Search Results: "cas"

19 September 2006

Lucas Nussbaum: Of bounties, donations and summers of code influence on volunteer participation

Stuff like the Google Summer of Code, the GNOME Women’s Summer Outreach Program 2006, the Sourceforge donations system, or Dunc-Tank (an experiment to see how targeted fund raising can improve Debian) are generally considered a good ideas. However, experiments have shown that sometimes, paying volunteers decreases the overall participation. Luis Villa wrote about this a few months ago, and summarized like this:
When people do things for their own intrinsic goodness (i.e., for reasons other than payment), introducing payment can reduce the amount of invovement.
I urge you to read Luis Villa’s blog entry about this, and specifically the Motivation Crowding Theory: A Survey of Empirical Evidence paper.

Clint Adams: Draft Debian Code of Business Conduct

The following Code of Business Conduct ('the Code') has not been approved by the Board of Directors of Debian, SPI, or any U.N. committees: Debian and its subsidiary companies operate in many different markets and countries throughout the world. In most instances, we respect national laws and industry codes of conduct. We, the directors and employees of all companies under the Debian umbrella ('corrupt fuckers'), recognize our obligations to all who have a stake in our success including shareowners, clients, employees, and suppliers, unless those obligations run counter to our profitability; Information about our business shall be communicated clearly, and accurately in a non-discriminatory manner and in accordance with local regulations, unless doing so would impact negatively our profitability; We select and promote employees on the basis of their willingness to support our aims and their potential for profitability, without discrimination or concern for race, religion, national origin, creed, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, or scruples, as long as doing so would improve our profitability; We believe that the Debian mailing lists should be safe and civilized; we will not tolerate sexual harassment, discrimination or offensive behavior of any kind, which includes the persistent demeaning of individuals through words or actions, the display or distribution of offensive material, or the questioning of our integrity, unless such tolerance would improve our profitability; We will not use, possess or distribute illegal drugs or software, unless doing so would improve our profitability; We will treat all information relating to Debian's business, or to its clients, as confidential. In particular, 'insider trading' is expressly prohibited and confidential information must not be used for personal gain, unless such personal gain is acceptable to at least two of the persons involved; We will not knowingly create work which contains statements, suggestions or images offensive to general public decency and will give appropriate consideration to the impact of our work on minority segments of the population, whether that minority be by race, religion, national origin, creed, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability or scruples, unless that minority can be safely ignored without damaging our bottom line; We will not for personal or family gain directly or indirectly engage in any activity which competes with companies within the Debian umbrella or with our obligations to any such company; We will not offer any items of personal inducement to secure business. This is not intended to prohibit appropriate entertainment, the making of occasional gifts of minor value, or any monetary contributions transferred through PayPal, unless the client has a policy which restricts this; No corporate contributions of any kind, including the provision of services or materials for less than the market value, may be made to politicians, political parties or action committees, without the prior written approval of the DPL and a clear assessment of the rate of return on the investment; and we will comply with all applicable local laws and regulations, and any other laws with an international reach, such as the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, where relevant; We will disclose fully to the DPL the nature and all relevant details of inducements paid to us by external parties, whether or not such inducements affect our judgments and actions, and we will accord the DPL a percentage of such inducements for use in re-election campaigns or discretionary spending; When we engage in bookmaking, the standard vig should be 10%, and any exceptions should be appealed to the Racketeering Committee, a self-selecting committee with no external oversight; We will not NMU or hijack any packages if the maintainer is refusing to act on said packages as part of a negotiation for inducements; We will not underbid our colleagues in the midst of such negotiations; We will always assume that any inaction or incompetence is due to such negotiations, whether or not that has been disclosed, as it is often the wish of the persons involved to keep such dealings hush-hush; We will spout trite falsehoods such as We are all volunteers here , and At some point you just have to trust people , as a standard business practice; We will avoid sarcasm at all costs.

