In an hour the online part of this combined embedded+fai meeting in Badajoz in Extremadura, Spain, will sadly be over, but the sadness will hopefully be compensated by good food (yes, the food at the last dinner was great) and more fun! To me it were three intensive days (plus some two half days of intense travelling) which were really productive. This post is a summary of what I did here, to document how useful these meetings are. I'm only one person out of 18, who did some Debian work here, much more stuff was done, most of it I probably didnt even notice, as 14 people where working on embedded stuff, which I mostly ignored... ;-) That said, I think it was still very nice to have this meeting together, a.) because I'm quite interested in embedded stuff and b.) because the embedded crowd is a fun one to hang around with!

Right now I'm quite tired so that I dont fully remember what I have done on the first day :) It included uploading the DebConf7 mpeg videos which will now be used by Miguel Gea to create DVDs from those, so that he gets familar with the toolchain, so that he then can do the DebConf8 DVDs once those videos are (fully) ready. That will still take some time though, but hopefully not too long.

Unlike DebConf8 I also brought my fancy new fonera2 with me, in the hope to give it to someone to work on emdebian support for it. This is quite a longer road, as currently uclibc is not part of Debian, but thats only one step in this puzzle. Much to my joy Per Andersson took the opportunity to play with it and now took it home with him to document how to run Debian on it. I'm looking forward to see progress on this in the future ;-) Update: uclibc support is only needed for running Debian from the 4mb flash it has. But since it also has an usbport one can attach some storage there and run a full Debian system, just like on the nslug, which also has 32mb of RAM.

Unfortunatly I basically forgot about the FSG-3 I also took with me (which was for good reasons, one the second and third day I mostly did FAI work), but then I remembered 90min before the end, which was really too late. Narf. But Riku had a short look at it and told me one thing I didn't knew before: (at least) arm(el) kernels need to have the cpu id set in the kernel and the debian kernels don't have that, as they are build for more than one cpu type, so one has to prepend an arm assembler code instruction before running the kernel... I'm curious to do this soon :-)

But I have more hardware news to tell: C sar G mez Mart n (thanks for organizing this meeting, too!!!1) gave me back my OLPC laptop which I borrowed to him quite some time ago, so he could use it for a talk he gave at a university in Extremadura, so now I finally could give Andres Salomon new debian image for the XO a try. It was really nice to finally see a nice Debian gnome desktop on the device :-)

Today the FAI group, that was Sebastian, Michael, Thomas and me, also took a break to visit the Alcazaba de Badajoz (built around 1100, so roughly 900 years ago) which is an amazing building (thats why I linked to the spanish wikipedia entry as it has nicer pictures), from where you can see most of the city. I've been to Badajoz at least three times now and I'm really glad I finally did that, it's only 5min away from the office where the meeting was held and I highly recommend it to anyone going here.

Oh, and last and definitly not least I did a lot of work on FAI too. Besides discussing stuff which will hit planet after I posted this (hah! Michael already posted it, though without proper credit, so I will do a repost) I mostly reviewed changes and patches and discussed bugs, I didn't develop many patches myself (well, except one for the changelog..) but I've read every change at least twice, once as a commit msg and once in a full review. Plus many patches I read more often... all in all I think FAI is now in an great shape for lenny (which was the only thing we worked on during the weekend, we discussed some future plans, but work was only done for lenny), except that we want to another upload (with only documentation changes) after the upcoming one (which has quite some documentation changes already, but also some RC+important and some trivial bugfixes).

As you might have guessed, I started this entry on saturday and am finishing it now. According to the topic of the #extremadura2008 channel, which we created to coordinate between the groups, we also fixed 7 RC bugs (or 8? one should really document the bug numbers and not the number of bugs..) affecting lenny and 3 more which are only relevant to sid. Which is not as many as I would have liked to be fixed, but then, it wasn't a ("traditional") bug squashing party either. Which makes me wonder, are there any planned in the coming weeks?

