As might have noticed, I haven’t posted anything in the last week. Well, as you might have figured, (oh I don’t know – maybe from the blog title) I’m enjoying a three week long vacation.
I’m staying with my parents, doing day trips and getting a tan (I’m working pretty hard on that!). I still have two weeks left (well, actually only 11 days – makes it one week and change), as I’m leaving for Stuttgart next Friday.
So far, cheerio.
Well, as I wrote last year, I spent some time with my brother on Spiekeroog (that’s where he’s currently living and working). As I left on December 4th, it started snowing like crazy ..
If you read the old article, you might remember that I mentioned Spiekeroog is 100% free of fossil fueled vehicles. That being said, let’s continue with the story I’m about to tell.
Anyway, my brother was walking me back to the hotel boat and we waited a bit in the harbour since we were a bit early. Now, every item is delivered by ship to the island, since there’s no other way (besides by air, which is kinda expensive ..). Anyway, them dockworkers ain’t stupid. They needed some snow-free space, and they started clearing the snow. But how ?
Well, again, them ain’t stupid … You take a forklift and a euro-pallet and you got what ? Exactly, a snow plow!
I know, the images are kinda grainy, sadly I only had my cell phone to take the photo (left the digital camera at home). C’est la vie ..
Well, Arne recently (not really recently though .. 😛 ) complained about my blog being waaay to technical, so I ended up writing this lil’ anecdote.
I’m finally on my long awaited, the remaining year lasting vacation. Last week was interrupted by a short job interview in Nuremberg, and also by the flu (not “again“, I still got it in me, haven’t been able to shake it now for about three months).
Today I’m spending the night on Spiekeroog, which is a smallish island in the middle of the North Sea. It’s a real neat island, and if I would have the choice of deciding whether or not to move here for the same salary, I’d probably do it. Spiekeroog certainly does have a certain amount of flair, which I ain’t gonna deny. But it also does have it’s drawbacks.
One thing “neat” about Spiekeroog is, that it’s completely isolated from the CO² pollution. There is not a single car on the island (well, besides emergency services like police and fire/rescue) – only electric cars.
It’s located in the North Sea, so it’s exposed to the raw Atlantic weather of which I got a good taste today. When I was planning the trip a few weeks back, I allotted about 8 hours for the 400km’ish trip to Neuharlingersiel. Due to my driving “skills” ( 😀 others would say I do have a rather heavy foot – 170km/h or 105.6331 mph for those not able to deal with the metric system ❗ ), I was there about two hours early. So I went eating some crab soup (which was really delicious) and then went down to the harbour, where the hotel boat was gonna pick me up. And then it started raining (as in pouring), with only about 2°C air temperature. So basically I was freezing my bollocks off.
Anyway, after eating dinner worth fifty bucks in the restaurant (well, don’t forget the expensive rose wine – which was a bit sour actually, as well as the three bucks of delicious tea) I’m now all cosy within my bed and all tucked in.
Cheerio for now!
Yessir, I’m back home. Bought a new bed (god, I forgot how good sleeping can feel) and spent the first two days at work already (yes, it’s Friday afternoon already).
I *really* thought catching up after having a 2 week vacation would take more time, but it just took yesterday morning (till ~9am). I’m surprised by the taste of black tea with milk and sugar
(yes, I was like *yikes* initially, but I like it pretty much now 😀 ) and by the ability to rise at 7am in the morning 😛
On Monday I finally got to do an expanded test drive with my shiny, new car (that is driving it up from Stralsund down to Stuttgart). I really can’t complain, the fuel consumption is like I expected (~6.6l/100km while driving between 160 and 180km/h), the noise while driving that fast is quite low (as in you hear the engine but you don’t really consider it noise) and the acceleration is nearly like the one of a F1-car 😛 (at least I’d wish 😉 ). Spent the evening relaxing from the near 950km nonstop trip (yes, only had one stop to put some fuel back into the car), had nice curry (my cousin’s husband made yummy potato curry!!!).
On Tuesday I nearly spent the whole time on a boat driving down and up the Neckar (that’s the river flowing through Baden-Wuerttemberg), being lazy, lying in the sun for 5 or 6 hours, spent time talking to my aunt and to my cousin while trying to listen to the music fluttering out of my iPod nano (“Autobahn – Linke Spur”).
