Lars Wirzenius: November, 2005
Contents
- November 29: Quest for Sun '05 (Madrid)
- November 11: Hardcopy fingerprints
- November 09: Where I hack
- November 08: My BTS spam rant
- November 03: Lisp logos
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Travel report: Quest for Sun '05 (Madrid)
Sun!
Sunlight is a wonderful thing. Yesterday I came back from a six day vacation in Madrid. The weather was not warm, a bit warmer than in Finland, but especially it was dry and sunny. Pretty good autumn weather, actually. The best week I've had for a while.
This was my Quest for Sun '05. I stayed at Amaya's place, slept well and long every night, had a wonderful time with some Debian people, and walked outside and visited a couple of wonderful art museums. Thank you, especially, Amaya, Holger, and Miriam. And also vi and emacs, the feline foot fetishists who rule Amaya's apartment.
I took some pictures. They're touristy snapshots, not meant to be art. I meant to make notes about my experiences during the week, but the nice, classy Moleskine notebook I bought especially for the trip got lost the first full day.
Some moments stuck into my mind, however.
- Amaya's cats attacking my feet while I slept. At one point, one of them sat on my knees for a while and pounced every time I moved in my sleep.
- Tapas is a very good never-ending style of food. It just keeps coming: every time you get to the end of the plates you now have, the waiter brings more.
- Food in general was very good. Even cheap fast-food like kebab.
- Art museums in countries with a long history of art are bloody big. Both the Museo del Prado and the Museo de Arte Thyssen-Bornemisza seem to require about seven straight hours for a proper visit (I spent about three at each, and saw half of each). I think this is so that people will attract fewer cats by being too tired to move their feet during the night.
- Telling the history of love, bed, and sex to Amaya and Holger over a meal. I really should write that down some day. (They're editors.)
- One of Amaya's cats is crazy and likes showers. Or at least likes to sit in the shower after someone's used it.
- The Retiro park is wonderful. I could spend a lot of time just walking about in it. I did.
- Food in Spain is good. Spanish eating times are crazy, but you get used to them.
- Me: "Back when I was working on Kannel...". Person next to me: "Oh you worked on Kannel? It is such a nice program". Moments to live for. Enough to motivate me to write and publish some more free code.
- "Gracias", "buenos noches", and "de nada" is enough Spanish to get you live well for a week. Helps to have native speakers as guides, of course.
- Did I mention that the food is great?
Since the Quest for Sun '05 was a success, I definitely will do it again. A week of light (and sleeping properly) really improved my mood. Maybe even enough that I will be able to deal with the remaining months of dark, gloom, wet, and cold of the winter in Helsinki.
The only big negative thing about this trip was flying. I suggest that international air travel henceforth shall be called "The Cattle Drive".
Friday, November 11, 2005
Random thought: Hardcopy fingerprints
Like Andres Salomon I too have had my business cards with a GPG fingerprint be obsoleted. For me, however, it happened because I gave the printers the wrong fingerprint: the one for a special purpose key (comp.os.linux.announce moderation, I think), not my usual key. That was a nice "oops" moment.
These days, if I need fingerprints on paper, I print out copies of a little design I did with glabels, not liking the output from various existing key-to-fingerprint scripts I tried. I only print as many as I need, though, which is easy now that I have a working printer again.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Personal life: Where I hack
This photo shows my current hacking place: a nice comfy armchair, a laptop on a lap tray, a table for various things I have use for while working, and a place for headphones, USB disks, power supplies, cables, and various other paraphernalia. This is much nicer than sitting at a desk, I find, for most things.
I've burning a lot of data on DVD-Rs lately.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Debian: My BTS spam rant
In recent times, the Debian bug tracking system has been suffering from slowness due to having to handle much spam. When it takes many hours to get a response from the system, usability and productivity hurt a lot. Having waited for a response for an hour again, I wanted to rant about the evilness of spammers, but luckily I did not. My aunt had called me and I had forgotten to press "send" (specifically, I had pressed control-backspace, instead of control-Enter). Oops.
So, instead, I'd like to express my gratitude to Blars Blarson for coping with the BTS spam load. Despite occasional hickups, he and others make sure spam is not something BTS users need to worry about much. Thanks!
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Random thought: Lisp logos
Just when I thought nothing could save this week from being an utter disaster, I learn about this: the Lisp logo set. Absolutely hilarious!