So all in all I think this meeting was really very productive. Plus, I also enjoyed a special half an hour of real holidays: on saturday we had to leave lunch without having a chance to have a coffee afterwards, so I stumbled into a random cafe on the way to the venue. Turned out it was a very nice one, where due to its nice interiour I managed to reflect on life, 42 and all the rest almost immediatly. A totally unexpected but needed break. I wont say more here, because the thoughts and memories are really mostly relevant for me, but I'm really happy I found that space. DebConf8 and this meeting both were really fun, but I really didnt have a minute to reflect things. 30 minutes to do that is definitly not enough, but it was a good start. Now I just need to find another opportunity to continue with it. I hope this will happen before the next Extremadura meeting ;-)

I'm uploading new backports of xorg for etch at this moment. They are based on what was on unstable on the 9th on January, which was xorg 1:7.3+10. Thanks to XSF for their great work!

I've also included a backport of Andres Salomons xserver-xorg-video-amd package, as the one in sid is not uptodate enough for the OLPC laptop.

It's noon now and half the attendees or so the day hasn't really begun. Sure, some people here at the 24C3 in Berlin are having lunch already, but most are having breakfast or not even that yet. As the Debian booth is set up (mugs are sold out, bags almost...) and there are no interesting talks for me at the moment, I'm having a second breakfast in the smokers lounge is the cellar. Officially, this is the third non smoking congress and inofficially it's the third time there is an official smoker place ;-) This time, it's a lounge with comfortable sofas, ambient light and loud music...

About four weeks ago I was contacted by Martin Michlmayr and asked if the video team could make use of some hardware donation a company wanted to sponsor. I said yes, and so last week two boxes arrived at my house: a small audio mixer, a Behringer XENYX 1202 with 12-channels and XLR and chinch inputs, which is supposed to help us improve the audio quality in small venues. The second box contained a TwinPact100, which is a video converter box. It has an SVGA-input (supporting up to 1600x1200), an SVGA-output (sending the same signal out) and DV (firewire) output (and more features we don't really care about). So for us it's basically a SVGA-passthrough box which also outputs a video stream (of a speakers laptop in our use case) over firewire. So no more capturing of slides with a normal camera, yay! Yesterday Ben Hutchings and me tested this box and found it working, then Ben also fixed an issue with dvswitch, which we use to mix different firewire video streams together, probably even as soon as FOSDEM again! Many thanks to hitflip.de for this nice donation!

When I arrived here this morning I hoped to see the BabelBox I set up last night to be still running, and it was, yay! BabelBox is a d-i setup which loops through an installation of Debian etch in 36 languages, mostly using the graphical installer. And this will be running here for approx 72 hours non-stop resulting in 289 installations without a single keystroke :) IMO it shows real nicely two of the three major strengths of d-i: internationalisation and automatisation.

I guess it's pretty unlikely that I'll find some time during the last two days of the congress to take Andre Salomons packages for the OLPC laptop and demonstrate d-i's third major feature: it's modular design. It's more likely to be an excercise for next year though (I'll arrive home on the 31st..), here is too much stuff happening. Installing babelbox was just following a good howto. In any case, there is a OLPC.de meeting planned tomorrow at 12.30 noon at the Debian booth or in the Embedded Corner. Just come along and look out for the green cluster of XOs :)

And by now it's 8 PM - time flies when you're having fun. I just noticed that my wireless connection is up since seven hours uninterrupted! Wow.

Just got back from NYC where I hung out with my brother for a few days. I got to go to the official Debian NYC Belgian Beer Bar and meet up with dilinger, which was cool. The whole trip, aside from getting stranded on the way down due to a diesel fuel leak, was pretty awesome. I need to find me some Bombay Chinese up here.

