat. Imagine taking over the world dressed in hats like that. Hm. Actually, sounds like a plan. James, ready the tank. Meanwhile, Nat asked me if I wanted to go to Istanbul to do talks. Hm...

The next day, Ben and Amy had planned on taking me to the harbor, but the night before we had stayed up too late with the Playstation at the ready. So we ended up quickly going to the Virgin Megastore and a small record store (ended up buying an album by Arab Strap I didn't find yet in Belgium, as well as a Black Box Recorder record). I thought that was OK, I was too tired anyway. And now I have an excuse to go back someday ;)

Left a book under my pillow for my hosts - "Written on the Body" by Jeanette Winterson. Recommended. Ben and Amy then took me to a place with vegetarian food and I got a Cosmic Burrito and a grape - pineapple - lemon juice, because I thought it would taste nice. Amy noted very truely that it was a GPL drink. I wonder if they would have given me the recipe. Oh wait, the name is the recipe.

Plane back sucked. Post-fun depression set in as effects of extensive jetlag took it's toll. Started working a little on a gnome media player app UI though.

Landed this morning around nine, went home and took a shower, then went straight to work. We're broadcasting from the beach for three weeks, today was day one and the server synchronisation still needed to be set up. These are Win2K and NT servers, and the software vendor reckoned we should just "make the drive letter from our office available over ADSL to the location". Uh-uh. I wish I had stood my ground before leaving and insisted on my solution : setting up a Linux machine at the location with samba on it and have it rsync over ssh from the office.

Found no good way to do it securely because of tiredness maybe, so I installed cygwin on it. Pretty nice ! Five minutes of downloading and I had a shell that could do rsync and ssh on a Windows machine. I actually might at times consider using Windows again with this.

Work starts feeling bad and stale at times. More and more I feel I just want to be working on free software, period. Will have to start considering options for that. Have Wavelan, will code.

Wrap-up

And now I'm tired and ready for bed and wondering how all of this experience will sink in and what it is about this sort of thing that can make you feel happy and sad at the same time.

Outro

No big differences these days
Just the same old walkaways
Someday
I'm gonna stay
But not today

Intro I gotta rush away she said I've been to Boston before And anyway this change I've been feeling Doesn't make the rain fall Boston Back from the Gnome summit....