Jos Parrella: BSP Venezuela: Afterparty

Last saturday around 2100 (UTC-0400) some people started joining the #debian-ve IRC channel at OFTC, in order to participate on the very first Venezuelan Bugsquashing Party. We had a lot of people interested not only in squashing but also developing for Debian and other topics. Some DD’s were around, specially An bal Monsalve Salazar (anibal) who has been very helpful on testing and uploading packages. Both me and Jos Luis Rivas (ghostbar) made a couple of NMU’s (in his case, xfe and divine; in mine, sdr and orca), fixing six RC bugs. Jos Luis is like 17 or 18 years old and has proven to be a very energetic Debian collaborator. Other maintainers from Debian Venezuela (actually, we’re eleven persons as of last week) were around but couldn’t make a NMU at the time of the event. Others weren’t even present. It was a very small BSP indeed, but we learned lots of things and hopefully our work will help improving the quality in Debian a little bit. It also settles our desires as a group to improve our knowledge and work together to improve the Project without disrupting the overall ecosystem. By the way, the Venezuelan Debconf is definitely going to happen between October 17th. and 21st. Hopefully we’ll have Benjamin Mako Hill, Enrico Zini, Alvaro Lopez Ortega (OMG! Cherokee!) and Randal Schwartz sharing a nice time with people from all parts of Venezuela and the rest of South America. Some local Debian maintainers will set up some nice workshops and demonstrations, ranging from Xen and LTSP in Debian to QA and the local GNU/Linux distribution projects. This local Debconf is part of a larger event, the World Forum on Free Knowledge, which some people at Debian Venezuela help to make. Returning to the BSP topic, I was looking out at a couple of bugs out there, but I lack the hardware and the experience to handle them. One of this is #333915 and other orca bugs, and other one is #385078 regarding a Debconf script in xserver-xorg. The morning before the BTS I was testing the MBONE tools with a friend of mine, and we were quite unhappy by the fact that sdr was almost unusable (passing the mouse cursor over some buttons resulted in annoying notices). So, if you use sdr, please test the last NMU I sent, which fixes two bugs. Just for reference, the webpage where I keep my Debian-related work is here. The case where I learned most was #386938, regarding xserver’s FTBFS in s390. Events like BSP are a great way to motivate people to participate in the Project: while trying to learn anything about this bug I ended reading documentation from IBM, asking advice from someone with an S/390, sending a couple of emails to debian-s390@lists.d.o, browsing at a DD patch in upstream, looking at buildd logs, searching the Web for opcodes lists… usually trying to explain how all this pieces join in a sane way (most times; well, some times, well, seldomly) is quite difficult for someone who tries to promote Debian, but technical events like the BSP provide a really accurate way to see how things work in and around Debian.

Russell Coker: siteminder - what you expect from CA

Recently I've been unfortunate enough to be the sys-admin of some systems running CA software, the specific horror in this case is Siteminder.

The latest excitement was when an important machine stopped working abruptly and gave the error "ff ff ff ff" in the Apache error log. I have been familiar with the error message "ff ff ff" which means that the Siteminder policy server can not be contacted. But it took me a while to discover a message in the policy server logs indicating that a client was connecting to it with an invalid shared secret. It seems that the policy server had suddenly changed it's shared secret for no reason I could determine.

A google search for this issue turned up a single blog entry about it, which reports the "ff ff ff ff" error message as appearing in the case where the "ff ff ff" error occurs on the machines I run. Maybe I'm running a newer version, or maybe drax0r wrote the wrong error message by mistake. My colleagues have seen the error message "ff ff", we are still unsure of what that means.

For people who haven't used Siteminder I'll briefly describe how it works. There is a 2MB Apache module (larger than httpd and all the modules shipped in the RHEL package) that implements the access control and content management (compiled with -g, presumably because it will SEGV if compiled with -O2). This module spawns a daemon from Apache. Unfortunately the daemon code drops the root UID but does not drop the root GID (fun for security), I wrote a patch to the runuser program that can be used to address this by changing GID before running Apache. Then all communication between Apache and the policy server goes via the daemon process via sys-v IPC. Of course if the daemon crashes then the IPC resources are not freed and then it won't restart unless the system is rebooted or the semaphores are manually removed.

17 September 2006

Jesus Climent: On traffic accidents.

Joey points out he could have saved Lilo’s life. A bit over 2 years ago I had the same feeling, when Ranty and Erconde died on a car accident, 700Km after I left the car asking them if they really did not want me to drive with them, so that we could share the driving times (Erconde did not have a driving license). In my case it affected me in ways I could not have seen happening, to the point that my (back then) girlfriend and best-friend-ever are not a close part of my life anymore. Lilo is no more. Yet I am glad Phil is alive.