I've come to the realization that an intense social schedule combined with a bout of luck in lab has left me with relatively little time to do the Debian work I need to do. I'm also going to be spending my extra time in the evenings writing my first scientific paper (not to mention staying late in lab until this lucky streak wears off), so if I want to stay productive in Debian I need to do something. As a result I'm stopping IRC for a while until I can get 7.1 out in to unstable. Cutting the crack is tough, but I learned long ago that cold turkey is by far the best method for me to do things.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... Z0MG LUV!

dilinger’s first rule of packing: no matter how well you prepare, you will end up needing something that you’ve already packed. In 15 days, I will no longer be a resident of New York. I certainly won’t miss Queens at all!

Ever since the drive on my laptop died, I’ve been trying an experiment; I’ve been running sarge (debian 3.1) on my desktop. Of course, it’s not vanilla sarge; I’m using packages from backports.org as well. This means I’m running a gnome2.8 system w/ things like thunderbird1.5, kernel 2.6.15, and misc other things upgraded. For the most part, it’s been very successful; I haven’t really found myself wishing the software was newer. However, I would like to play around w/ gnome2.14. To that end, I’d started backporting it; you can find packages here. Unfortunately, I probably won’t finish, as I’m heading back to NYC tonight for at least 2 weeks, and thus won’t have a computer (my laptop is in for repair, my computers are all in Boston, and my office in NYC is unbearable after 10pm and on weekends). So, if someone wants to take up where I left off and upload the whole thing to bpo, go for it. While I found sarge to be quite usable w/ bpo, I don’t know how much longer I would’ve liked to use it. I look forward to AJ’s etch snapshots idea coming to fruition; I think a well motivated group of people could do an excellent job of polishing up a snapshot release (if ubuntu can do it w/ 10 people, using *unstable* as a source, all while adding experimental features like initramfs and xorg, certainly using testing as a base is doable), giving us something that would tide us over between debian stable releases.

I want to comment and explain my various posts in the removal of svenl from the project thread. Expulsion is the most grave measure the project can take against a Developper. There is nothing beyond that, except death^[1]. So an expulsion process has to be investigated carefully before beeing cast, and has to start only if a clear abuse of Debian ressources^[2] has been done. Given that fact, I just can't accept dilinger's post. He based his expulsion on social facts, that barely deserve to be noted, and do not explain where Sven abuse was, if there is any. Hence my quite rough reactions. I know that dilinger stated on IRC, that given the reactions of the ocaml team, he might reconsider the expulsion procedure. Honnestly, I'm still offended, for two reasons:

• if Sven really abuses the kernel team (or whatever team dilinger and Sven are both in), why has it not been taken care of INSIDE THAT TEAM (if it only deserves to be taken care of) ???
• if dilinger has so few knowledge of all Sven contribution in debian, how could he even dare sending his mail to debian-devel ???

We talk about extreme measure, that require extreme care when invoking them. EXPULSION IS NOT A THING TO BE CONSIDERED LIGHTLY. The current trend of the project wrt expulsion, vilifying developpers that do not behave fully straight, following the line of the Party makes me sick. I reckon I was sceptical before, when I read people that said :

we are a technical community, social skills does not really matter.

I was sceptical because I was convinced it's still better if we can also be maybe not nice to each other at least comprehensive. Recent events make me belive that a community of technical persons cannot lead into anything else that a dictatorship, when it comes to social problems.

It is kind of cute when you wake up, check your IRC backlog, and spurt out coffee all over your keyboard.
[micah] wow, who said branden looks like amaya?
[liw] micah, stockholm?
[micah] he's right
[micah] I thought that when i saw him in boston, with no moustache
[micah] but I didn't want him to hurt me
[dilinger] amaya should get a mustache, so we can tell them apart
/me LOLs

P.S: I have never liked Branden's moustache, so I am not very happy about getting one myself.

