Day 2, Part II
Just about to dive out to the Ximian PARRRTAY after a quick change and wash. I'm tired, I've gone to a talk in every slot, and for some reason listening to someone turns out to be quite tiring.
Some quick observations:
- Miguel de Icaza types as fast as he speaks, and he gesticulates heavily. This man must be scary drunk. He is also a good public speaker.
- Glynn Foster needs sleep. I hope he manages to get some time off from work for arranging GU4DEC, he deserves it.
- Jeff Waugh is a fun man to be around -- he is as loud as his IRC persona, which is a good trick.
- The flashing LED pens from Sun Microsystems (Desktop Group) are possibly the coolest conference giveaway, tying with the ASCII table mug from the Embedded Systems Show.
- Wifi cards eat battery power. A 4 hour charge is now lasting 2 hours.
- Wifi truly rocks.
People still to meet: telsa, fcrozat, havoc.
Day 2
Now it's the first break on Day Two. I've just come out of Anders' D-BUS talk, which was good. D-BUS really does look like fun. Met Mikael Hallendal, who has kindly made me a small sign... :) Annoyingly just missed Ross Golder, he was in the hacking room, I went to the hacking room, and...
<ross_> Burrito: seen ninja -Burrito/#gnome- I last saw ninja (~guadec6@193.1.27.184) 0d 0h 3m ago [quit: (Client exiting)]
Dammit.
[time passes]
Just went to James's talk on PyORBit, which looks very elegant. After looking at the Java ORBit APIs I was scared by CORBA and stayed away, but this looks very nice. Hopefully I'll be able to play with Evolution 1.4 via CORBA now... Now I'm in Alex's Nautilus talk, which promises to be interesting. I've tried to hack Nautilus in the past but ended up running out of disk space... its not a small module. Maybe if I know something about the code I'll have another attempt.
First Night Over
Well, I'm in bed writing this before I got to sleep. After the afternoon talks were over I went down to the machine room with Thom, meeting Matthew Garret (of Dasher fame) en route, and hung around there for a while, finding Edd Dumbill and heckling Jeff and Glynn as they totally failed to make a "It Just Works" MacOS X laptop talk to a projector and play a QuickTime movie.
After a quick change, we tried to go Out On The Town. Unfortunately my current account is seriously overdrawn (oh bugger) and none of the machines would accept my credit card. This is not funny. I have to survive a week until I get paid on no money for some reason (probably too much shopping), but I can't even use my credit cards here!
In the end we found a really good pizzeria, where I had the best pizza I've had since Rome (Le Chef, peppers, pepperoni, onion and cheese I believe). Afterwards a quick call to my better half as they say, and a pint (or three) of Guiness in a local pub. Now this is service -- I go to the bar and ask for three pints and a whiskey, he tells me to sit back down and he will bring them too me. Excellent. I must educate my local pub in this habit.
Tomorrow's talks look on the whole better than todays -- Thomas's GStreamer talk was excellent, but Soren's Performance talk needed more practise and over-ran quite a lot. At the very least, tomorrow Thom and myself can heckle Edd as he gives his Bluetooth talk...
People still to see: andersca, alex, ninja, telsa walters, oskuro and docpi. I'm sure you are out there, find me! :)
Last not least, congratulations to Glynn Foster for arranging a great conference. It may have been absolute hell to arrange, but it appears to be going well. Nice work. Now can I have one of those flashing Sun pens?
Things I Miss (in accending order):
- A book to read in bed/on the toilet/anywhere else I fancy reading.
- Vicky.
