Tuesday 10th
Woke up at 8:15, looked out the window... DAMN IT, Still raining!
So Tuesday could have started a bit better. There was a very interesting talk by mvo and jdub on package management stuff, and then I entered NMU mode again. The tiff transitions is about to be completed, after a I uploaded a "fixed" jadetex ("fixed", because today I found out the NMU got reverted, and discussion is underway to see what needs to be done. After doing gnobog, only ivtools and grass are left. I'm currently doing a grass build, while it seems ivtools will be fixed by the maintainer. At some point in the morning, I discovered the sky is also blue in the UK, as it finally cleared. Lunch was very good, and as it's self-service, it was pretty quick too. :) During the evening I continued with some NMUs and had some fun as jdub and mdz did some test installs of some well-known commercial distros. Jeff was quite amused by the lack of polish of some parts of their installers.
One hour before lunch, I finally decided to stop sitting and eating and do something about next week's triathlon. I asked at reception if there's some nice place where I can run that isn't all asfalt (bad for my periostitis), but she said there wasn't any. They suggested me going to the right side as soon as I went out the hotel, and so I did. Just a few hundred metres away I crossed a channel filled with boats, and continued down the road, out of the urban area. There was no traffic, but still, not being used at running at the right side I jumped into a narrow trail just at the edge of the road, in an attempt to run on soft surface. That proved to be a bad idea, as not much later I stepped on a rock hiding behind the overgrown grass and I nearly break my ankle. Luckily all my body elasticity appears to be concentrated there, so it only was a warning to get out of there. Got to a small village called Wytham and continued left until I reached a big road with lots of traffic. At that point, I followed a train inside a forest, but realized I probably had been running for nearly 30 minutes and went back, stopping at Wytham for 1 minute to have a look at a monument dedicated to those dead during WWI.
Back in the hotel, dinner was very good again, and this time we had pre-ordered, so it was kinda fast. The rest of the night we spent exploring a few more distros, and me doing the last few NMU's of the day. Most libtiff3g-using packages were fixed at that time. At 2AM, I finally went up to the room, leaving jdub and matt behind.
Wednesday 11th
Carlos woke up quite early, but I managed to oversleep and missed the daily meeting. LaMont was looking for attendees for the first of his BOF's and finally managed to get some. The last tiff transition NMU really didn't want to compile as it uses an *insane* amount of diskspace that I don't have available. I finally found somewhere else where to build & upload the NMU, thanks to LaMont's magic. This time, before dinner, Keybuk, Teo and I went to the gym and did some exercise. I just did static cycling, for the first time. It's not too cool. It's boring, and it's very unlike real cycling, because the resistance for the pedals is always the same (unless you change it, of course). Real cycling has lots of effort changes, depending on the terrain's steepness, etc. In the gym, all of that was constant, so I'm not sure how good of a cycling training for a triathlon it makes. After 20kms in around 38 mins (I guess), the machine said I had produced an average of 213 watts. I guess you can charge a laptop battery with that. :) Tomorrow's running again, and I'll explore a small trail near the main channel which seemed to be cool, but I just discovered on my way back on Tuesday. It seems Lu also goes running outside, so maybe we can make a group of sane people to go out tomorrow. :)
Dinner involved Indian food, and was buffett again. It looked very good, so I asked for a bit of everything. My surprise when I started eating... dude, that's _hot_! I had to drink 3 cups of water to get my mouth sensivity back, ate the less hot food (with the advantage that my tongue wasn't feeling any taste anymore) and went for a second plate with the least hot stuff. The other people sitting at my table were largely amused by me shouting foul words in Spanish.
And finally, after dinner, Keybuk organized his Evil Game Of Mao. Dafydd, LaMont, Scott and a few others started a game with seb128 and me, the lonely virgin players. The first rounds were horrible. The bastards just don't explain anything, and the only stupid rule they do explain you forget almost instantly, as you expect it'll be repeated if you ask. Not quite so. The game is full of rules, but the intrepid new player needs to learn them by himself. Of course, in the learning process, the rest of the players keep pointing out they have broken this or that rule, and they keep drawing cards. After a few minutes I had something like 20 cards in my hand, and you start with 5. After a while, when I had started to get some clue, jdub, Martin Pitt and mdz joined the game, being the first game for all of them. I had quite a nice time watching their faces saying "What the fuck" every time the bastards gave them another card for their collection. And the worst thing was when you started feeling a bit confident about the rules, because every time one of the good players won, they were allowed to add a new rule to the game, which of course they didn't explain, you just found out the hard way.
The day ended with some major GNOME 2.7 breakage in Debian experimental, which I'll start to take care of tomorrow, hopefully helped by JHM and others. It's probably bedtime now, and oversleeping tomorrow seems quite inevitable at this point already. I'll try not to...
Oh, before I forget. The weather, again... the day was quite ok in the morning, but it has been raining for several hours now. Right now it's kinda pouring. Sigh, I want my Summer back. I want my 35ºC!