Abridged to remove irrelevant conversation…

< Czesiu> Btw, udev recommends at least 2.6.12 kernel, which is not shipped
in Debian.
< Md> so far the upgrade procedure is “upgrade your kernel, reboot,
upgrade udev”
< Md> Czesiu: yeah, nobody had told me this yet, you know?
< dilinger> you can either go the lvm route, and make up some kernel APIs to
match again, or you can go the ndiswrapper route and make some incredibly
strict dependencies so that people are sure to upgrade kernels and udev
in parallel.  both solutions suck.
< Czesiu> Md: you sound quite sarcastic :)
< wildfire> why not just have a udev-compat; which conflicts which newer
kernels; and make udev conflict with older ones
< Md> dilinger: a future udev version will refuse to install on anything
older than 2.6.12, so this will reduce the potential for brokeness
< Md> the /dev/input/mice problem has been unexpected, if it cannot be fixed
I will make the next package require 2.6.12
< dilinger> the best solution, imo, is to have udev 0.5x and 0.62 allowed
to be installed in parallel, and have a wrapper script that determines which
to use when it’s run
< wildfire> hmm, dilinger, that does sound pretty clean
< Md> dilinger: the configuration syntax is subtly different too. this is
not really possible
< Md> wildfire: yes, until you start looking at how to implement it 
< dilinger> Md: sure it is; /etc/udev05x for the old version or something
< dilinger> /etc/udev for the new version
< wildfire> md, but that’s someone else problem ;-)
< Md> dilinger: keeping them in sync is hell
< dilinger> no kidding, but that’s what maintaining stuff like this requires
< Md> so far, it appears to be too much complex to be justified
< Md> if upgrades will happen to be more complex than we currently know then
I will reconsider this
< dilinger> are you kidding?  i think the number of people whose systems
are breaking is pretty good justification
< Md> dilinger: only because the package currently is not refusing to run
on older kernels
< idnar> Md: but if the package fails to run, isn’t that likely to cause
breakage too, since your /dev won’t look like it normally does?
< Md> idnar: it will refuse to be installed or upgraded, like it’s currently
happening if you are using a kernel < 2.6.8
< dilinger> Md: what about doing something insane w/ devfs/
< dilinger> and devfsd
< Md> dilinger: ?
< idnar> Md: ah
< dilinger> depend upon devfsd, if the kernel is older than 2.6.12, have it
mount devfs over /dev and run devfsd instead of runing udev
< Md> different configuration syntax, different semantics, no HAL/hotplug
support. basically, I can’t see why you could think about this
< dilinger> because it would allow things to *work*
< dilinger> even if it doesn’t have the same config syntax
< dilinger> it could spit out a big warning upon startup
< idnar> suddenly switching the user to devfs would likely cause all sorts
of unknown breakage
< Md> if the kernel is older than 2.6.12 people will not be able to install
a newer udev, so this is not relevant
< Md> please try to look at the whole picture
< dilinger> people are going to want to reboot into older kernels and have
their /dev in a sane state
< dilinger> the running kernel isn’t the only one they may be using
< Clint> yeah, i’m not using the running kernel
< Md> dilinger: then udev will automatically disable itself. the current
experience shows that users are not bothered by this
< dilinger> Clint: quiet over there :P
< dilinger> Md: the user experiences around here don’t seem to match what
you’re saying, otherwise i wouldn’t even be mentioning it
< Md> again, this is not how future versions will work
< dilinger> let me put it another way
< dilinger> it would be a very good idea to future proof udev against such
incompatabilities now
< Md> tell greg k-h, now me :-)
< dilinger> because i’m sure things will break again
< Md> anyway, you persuaded me. I will upload right now an updated package
which refuses to be installed with old kernels
< Md>   * Kernels older than 2.6.12 are not supported anymore.
< Md>     If detected, the package will refuse to be installed.
< Md>     If the running kernel is downgraded after the package has been
< Md>     installed udev will disable itself at boot time.
< Sesse> Md: whoa
< joshk> that’s ridiculously stupid if you as me
< Md> this is what was going to happen in a few releases anyway
< Clint> joshk: coredump immediately
< Md> BTW, I suggest that concerned people read this before continuing
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=12236847
< joshk> breaking support for anything but the very latest kernel (which
isn’t even in debian yet!) is dumb. you break everyone’s desktop because
hal stops working
< joshk> (one particular example)
< Md> joshk: people can keep the old udev until the upgrade, nothing breaks
< Sesse> Md: *g*
< joshk> don’t grin at Md, it makes him think we’re in agreement

I’ll be at Debconf5 by 9 AM on Sunday morning! I’m taking an early flight tomorrow morning to NYC, and have an hour or two of layover before boarding a plane to Helsinki. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone. I thought I was going to be on the same plane as Andres, Erinn, and Clint, but it turns out they are on the same flight I am, only one day before. Oh well.