Joachim Breitner: Software Freedom Day 2006 in Accra

Yesterday was the international Software Freedom Day, and the Linux Accra User Group, which I just found out about last week, held a small expo in the "India-Ghana Kofi Annan Center for Excellence in Information and Communications Technology". On the program was a keynote speech by the group members, introducing the concept of Free Software, an exhibition of Linux installations and some programs as well as the showing of the first Open Source movie, blender-made movie "Elephants Dream" and its making-of.What I did not expect at such a meeting would be such a Linux guru: Swedish guy, who was an Amiga fan but had to start using PCs in November 1991(!) and looked for an operating systen, heard of Linux and used it since then. For all those newbies as myself: That was when "Linux From Scratch" did not exist, but you had to do it that way anyways, since there were no distributions. He has been living in Ghana vor 10 years now, bound by a family, the warm weather and by a job where he get's paid to do OpenSource development. Envy, anyone? Read more about him on his recently opened blog.
Someone already uploaded his pictures of the event, my pictures will be uploaded in a short while.In other news: At the College in Tema, where I am working at the moment, we agreed on installing Linux on the library computers to let the students have a shot at it, if they want, and after that the enrollment in the regular labs will be discussed. I shall also give an introction lesson to the IT teachers so that they can help a student during class, should he try to use Linux.

Zak B. Elep: Software Freedom Day 2006 - Manila

Yesterday, I was at the UP Engineering Theatre at Diliman to join in the worldwide Software Freedom Day celebration. I was supposed to be there earlier, but due to new work (and some new stuff to learn too ;) I woke up rather late that day. So, I found myself there in UP at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, rather tired and sweating (note to self: walking around the campus and looking for the venue at that time is not a good idea) but also looking forward to have some FOSS fun with fellow FOSS enthusiasts. I found Dom, Jerome, Paolo, Dong, Charlton, Ian Dexter, and Doc Mana there at the theatre listening on the technical seminars that were held by PLUG as part of the celebration. This time, the TechSem was particularly interesting, due to the new student project presentations’ by UP Engineering students, covering areas as diverse as Embedded Linux and SMS-to-Speech technology. I missed the special video from Richard Stallman though, as it was shown earlier, but I was able to grab a copy thanks to Dom :D . In between presentations, there were also mini-matchups of Frozen Bubble, which drove the (mostly geeky) crowd crazy with the rocking music and players’ itches. Representative Teddy Casi o of Bayan Muna also dropped by later that day, to observe the goings-on as well as to bring his filing of the draft FOSS bill to the public fore. This bill has been much talked about in the PLUG list, where the especially cynical posters (me more or less included ;) had been taking their time nitpicking many of the details on the draft (especially on the section where it essentially says all your base are belong to us’ ;) Turns out that RMS also saw some things that he thought needs improving (towards the end of his video, he took some time reflecting on the proposed bill,) and he wanted to see more emphasis on promoting FOSS to the education sector. Ubuntu CDs were also given away, as well as custom SFD/UP stickers. I also finally got to meet the UnPLUG hackers who, with PLUG, jointly organized this year’s SFD.

John Goerzen: Renovation: Weeks 10-12

Well, it's been awhile since I've posted photos of our renovation project. We've been very busy, and I'll write about that sometime soon, too.

But anyway, I've now posted photos of weeks 10 - 12 of the renovation.

Some of the highlights include: new windows, a new roof, two new staircases, three old oil heaters removed from the attic (some still with oil in them), and a little joking around from the workers.

Click above to see all of the photos.

Here are two samples from this set. First, how the house looks from the oustide now:



And this one:



Someone found that old commode from the attic. They put it on the dirt pile, and put a bucket under it for good measure.

Nobody actually used it.

That we know of.

