Wed, 15 Dec 2004

Back from the Mataró conference

Oh well, the 8 days quickly expired and yesterday I had to return to València. I wish I could have stayed until the end of the show, I always miss the last day's party...

I spent Monday reminding myself that it was my last day at the Conference, which made me feel a bit sad. Mixing that with the remains of the Ubuntu virus, made my last day at the conference not the greatests of all...

I woke up around 10 minutes late for the group session, and a series of laptop lockups made time fly until 13:00, where we had our great "lunchpack". The cheese sandwich was delicious :P and I managed to steal a few extra bananas to compensate the lack of "bocadillo". I discovered some clever dudes ordering pizza in the lobby, but it was too late.

The rest of the evening was spent packing up, doing a few Debian packages and filling in the paperwork for travel expenses and then trying to print it using the printer lu had previously broken (according to LaMont, at least). After unbreaking it (ie, removing the plastic protector to the new toner). When it was dinner time, kiko and I agreed that going to the same place we had gone the night before was a great idea, and soon had a few people that would follow us. Too bad Mark had other plans for the Launchpad people: their fate involved pizza in the hack room that night. Of course, there was no swimming that day either. Oh well.

Another group joined us in the lobby, and then another one outside the hotel, and then another one as we walked to the centre. Suddenly, we were a group of 18, not 6, but we still managed to fit in a long table in the restaurant. During dinner, Jeff was loud enough to annoy the waiter, who ended up yelling at him "Shut up!". Of course, Jeff did. The food at this restaurant is very good, but I didn't expect that my first plate, a salad crepe, would be so big, so I couldn't finish the spaguettis.

I had a very nice chat with lulu at the restaurant, I think I'm going to miss her quite a bit in the next conference, and I really wish her luck in her new adventures! She introduced me to Charles, the South African dude that was around the conference who speaks a variety of South African languages. Of special interest was one which lots of "clicks" phonemas, which are totally impossible to pronounce for me. It'd be very cool to learn an African language. But I guess Arabic is first on the list...

Back at the hotel, I said goodbye to everyone at the hackroom, and thanked Mark for this new opportunity. It's been a fantastic week! Erinn said she'd go up to my room to exchange signatures, but she never did, even if I was awake well after 2AM. Boo, helix! After finishing the packing up (and realising I really had lost one of my gloves), I went to sleep, after asking Sjoerd to put his alarm clock at 5AM too, as I could not oversleep at all.

Just a few hours later the alarms went off and a long day started: of course, there was no breakfast for anyone at 5:20 in the hotel, but the lobby man suggested that I went early to the train station, where the cafe should be open at that time. Having nothing better to do, I left the hotel, and discovered everything was closed at the station too. So, hungry and very sleepy, took the 5:56 train to Barcelona, arriving to Sants with more than enough time to fetch my 7AM train to València.

3 hours later, I was in the Metro to get to work, and uppon arriving there, I discovered my clothing wasn't the best for the ocassion: we had to go to see the LliureX presentation by the Valencian Minister of Education. At least, I could go home slightly early, although I never got a well deserved nap.