<dilinger> sucker
<Clint> you just wait until you’re infested with mp3s
<dilinger> i wear my mp3 collar
<dilinger> it has my name and phone number engraved on it, too. in case i get lost.
<Clint> have you had your shots?
<dilinger> yes. i’ve been spayed and/or neutered, too. i highly recommend it; it was an enlightening experience
<Clint> you should blog about that There, done!

Parted love. That second patch would fix an incredible amount of pain.

As predicted, the morning was not productive at all. At one point I slightly became concious and saw sladen fetching his bike, opening the door and saying me "Back in two hours!". We didn't know anything about him until 24 hours later. As we started waking up, we tried to think of a plan for the day. The morning was gone, though. Clint took us to a restaurant two blocks away for breakfast, or actually brunch, because that was the only food in many hours. I ate some "pancakes" with banana in them, and barely could finish them; they are very filling. We went to the promenade for a last look at the Manhattan skyline and took some pictures while we tried to figure out what to do.

A last view over Manhattan Mako was developing a plan in secret, though, which involved micah and his car. Micah found out soon after. We went back to Clint's, expecting to find sladen somewhere, but we didn't. I packed my things, and when we really needed to go, we resolved to put his things in the entrance so he could find then and do whatever he wanted on his return. We went on the Metro to Union Square, where, hear this helix, I saw TONS of raperos doing their break-dance thing (ok, maybe not tons, but I did see them). And two blocks away, we arrived to the most incredible book store. Mako has blogged many times about buying very rare books at the Strand for ridiculous prices, but this was totally unexpected. The Strand is huge. On the outside, there's carts with hundreds of second-hand books, all for one dollar. Mako used to go there and browse the books to find interesting stuff. The Acetarium is full of them! Most of the dollar books are total crap though. A very high percent talk about god, religion, "our troops" and stuff like that. Mentally filtering what might be good and what is not is not easy when you haven't done it before. Mako started scanning the shelves as soon as we arrived, and every now and them he'd pick some totally stupid title. I was on my own shelf, missing many good stuff, while mika, Clint and mako did their own. Clint found quite a few titles, but mako didn't find anything good. I got lucky though, and found the precious book of the day: The Spanish Anarchists. The heroic years 1868-1936, by Murray Bookchin. Although old, it was in very good condition, and mako immediately asked if I was taking it. :) I won! The inside of the Strand was incredible too. Three very big floors packed with books, plus the half-priced "reviewer's copies" at the basement. I was totally overwhelmed by the amount of books I'd be interested in buying, and the limited weigh I should be carrying back, so I did my best not to look too carefully. For a few hours, I didn't have a too clear idea of what mako's plans were. At some point, micah phoned him and we rushed to the PATH, the train that goes to New Jersey. Apparently we were meeting micah at Newark, but I still didn't know why we had to go there. During our ride, I could see how pleasant New Jersey is to the human eye. Miles and miles of heavy industries. I'm pretty sure it's the ugliest place I've ever seen. What I couldn't see, and I'm still disappointed, is any of the viciously arrogant rats of the New York metro system. Mako had told me about how they look at you, like saying "if you come down here, you'll be left with 9 fingers", and the incredible number of them on the tracks. Unfortunately I couldn't see any. I blame Michael Bloomberg. At Newark, micah appeared in his car, and we all hopped into it. We apparently were going by car to Boston... including Clint. I was puzzled, as he had to work on Monday, but he'd said that he'd simply "come back". There was a problem though, mako had dilinger's keys, and he was going back to NYC from Boston, and we didn't have time to get to Boston before he left, so we had to find a way of leaving the keys in NYC so he could get into his appartment. Finally, mako resolved that Clint would be left in a cold street, in a rough area of NYC, and he would handle the keys problem. I still didn't understand what was going on. We headed North, and I quickly fell asleep on mika's nap. I'm getting old. When the car stopped again and I suddenly woke up, I looked ahead and... HORROR! We were at the door of a McDonads. WTF WAS GOING ON? So it seems that when you're on the road, there's no much other choice than shit food. After a quick discussion with mako about how badly those burgers taste, I quickly went back to sleep, until we were in Boston. It took a while to find a parking spot, because all of them "permit only". It's impossible to park if you come from somewhere else. I was finally at the Acetarium, a very cool flat in Cambridge, 15 minutes away from the MIT. It was 3:30 in the morning. The day after, we woke up pretty late, and as I opened my laptop and found a privmsg from sladen, he was was knocking at the door. This man has an incredible ability to disappear and reappear when he's most unexpected. Apparently he managed to grab his stuff in NYC, fetch the bus and arrive at 2 in Boston, meeting dilinger at the station, and mako as he went out to MIT. micah and I went to explore Boston, but never managed. We consumed a few hours when trying to ship some equipment to micah's colo, and then trying to find food. When we were ready to go, micah got a very badly timed call, which made him go back to the Acetarium: a server at work was dying or dead. At one point, it was late enough that going to Boston wasn't worth it, so we went to visit the Media Lab instead. On our way there, micah and I kept chatting about this and that, and found out how small the internet is. We both know a bunch of common people from uncommon places like Per , from our involvement in social projects in the net like Indymedia and Sindominio.net. The MIT is incredible, specially the Stata Center by Frank Gehry. We wandered around as we only got voice mail from mako, until an hour later we found we was like 20 metres away from us. He gave us a tour through the Media lab, and it was incredible. I had never seen something like that. Every lab was colourful and fun, and very cool developments were going on everywhere. I also saw the coolest mame box ever, with an arcade case and everything.

