GU4DEC is Over
Okay, I admit it. After the last GUADEC entry I got just a little bit drunk, then had a little hang over, and was a little busy for the next few days. I'll summarise.
Day III of GUADEC. Alan Cox's speech on DRM, IP, Copyright et al was very interesting. That was followed by the final talk in which Glynn was given a small prize (via email, but was told then) and a thunderous applause for arranging the conference, and Luis was awarded the Pants Of Thanks (don't worry, they were trousers) for being Bug Meister through the GNOME 2.0 development. Finally there was a futile effort at a quiz, as Telsa had lots of questions sorted. In a pub situation it would have been great fun, but in a room with WiFi... let's just say some of the questions were slightly easier than intended. Still good fun though.
Then a rush back to the room, quick change, and wandering for food. It ended up being a Debian and GStreamer team dinner, which suited me just fine. After a lovely piece of salmon and not enough wine, we paid up and wandered towards Msrs. Maguires for drinks. That was a damn nice pub, summarised by Matthrew Garrett very well: They gave me good beer and then played obnoxious loud music at me. They had a local micro-brewery, I can recommend the Weiss and (dear God my head) the Rusty, a rather poor band, and a very large speaker on the stairs aimed at the punters. We moved upstairs after a while, where it was hotter, busier, but importantly, not as loud.
Found Murray Cumming upstairs, chatted about GTKMM and the GNOME Release Team. Had more to drink. Tried to say more than Hello to Telsa again, failed. Drunk more. Avoided becoming the gnome-media maintainer, thank god. Drunk still more, Dan and Helen went home. Became the new co-maintainer of DevHelp. Still more drinks. At this point I noticed that every night I've been out drinking, its always Debian developers and Swedes left at the end, propping up the bar. The GStreamer crew don't drink too badly either.
At this point I'll skip straight to the morning after. This photo should be more than enough to explain how I felt (thats Matthew Garret, Thom May and myself btw).
I'll skip past flying from Dublin "Boring" Airport, the highlight of which was watching iTunes rip a CD, giving me ideas for future Sound Juicer developments.
Johan Dahlin was staying over at ours for a couple of nights for his connecting flight to Sweden. Thank god he was hanging around just outside arrivals, I had nightmarish images of running around the airport trying to find him. Back to my place, introduce V to Johan, nice cup of tea (with milk, the Swedes don't do this either) and wandered down the road to test a new Indian restaurant which looked good. Johan has never had Indian so we kept it simple and suggested a biyriani, which luckily he (claimed to) like. He managed to eat all of it, which was more than I could manage, so it can't have been too bad. The Indian restaurant on Apton Road, Bishop's Stortford, gets 8/10. Back to our place, have another nice cup of tea (no biscuits, sadly), Simpson's and then bed.
Friday should have been a good day. It was nice and warm, a little windy maybe, but the day was long and we had nothing to do. For lunch we popped into the Host cafe, but my eye was itching and watering, which was a pain. On the way down to another cafe for food V noticed my eye and said, "oh god its really bad, like it was that Summer". Oh joy. A dive into Boots confirmed this would be another A&E visit, my eye was very sore, inflamed and a fetching orange/red colour -- not white any more. After sitting in A&E for only 30 minutes -- far better than last time -- Allergic Conjunctivitis was diagnosed, again. Whilst I was there I also had an eye pressure test (I haven't got glaucoma yet, but my Dad has), and discovered that the last time I had this identical problem was four years ago to the day. Spooky. Now I've got to take bloody eye drops for the next two weeks.
I got back home late that afternoon to discover than V had been an excellent host to Johan, they'd been shopping for dinner, sorted out a package he needed to sent, picked up my Red Dwarf Series 1 and Best Of Monty Python DVDs and lazed in the sun. We also discovered that we can't pronounce Johan's name correctly. The closest I can come is "Ewan" in a Welsh accent...
That evening we went down our local pub, pulling Allen and Dave along for a drink. Allen has been sacked for turning up to work 2 minutes late -- The Joy of Temping. As last orders were called I made the mistake of asking Johan if he wanted another drink...
...and he nearly fell over on the way out of the pub. To be fair, he only started drinking beer a few months ago and he was mixing a little that night, trying out John Smiths before going back to Carling. I tried the Guinness but it seemed inferior to the good stuff served back in Dublin...
On the way back home we knocked on Elliot's (my sister's partner) door to see if they were -- they were! This was cool, I hadn't seen them for a few weeks as they were doing the trekking thing in Morocco. Had a good look at photos, chatted to my sister about her career changes (not teaching any more), photography courses (£100 for an evening class apparently), the conference and other random stuff. All this time Johan discovered that Elliot's taste in music and his own match quite well -- this led to Johan jumping around with alcoholic enthusiasm, switching CDs after a few minutes. Elliot and Wiz loved this, shouting "We need more Swedes here!". Johan calmed down. People ate dodgy kebabs. I got cold sitting outside. Time to go home, Dave walked back to his place whilst Allen slept on our sofa.
At seven the next morning I pulled myself up to say farewell to Johan, and went straight back to bed. The rest of the weekend was uneventful -- a little shopping, changing the fish water, cleaning, wedding planning. Quality time with V mainly, which was nice after 4 days in Dublin and 2 with Johan and Allen around.
Summary: GU4DEC rocked. I hope to go to GVADEC ("GUADEC 5" is so boring). Johan is a great person in reality as well as in IRC. Guinness is better in Dublin. Planning weddings is a lot of work. Sun pens rule.
In other news I'm off to Kefalonia in two weeks, which will be nice. I really must keep to my schedule at work...