On Wednesday I got up rather late, helped my aunt picking up her car from the car dealer (they had to fix the air conditioner and did the yearly inspection). Afterwards my brother and I went of to see if we could find a nice and gooood bed pour moi at Ikea in Sindelfingen (yes, I admit it .. I like IKEA too 😮 – which turned out rather, err, shite. I didn’t find a bed pour moi, but I picked up a couple of bookshelf’s and a 2,20m’ish CD/DVD shelf.
On Thursday, I had my complete lazy day. Woke up around 9am, went downstairs to see my brother and my cousin’s husband and his parents were already awake. Ate breakfast till 11am and sat around on the sofa for a few hours and waited till my aunt and my cousin would wake up. In the afternoon I went to see my other uncle and aunt, did some catch-up with them, played a bit with their cutie cats (they are like 9 months old). Afterwards we went shopping for some Maultaschen for my brother’s host family in Belgium/Eupen. Went onwards to see my other cousin’, his wife and his cute lil’ daughters. That was my lil’ four day vacation in Baden-Wuerrtemberg …
Here’s just a note for you people out there, how’re crazy enough and want something from me in the next week (that’s 18th till 26th June):
I’m on vacation …
Means I won’t be around to fix anything (as I’m gonna try and relax a bit), so if you encounter something that you want to fix; consult with the herd (that’s apache/hardened/kernel …) and/or fix it YOURSELF. Just make sure you don’t break it more 🙄
Some of us attended this years FOSDEM in Brussels (thanks to Dimitry it was *really*, *really* great).
We (at least the ones attending) got to know each other a bit better (I even got to know some pre Gentoo devs .. yeah, you), and some time after FOSDEM (I think it was ~3 days afterwards), Petteri (betelgeuse) asked me why people all of the sudden start to call him with his first name on IRC.
I think the cause for that is just seeing each other for some time (like 2 days in a row), talking to the other(s) in person makes you feel closer to him/her (you hopefully know what I mean 😯 ). Or maybe that’s just me.
After FOSDEM the virtual bonds changed, I started to call quite some people by their first name as did others.
The last three days have been quite amazing, I’m still stunned by all these impressions (basically meeting all those people you usually know though IRC), how nice people can be if they want (yeah dad, I’m talking about you :P)
Although I was pretty sad about leaving so early (I think, if I’m going to attend next year, I’m going by train and starting on Monday morning so I got one night more in Brussels), I’m also quite happy to be home again, as I was pretty phreaked (haha, self-pun intended) by all those people.
The Booth was fine from my POV, but it looks like users already requested some stuff already on the forums, which we hopefully will have next year/the next event (Christel or even Chris – get the event kits sorted out and prepared – pretty please with sugar on top 😛 ).
The talks in the DevRoom where great (at least the ones I attended) – most of them were well prepared (hi Christel 😛 ) and the company I had for these three days (all the senior devs around – especially vapier, wolf31o2, kingtaco, pylon and some of the former ones – hey Mr. “I want SeJo’s HumpGang on the picture” 😀 ) and of course our youngins (that’s Peter, Alexander and Robert).
Today, I got up again at 0630 *ugh* went to bath, woke up Torsten, afterwards the mystery guy and went downstairs to get some breakfast. I ate some cornflakes and some bread along with a glass of chilled orange juice, then went back up to get all our stuff and prepare the room the way we found it.
After we finished that, we went downstairs and met Alex along the way went to the cars and Torsten led us to the university. I went to the booth and noticed that Torsten and me where the only ones that early at the booth. So we sat down for a moment, cleaned up the booth space a bit and finally sat again preparing the notebooks.
Suddenly some of the Debian guys came along and asked for a Gentoo Linux Install-CD and is was like “WHUT”. Apparently they only needed it to fix a borked lilo.
I went over to the DevRoom to see if anyone else was there already, but there was “only” Petteri doing his presentation about Gentoo/JAVA stuff with Rob’s help (he lend Petteri his somewhat broken notebook because Petteri’s hard disk broke on the day before).
