Mon, 09 Aug 2004

Oxford, day 1

[ This was written on Monday, not uploaded until Wednesday, sorry. ]

In case you don't know, I was lucky enough to be invited by Canonical to their August Warthogs meeting in Oxford. Carlos and I arrived last night, too late for dinner, after two hours of flight and another two of bus ride through a busy highway. The last and only time I had been to the UK was like 12 years ago, so it's great to be here again.

As soon as the taxi dropped us in the hotel, I started meeting many people I didn't know in real life yet, which always is the best part of conferences. Had "dinner" (gas-station food, heh) with Teo and Daf outside the hotel, the only place not air-conditioned. Temperature was comparable to València's, which was a surprise. Then we went to the meeting room for a while, where I found out little Daniel isn't so little after all. Carlos and I are in the same room, and after a few tries through the endless hotel corridors, we found it. The hotel is huge, apparently divided into different wings and quite nice in general. All we had time to do last night was go into the main meeting room and test the wireless link (after DanielS aggressively tossed a wifi card at me) before going to bed.

Real stuff started today at 9AM with a meeting of all the workgroups, where people briefly explained who they were and why they were there. The team Mark has brought together is simply impressive. Soon after, people started introducing the different projects Canonical is working on. Malone, HCT, Rosetta... they talked about features that are just going to rock, and the best thing is that it's all going to be publically available. I won't say much more for now, as I don't know how private this is still.

I spent the day in some of their meetings and generally trying to help around #debian-release fixing as many bugs as possible. I pretended to go out to run a bit before dinner, but unfortunately it didn't stop raining during all day, so no luck with that. The swimming pool is small and not too appropriate for real training, it's more a place where to take a relaxing bath. The gym appears to be well equipped, so I'll be able to "run" on one of those machines if necessary, and do some cycling in the static bicycles. The food in the hotel's restaurant is quite good, but we spent more than two hours to get our two dishes served. I guess they can optimize that. :) lamont and I are having a fierce fight over temperature in the rooms. ;) Most of the guys want it quite cool, and I ended up getting a long t-shit to not get a cold. I'm ending the day typing stuff at 1AM from our room, where we have a very weak wireless link in the room's door area. I've just discovered wireless rocks.