Steinar, I don't know if after our little adventure people picked up the phrase and started using it with the second or third meaning in that dictionary. :)

mdz found a great place that explains where this "Pop the trunk" stuff comes from. DO IT.

I hope to be back to normal in a week or so.

Right. A week later, my connectivity issues have gotten so much worse...

Yesterday, I was trying to do some of my neglected Debian work at my mother's house (namedly, updating some packages for GNOME 2.12.1), when the ADSL modem lost its link and didn't come up again. As it was a bit late, I just cursed the nth incident with Wanadoo and left until the next day.

Today, when I go back there, my sister asks if I can have a look, because there's no Internet. I suspect that the Wanadoo people have finally freed us and have cancelled our contract as we asked for two weeks ago. I phone and they confirm this is it. I then ask, innocently, if I am free to sign up with any other telco. They say I now need to wait, without any internet service, until the telephone line is freed so any other company can take care of it. That will happen in thirty or fourty days. WTF! I'm sure this can be reported somewhere, it's totally unacceptable.

I've had to come to my father's house, out of the city, to do the most urgent pending tasks, and it'll be a pain to do this throughout the week. The good news is that today I got a call from Telefonica telling me that my modem should arrive at home on Monday, and some other day my own DSL link will start working. Hopefully that'll happen even before I leave to my American adventure. I am sure The Acetarium will be ready for my arrival.

If you're waiting for some upload from me, please have a bit of patience because my current situation is making it quite difficult.

For the last two weeks I've been in the painful process of moving to a new flat.

Actually, it's not so new, as it was where we lived when I was born and until I was 4 or so. We then moved to the Plaça d'Hondures further down Blasco Ibáñez, although the avenue didn't get that far down to the beach. In its place, there was a huge unpaved area full of soil and puddles.

My grandparents had been living there for a few years when they finally came from Sitges to live here, but after my grandmother died, my grandfather decided he didn't want to be in that house anymore, and moved to Godella with my father. Some months later, we've decided that instead of having it closed and unused, I can move in and save some money, while at the same time I start fixing some of the quirks this house has.

The house is big, is in the 5th floor and has tons of sunlight. For me, the change has been fantastic, having swapped a tiny room in the old flat with a quite big room and a double bed. I can even say that I have too much wardrobe space. There isn't much noise during nights. Living on a 1st floor just above the darkest rock/metal club in the city didn't help...

I feared that living where my grandmother died would make me feel sad, but happily it's all the contrary. When I come in, the smell of the house reminds me of her. When I go into the living room, the first thing I see is her empty armchair, but I easily get flashbacks of her sitting there, getting surprised about my arrival.

Kiko has come to live here too for now, and for now we're doing quite well. He's helping me with some cleanups and shopping, but there's a lot to do. I'll have to call my sister to change the light switches and plugs, because they are either broken, too small, or use an ancient standard for plugs which no device uses anymore.

All of this has sucked all my free time lately. We still have no DSL, and only got our new telephone line yesterday (although the old one still worked, too bad we didn't take advantage of that "flat rate" :) Having no Internet access makes me totally uncapable of doing any Debian work at all, more when my main development box is not online anywhere else. I've tried hooking up to the many wireless accesspoints that are all around the house, but they are either too weak, encrypted or just don't work. I only managed to use one of them reliably one night, but had to sit outside in the terrace. I'm glad we still have Spring-like temperatures in Spain, or I would have frozen.

I hope to be back to normal in a week or so.

Sergio pointed me at this website with real Gentoo users quotes.

I am a long time Gentoo user, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I believe that as hardware gets faster, it makes sense to migrate to a largely source-based Linux system. Binary packages encourage inconsistency and incompatibility, whearas source encourages unified development frameworks and integration.

Completely hilarious.