So I watched a bit and went then back to the booth. After hacking for half an hour on my broken system (haha, I tried updating glibc via binary packages yesterday again, I know I do suck 😎 ) slowly the other devs showed up one after another. So we manned the booth yet another day. The booth wasn’t that much visited as yesterday (which I kinda was pretty lucky about since yesterday was kinda rough) and I sort of vanished 1100’ish to get to Mike and Chris’s presentation.
I even managed to catch Danny talking about paludis and enjoyed it. Afterwards was Dad’s talk which was really interesting as well as Chris’s talk, though I mostly knew about that, as I’m currently building the hardened 2007.0 stages (which by the way still suck horribly, somehow the gcc ebuild still creates lib32 and lib64 directories on a x86 stage-build and puts the lib_gcc.so.1 into the lib32 directory, I’ll probably have to poke Chris or Andrew again when I’m back home or try to build a 2006.1 stage with grp’s I may get from the old livecd/dvd).
Afterwards we had sort-of a lunch break (hah, no food again for me) and heard Christel talking about “What makes Gentoo a community based distribution?”. Her talk was interesting (admitted she was a bit unprepared, she admitted it herself, don’t sue me :P), though she prepared the slides like during Mike’s and Chris’s talk. 😮 The presentation was still pretty much interesting (hah, Al-Quaida and P0RN were mentioned on the community’s thoughts *ugh* – I doubt it though) from a users POV.
Afterwards I said goodbye to an pretty “good, old” friend (my handsome Rob that is) and a newly won friend (djay-il from userrep working for exanet.com) as they wanted to get to the airport in time, Rob for his flight to Geneva and Alexandre for his flight back to Israel (I don’t know where exactly). Ah, btw (and on behalf of djay-il) – the recent dbus update broke the complete GNOME, hah 😛
In addition to the previous presentation, Marius talked about portage foo, which I have to admit, only listened to with half an ear, as I was bashing Alex and Peter in #gentoo-dev at that time.
Nearly after Marius’s speech we left for the car to get home, since Markus needed to get to work on the next day. But before we could get outside of the door, Christel snapped us and we all did a sorta-like group photo (even SpanKY is on it, after some persuasion – including Surprise Buttsecks). Afterwards we headed for the car, and started our run for home.
It took us about 8 hours straight to get back to Hamburg (and Marius to Bremen), Markus probably needed half an hour more since he gave me a ride to the central station where I sat in McDonald’s for about 3 hours, eating McChicken, Chicken McNuggets, a McFlurry, drank a Coke, an orange juice (they do offer Hohes C now at McDonald’s) and about 5 or so cups of tea 😎 (I know, I’m crazy .. I usually drink about the same amount for breakfast when I’m supposed to get to work).
I’m sitting now in the train back home (first class of course), writing this blog-o-report for all those people, crazy enough to actually read this “report” about my experiences at this years FOSDEM.
So, as I earlier mentioned, we finally found the U.L.B. and also found the booth and staffed it for nearly the whole day (I haven’t managed to view any of the speeches, neither one of the Gentoo ones nor any of the others), I talked to some interested people asking about Gentoo itself, but also asking about the EFIKA’s (the Genesi PPC’s), one by Camille and Julien providing video forwarding (from one EFIKA to another via cross-over cable), and the other one by Chris playing Descent 2 and Quake 2 at the end. Peter (I think the PR guy from Genesi Europe, will have to ask Chris / Mike again).
Ah, and I nearly forgot about the best part. I finally met my “new” dad ;-P though he’s a pole humper, he’s really great and I adore him for being himself (hey SpanKY), along with Chris (wolf31o2) who’s really adorable for being himself, and for being all knowledgeable. Though I also finally met SeJo (who’s really charming but also a bitch :-P) and KingTaco (who constantly tried to hump my dad), met most of our youngins, Alex and the amazing Peter (welp) and of course my all-time-favorite handsome Rob.
I talked pretty long’ish to Chris and to SpanKY (who was always trying to make fun out of me, and succeeded) and gained a lot of insight as well as got to know them. I also managed to get in touch with the rest of the developer attending FOSDEM (that’s genone, jokey, kugelfang, spb, dertobi123, wschlich, grobian, genstef, nattfodd, tove, pylon and all the other …).