Axel Beckert: Software Freedom Day 2006

Today, well, yesterday was Software Freedom Day and the Chaostreff Zürich organised an information booth with support of the Linux User Group Switzerland at the Orell-Füssli Bookstore at Zurich and giving out Ubuntu CDs — and only Ubuntu. (Ok, and also Kubuntu CDs, but that doesn’t make a big difference.) After writing a Symlink article about the Software Freedom Day, I went to Orell-Füssl, of course equipped with my 10 years old Pentium-I-ThinkPad bijou which is though running Debian Sarge and the latest Linux kernels, namely 2.6.17.13 and 2.4.33.3, both only about one week old. Onsite, I tried to get access to the WLAN, but it didn’t work. Asking the network responsible guy from the Chaostreff, the reason was found quickly: The WLAN was WPA secured and older WLAN cards don’t work with that. No problem that far, but what I found very inappropriate was that this guy then told to put away that old computer since we only want to demonstrate on recent hardware. First I still can’t understand why such intolerance happens even on a day having the word “Freedom” in its name and secondly I think that especially the ability to give old computers a second (or third) life is notable feature of Free and Open Source Software, Windows can’t offer at all. So I did not feel like explaining someone the advantages of Free Software or Linux, since I’m not allowed to show some of it nicest features. I started folding some flyers which just had been printed. I accidently also started reading them and I found two grave errors in the content, especially in the context of a day about “Software Freedom” and not about “Open Source” or “Linux”:
  1. Free Software and Open Source Software were declared as being the same thing.
  2. Only the Open Source concept was explained.
So I used the rest of the event to chat with some of the SheGeeks I knew and a few people like Fabrizio who I just knew from mails and never met in real life before. I also had no guilty conscience to leave the event earlier since I didn’t like it — even if it probably was a huge success and I met there many people I like. The late afternoon I helped a friend of mine moving. Well, actually I helped him transporting all the new furnitures he bought at IKEA to his new home with my CX Break. And after returning home, I had to read on Symlink, that Rob Levin aka lilo from Freenode died yesterday after being hit by car while riding on his bike on Tuesday. May he rest in peace. So somehow the Software Freedom Day 2006 was quite a sad day to me. :-(

Now playing (from compact cassette :-): David Hasselhoff — Looking For Freedom

16 September 2006

Martin-Éric Racine: Co-Maintainers Wanted

During Debconf5, I voiced the opinion that all Debian packages with a priority Standard or higher, as well as packages with a high Popularity Contest rating and development packages with a priority Optional or Extra that many people rely upon for development work, ought to be team-maintained as a matter of Policy. I justified this by pointing out that Debian's Social Contract puts our users among our key priorities, which implies that keeping the packages that our users value the most in excellent shape ought to be the embodiment of this value, and that the best way of meeting this goal is to enforce a policy of team maintenance and easy NMU for those packages. While my own packages are rather modest contributions to Debian's pool and few of them rate anywhere close to the top in popularity, I honestly feel like practicing what I preach is the best example I could give. Another reason is that several business ideas that I'm working on are monopolizing my time, which means that I'm not as available as I would like to be to participate in Debian. I however see this situation as only temporary, which is why I have not orphaned my packages. Instead, I am soliciting Debian Developers to come as co-maintainers. Interested parties should check my QA page for packages that might interest them and contact me for details. Thanks! PS: in case this wasn't obvious, the whole point of enforcing team maintenance and allowing NMU on non-RC but annoying bugs is to avoid unresponsive lone wolf maintainers who let tons of bug reports pile up on their packages without fixing them or even acknowledging them. Ubuntu avoids this by allowing anyone on their development team to chip in, while Debian still clings on to each maintainer's absolute reign over their packages, which leaves users of neglected packages completely in the dust.

15 September 2006

Uwe Hermann: Why voting machines suck and undermine democracy [Update]

If there are electronic voting machines where you live, and you've ever considered using one of those... well, you should probably reconsider. In this CNN report (M4V video, 13 MB) Avi Rubin explains why voting machines are a really, really bad idea. To quote some issues raised in the video: , especially so in such important scenarios) The CCC Berlin has a very detailed analysis of the topic (German), with many links to further articles. I'd recommend everyone to not use voting machines at all, but rather perform traditional pen-and-paper voting, if you value your vote... Also, make sure to inform relatives and friends about the risks of voting machines, and complain to your local responsible authorities, and ask them to remove these unreliable, insecure machines. Update 2006-09-18: Just in case you thought that maybe you can trust the Diebold machines after all - their locks can be opened with a standard hotel minibar key. (via The Lunatic Fringe)

Julien Danjou: Dust in the box

I really should clean my workstation case more often.
abydos kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold
I agree that 50 C idle / 68 C full load is too hot. I cleaned it (arrgh so dusty), change the CPU fan. Back to 30 C idle!
But I did not plug back the case fan.
abydos kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev hdc, sector 43940535
[...]
Err, 58 C for an hard disk is too hot :( God bless RAID 1.
* jd is going to buy some hard drives

