Not Dead

... just almost dead. Let's see, since last time, I have

1. Travelled across asia for a month with drheld
2. Convocated
3. Moved to New York
4. Started working at Google NY

Now on Saturday I'll be off to Spain for GUADEC with slatepelican, which should be good, if only I can get over this odd little illness that took me by surprise between items (1) and (2) above.

It started a few days after getting back from Asia. I had a crappy sleep one night and started feeling like shit the next day. First it was mostly fever, aches and pains, but shortly thereafter a nice debilitating cough set in, right in time for convocation. All accompanied by an astounding loss of appetite. I barely ate for days. In fact today was the first day in a long time that I felt remotely hungry, and that I ate anything in addition to a small lunch. I was starting to feel a little like shovel.

Anyway, the fever is gone now and the cough seems to be getting better so with any luck I'll make it to GUADEC in one piece. And once I'm feeling better you can be sure I'll post all my pictures and such.

June 30, 2006 (link)

GUADEC

Things I have learned so far:

• Paris CDG is quite possibly the worst airport in the world. Too ghetto to have the little walkway from the plane to the terminal, incredibly slow busses to take you to the terminal, incredibly slow busses to take you between terminals, glacial immigration lines (though when you finally get to the front, they don't do anything; they just take your little card out of your passport and let you go) and a lossy baggage system. Fun! I keep trying to come up with some funny expansion for CDG, preferably starting with "crappiest," but I can't think of anything good. Suggestions welcome.
• Stores and restaurants and pretty much any kind of business in Spain have the oddest hours. At any given time, maybe 1/3 of things are open. We've gone by a supermarket at many times of day and never seen it open. You can walk down the main street in the middle of a business day, when you would expect all the shops to be open, and only find a few willing to take your money. Odd.
• Evolution uses 80MB of memory. Gahjeebus.
• Happily, tinymail uses 4.5MB of memory on the same mail. I should really check that out. pvanhoof's talk was really good, and I need to check out this.
• Gimmie is pretty cool, and almost makes me want to switch back to a GNOME desktop from ion. Almost :)
• Some very cool stuff is going on in monodevelop. I usually can't stand IDEs because I'm a vi addict, but it turns out the editor in monodevelop is completely replaceable, so you could conceivably just drop in vim. And it's not just for C#. Worth looking into, anyway.
• Travelling with your girlfriend is awesome. I've had lots of fun being with slatepelican.

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Next: July 2006