Later, in the evening we went to some restaurant (by bus and by foot), which was funny though since we left around 1900 when everyone else was leaving too and about 200 other people were trying to get somewhere else of Brussels. It was really nice, christel shouting all over the street, telling some of us to get on the next bus, half a minute later to stop and get back here to the tram. After Petteri looked at the tram schedule, we agreed to go get the bus, because the tram was already late (we were too).
We drove till Brussels Center (the bus-driver was driving like mad, he took every hole in the street he could find and was waaay to fast), I managed to talk a bit with Rob about his work in Gentoo and real-life issues affecting the development and finally walked the remaining way to the Restaurant (we somehow got lost – again) but found our way to the “Rome”, which was really a nice also as the food (we had a three-course meal with either Tortellini or Carpaccio, and again beef and lamb as main course and weird bakery stuff with butterscotch).
Between the courses I talked some more to Bryan, Alexandre and Christel; all of them we’re quite charming all evening and suddenly Dimitry comes at us and is like, “Hey I need all your money” (OK, *now* I’m lying, that was Christel who came up with this sentence instead of Dimitry telling that he needed the money for the dinner collected :S). So Dimitry and Christel went ahead and collected the money from the people staying at the hostel (so Dimitry would be able to pay the manager). That went pretty good and was without trouble (at least the two didn’t say something about having trouble). So we sat again, and talked some more, some more horseporn came up.
And Dimitry came along yet again, asking poor Christel to collect the money for the dinner and that’s what they did. They went along the table and as they were at the end, where SpanKY and the rich dutch translators sit at, as she didn’t knew their names (the ones from the dutch people), she decided to accidentally piss them off (she labeled them “young one 1” and “young one 2”), which they found out later by looking at the sheet.
Soon they finished and Dimitry was able to pay the dinner. So he talked a bit with the restaurant people and soon found out, that the drinks (even the non-alcohol ones) weren’t free. So he raised some more money from everyone. As they finished, we sat again and talked some more (gay horseporn came up again) along with the “The Internet is for …” song (nooo, I’m not gonna say it!!), but instead Christel tried to convince everyone to sing it loudly, which of course everyone refused to do).
Sometime soon they threw us out, because we were way to much people (~50 or so, because some just came along) and we were quite loud too 😛
So we decided to get some beer (I really *so* wanted to get drunk this evening and probably Christel wanted to see me get drunk), so we went looking for another pub where all 50 of us could stay. We walked and walked and walked and walked and lost some people, as they apparently decided to go into the other direction and then sort of vanished (*pooof*). As we were back at the center of the city, someone decided to get into the street where it was smelling like pot. There was also a pub that was quite nice (according to Alexandre), but quite filled. So some of us decided to go back out, but the rest apparently decided to stay, as they were quite comfortable with it (Peter even asked me later what all that pulling was about).
So we went someplace else (at the Grand Place again), and we sat outside. The rest bought beers and handsome Rob insisted on still owing me a beer for something (I’ve no clue what for he would owe me a beer) so he bought me one ! yay ! Hail Rob !!!!1one
We spend some time sitting there and making fun out of jokey (apparently he was on the menu at this bar, pub, whatever) and had some more fun listening to the “The Internet is for …” song again and some of us ordered another beer. Rob went of to make some photo’s of the city hall for his fiance(?).
He came back a few minutes afterwards telling us (what we already knew) that it is pretty cold (he was all tucked into his jacket, which he bought on advice of his fiance – he should tell that story himself). So we walked back to the hostel (it was quite a bit of a walk, but it was nice), Christel was completely out of breath and we met some of the userrep people back in front on the youth hostel and we had some more talking (again). Somehow, one of them came up with the idea that we should buy some latex or spandex superman-like capes for the next Gentoo Event for all developer attending with like pink or purple color and the Gentoo logo on the chest and Bryan was like “I would definitely wear that” and “that would probably scare off all potential users” and he was really encouraged about it.
We did some more talking and I got a bit insight into the userrep stuff (thanks to Christel and Bryan explaining) and finally went to bed around 0200 after trying to bribe the manager to give some more beer. My other room mates (that’s Marius, Markus, Robert, Torsten and some mystery guy) we’re apparently loooong sleeping.