Andre Luis Lopes: Entrando em modo usu rio

Devido a um projeto no trabalho, bem poss vel que eu tenha que passar as pr ximas semanas (ou meses, quem sabe) me dedicando a produzir muita documenta o. Eu escrevo muito diariamente, mas desde sempre s uso vim. Por m, devido a essa documenta o ter que ser produzida em um formato que possa ser compartilhado com outras pessoas normais (n o t cnicas), me vi obrigado a come ar a explorar as possibilidades do OpenOffice.org Writer, j que o m nimo que eu poderia fazer era dar for a ao padr o ODF. N o estou acostumado com esse tipo de software e n o consigo gostar de processadores de texto complexos como esses, mas pelo que vi at o momento, ele parece at bem completo. O mais estranho perceber que, depois de um tempo lidando com o bicho, voc se d conta de que est fazendo downloads de verificadores ortogr ficos e de dicion rios de termos de inform tica e, o pior de tudo, est realmente usando isso tudo. Uau ! Tenho medo do que pode estar por vir. Acho que vou come ar a virar usu rio comum. Socorro :-)

14 September 2006

Phil Hands: The wisdom of appropriate clothing

Yesterday morning I decided to wear my summer bike leathers, rather than my waterproofs, in defiance of the weather forecast's prediction of rain. About twenty minutes later, that decision paid off big time when my motorcycle was helpfully reconfigured into this new shape by an inattentive car driver:
post-accident CBR600F motorcycle
[not a great photo, I'm afraid, but I was in mild shock, and failed to notice that my phone was still in only medium photo-size mode, but you'll note that the dangly bits used to be the headlamps, and that the handlebars are in the full-lock-to-the-left position, despite the wheel pointing slightly to the right of middle.] Despite the fact that the bike is almost certainly a write-off, the main thing that's wrong with me is a slightly bruised ankle, and general soreness of all major muscles similar to that which would result from overdoing exercise a bit. The driver of the car seemed more shocked than I was. He was a nice chap, and a practicing Muslim (or so I surmised given his comments about having done his prayers in the morning, and wondering what he'd done wrong to cause this to happen). I think he was expecting to see my mangled corpse in the road, as depicted in a recent government safety campaign. While it's nice to see that people are affected to some extent by such campaigns, I think I'd prefer it if they instead promped people to look where they were going.

13 September 2006

Ben Armstrong: Ichthux, a joint Debian/Ubuntu project

Whew. Ichthux has released, and now I can breathe again! When I joined the Ichthux development team, they had produced their “proof of concept” release as yet-another-Knoppix-remaster. At that time, I encouraged them to move away from tacking their work on as a derivate of a derivative and instead become a CDD. I argued that as a CDD Ichthux would last, while as a Knoppix-remaster, it would just be another marginal custom livecd that went nowhere. They got the message. So you may well be surprised to hear our first release is based on Kubuntu, and not Debian.
So, what’s the story here? Have you defected?
Nope. It just happens that most of the team ended up being actively involved in Ubuntu development. Also, when we first started casting about for the best way to package a livecd/install disk, it seemed to us that Ubuntu already had a head start on this.
What about being a CDD? It looks to me like that idea has fallen by the wayside.
Nope again. We’re a joint team now, and though we’ve started out with Ubuntu, we’ll be pushing changes back into Debian. The goals of a CDD are well understood by the whole team: to best meet the needs of our users, we design the system to mesh well with the parent distributions, not forking and making a derivative, but working inside those distributions to improve them for our particular subgroup of users.
Hold on now, aren’t you contradicting yourself? A CDD’s development is all within Debian, but Ubuntu itself is a derivative, and what’s worse, Kubuntu is a derivative of a derivative! Aren’t you right back where you started?
Well, on the last count, you’d be wrong. Kubuntu is not a fork. And as for Ubuntu being a derivative, well, sure it is. But the Ubuntu/Debian relationship is different from other derivatives, and although there is friction, I’m enough of a crazy idealist to believe a joint Debian/Ubuntu CDD is quite doable, benefits both projects more, and serves our users better than if we were to split up and each go work on our own.

