It is obvious that we at the Debian GNOME team didn't hold up our promise and didn't make much progress on GNOME 2.10 Debian packages for experimental.

There are a few reasons for this, mainly the people that are more involved in this happenings being quite busy and we still were fighting the last few bits for the GNOME 2.8 packages for Sarge. People kept asking, and they kept being directed to my blog, which wasn't too helpful 3 weeks after I last wrote about this...

But don't worry! As you probably know by now, Ubuntu Hoary has been released, and this means that our mighty seb128 has not been able to upload 50 packages each day as Hoary was frozen.

What does this have to do with your shiny experimental packages, you ask? Well, many don't know, but seb128 is an upload addict. He needs to upload a minimum of 10 packages each day to rest peacefully every night. With no Ubuntu uploads to do lately, he quickly shifted his focus to Debian, and the result is that as you read this, GNOME 2.10 packages for Debian are slowly hitting incoming and experimental.

seb128 is now, officially, seb210!

(In not so important news, I stopped procrastinating and built Gustavo's libgda, libgnomedb and mergeant packages for unstable. libgda will hit incoming soon, and tomorrow we will upload the rest, aiming for a quick transition to GNOME-DB 1.2).

One of the positive effects of the hard exercise at the Rjukan cross-country skiing tracks was that suddenly, I missed doing sport, and started thinking about coming back to the triathlon world, to some extent.

I still have time to prepare for the Fuente Álamo triathlon, at the end of April, as it's sprint distance and my physical condition is bad, but not totally horrendous, after more than 6 months of no training at all. I told a few of my team mates about this, and they encouraged me to start again. Today, I went out running with Kiko and managed to do 40 minutes at more or less 5m/km with no problem at all.

Hopefully I can find time this weekend to do an easy cycling ride for a start. What will be more difficult is to gather enough motivation to wake up at 6:30 to swim. If I did it regularly for the last two years, I guess it's still possible...

The plan is to be in Fuente Álamo and then València, which is Olympic distance this season. Depending on how it goes, we'll see what else I'm able to do. It's a pitty that I have completely ignored the duathlon season this year. It's too late for those now...

Ah, the nice feelings of your legs aching after a hard training, getting home exhausted and sleepy and doubling your eating capacity might soon be with me again...

Yesterday, Kiko, Belén and I went to the cinema to see Memoria del saqueo (Social Genocide, in the English translation), a documentary film about how Argentina, one of the richest countries in South America, managed to go into total bankruptcy, ending in the popular uprise and rioting of December 2001.

As the story develops, from the times of Videla's dictatorship, and through the democratic presidencies of Alfonsín, Menem and De la Rua, you see how all the layers of the Argentinian society have systematically used their big or small powers for their own benefit, or to benefit corporations from other countries. From politicians to the labor-union leaders, and including judges, lawyers, businessmen or the Church, everyone did as much as they could to steal from the Argentinian people, during decades. Menem was specially incredible, as he didn't even care to hide anything, as you see in the YPF privatization process.

This is a crude film, and a feeling of impotence invades you from the very beginning. The description of how the thousands of middle-class families suddenly found themselves in poverty and without a job, and the poorer classes suddenly suffered from desnutrition had me thinking "hijos de puta!" during the two hours, specially during the description of the situation in Tucumán, where many children died of famine, in a country with capacity to feed 300 million people.

If you still wonder how Argentina could get in that hole 2 years ago, this is probably the perfect explanation.

Brande, Núria and I just arrived a few hours ago to València, after leaving Rjukan at 6AM on Saturday and spending nearly 24 hours travelling back home.

Our week at the Kvitåvatn Fjellstoge in Norway has been, without doubt, one of my best vacations ever. Not only for discovering cross-country skiing, but because I've managed to disconnect from the daily stress and worries almost completely for eight days. Waking up every day near Brande, Núria and my new friends Alfredo, Patricia and Diego, with the Gausta peak saying "good morning" outside our window was just priceless.

I'll have to write a long blog entry soon or I'll forget many cool details, but not now as I'm pretty exhausted from travelling. We'll post the more or less 300 pictures somewhere soon, too.