Clint Adams: and the ragged tiger

We were occupying the entire park bench when the strange girl approached. She was strange in the sense that we had never seen her before; in the grand scheme of things she was not all that strange. I mean, she was wearing bellbottoms, which was not the norm, and her feet were caked with mud, which might have indicated inclinations toward being a neo-hippie, and while that might be pretentious and lame, it's not all that strange, considering. Eying the occupants of the bench, she asked if any of our laps were free. The art of sitting on someone's lap is largely a lost one; I don't know where people learn the proper technique, but I do know that most people don't even know it exists to be learned. I know that I was surprised when it was revealed to me. Anyway, I never discovered whether or not she knew how to properly sit on a lap, because we all kinda glanced at each other and told her to fuck off. Two days later, she was screwing the guy to my right. That didn't last long. Neither did her mode of dress or her behavior. She lopped off her long, brown hair, bleached it blond, and got a few facial piercings. She started doing heroin and boasting that she gave the best blowjobs in a certain geographical region. She shacked up with a girl named after an invertebrate. I'm guessing that she didn't continue on to greatness. Then there was another strange girl. She was strange because she was stuck in the 50's. She was also as dumb as a rock, so the only two interesting things about her were her 50's fetish and her profoundly deep bass voice. When I say she was stuck in the 50's, I don't mean that she lived through them and failed to move on. I mean that she wore saddle shoes, sported memorabilia from the golden age of rock and roll, and became very hostile when anyone challenged her adamant insistence that no good music was ever produced after 1959. Her sister was a model, also as dumb as a rock, and with the same freakishly low voice. Her sister was also a giant slut. In contrast, 50's Girl publicly had sex with a 50-year-old guy while his wife and kids were in Virginia. Having sex in public is generally bad form. I know this because the last time I tried to have sex in a moving vehicle, the driver forbade it. Actually what she said was that we weren't allowed to have sex in her car until she had done so first. Then she proceeded to never have sex in that car, which I thought was a rather rude and deceptive practice. Anyway, 50's Girl met this schmuck with spiky hair, piercings and tattoos galore, combat boots, and a penchant for crashing motorcycles. Really, you didn't need to look far below the surface to know that he was a festering douchebag, but if you did, you would find out that he was a pathological liar and backstabbing snake. They hit it off, and just like that, the 50's persona was cast to the wind. She dyed her hair some sickly color, started dressing in leather and listening to hardcore. Her elderly friend, who had little trouble relating to clinging to the 50's, now suddenly found herself in the position of possibly needing to get herself a subscription to some kind of magazine. Not too far away, a lollergirl took a break from plumping up and spotted a ticket. If you were lucky, she told you about it.

12 September 2006

Uwe Hermann: Democracy Player 0.9.0 - one step closer to world do... a very cool Internet video/podcast application

Democracy Player 0.9 screenshot Democracy Player 0.9.0 has been released yesterday, which has been announced in quite a number of places already, e.g. Boing Boing. It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux; if you're on Debian unstable the installation is as simple as apt-get install democracyplayer (I uploaded the new packages yesterday, they should have reached all mirrors by now). If you want to know what this is all about, but you're reluctant to install yet another program, check out this screencast (MOV, 37MB) which shows the basic functionality and user interface and discusses some of the new features... I think you'll like it. You can use it for all kinds of video blogs and podcasts, it'll download and play almost anything with an RSS feed.

Andreas Barth: Unbootable PCs - non-intel partition tables or wrong partition ids?

Joachim described a setup where the computer refuses to boot if there is a linux-created partition table. One possible way out could be to use non-intel partition tables, if the computer assumes in that case that there is no partition table. Another possible solution would be to write a partition table with windows that has the required sizes, and not fix the IDs at all - it might be a bit tricky to get debian-installer into installing in "wrong" partitions, but might work also well in the end.

Jaldhar Vyas: Earlier Attempt To Map Out Regional Espa a Founders As Locations Alter. Faro Explains Lapse.


Faro points out that the map of Spain in my previous post is obsolete. A more uptodate version can be found here. From that link I also discovered that calling Extremadura a province is wrong. It is an "Autonomous Community" which consists of two provinces: Badajoz and Cáceres. The latter is where the place we were staying, Casar de Cáceres, is located.

11 September 2006

Andrew Pollock: [life] Surfin' in the USA

Okay, well boogie boarding. We had Franziska, a friend of Alison's from Dublin, who has been working out of the Mountain View office for 3 months, around for dinner on Thursday night. She invited us to go boogie boarding at Pacifica on Sunday with her and some of her friends, and despite the weather forecast of 11 degrees and fog, we thought we'd give it a go. Yup, this side of the Pacific Ocean is nothing like the side I'm more used to. It was cold, but with a wetsuit it was perfectly tolerable. The "beach" (and I use the term lightly) was pretty awful. The sand was that sort that has lots of black stuff in it, and there were rocks everywhere. The surf was also pretty non-existent. Despite these conditions, there were heaps of people in the water, the majority with surfboards. I really couldn't see the point, because the waves were of a size where you could stand up for maybe 5 seconds if you were lucky, and then it was all over. All of that said, it was kinda fun. Certainly an invigorating way to spend a Sunday. I'd do it again. Next time I'll take my snorkelling booties, as the coldest part of me was my feet. A few photos are here.

Next.

Previous.