The Stata Center, right next to the Media Lab After the tour, micah and I headed back, while sladen stayed to have a look at one of mako's projects. When we got back to the flat, there were a few people already there for mika's sushi party, and I rolled my first sushi rolls, which was fun. A bunch of Debian people joined us, including zufus and gravity, and had a great chat with them. The party ended way too late and after too many beers. sladen used his secret disappearing abilities, and a few colleagues from mako crashed, so there was a bit of overbooking. Mako's solution was simple. mika, him and I could share their bed. I can't say I have slept too much, because mako would keep pulling the blanket and leave me out in the cold, and I was trying not to squish mika. But it went ok, although we discovered too late that mika was hot while I was cold, and we swapped our places too late. Today, we'll go find the Freedom Trail and walk a bit around it, meet gravity and zufus for lunch, and I will sadly have to go back to Cambridge, quickly pack and head to the airport to catch my plane. My hours in North America are expiring.

Yesterday was a very, very intense day, and I had lots of fun. Clint, sladen and I headed to Chinatown walking, with a few detours to be able to checkout Manhattan's skyline. The view from the other shore is awesome, even with the two towers missing. When I compare the current view with how it was four years ago, I understand how much the city has changed without them. They were so impressively big that I just can't picture them too well in my mind.

The skyline of South Manhattan We walked over the Brooklyn bridge, giving me other very cool views of Manhattan, while I hammered Clint with questions about this and that. I saw that since 9/11, you can't go past the Town Hall. "Security reasons", of course. I was very surprised to see police cars in every single street. It's like a Police State, and if you ask me, it didn't make me feel safer. After some walk, we finally got in Chinatown, which is the craziest place ever. People sell stuff on the sidewalks, and many streets are packed with people. We had to meet with mikah, biella, dilinger and his cat at some Chinese place for breakfast/lunch. The place, as Chinatown itself, was crazy. As soon as we sat down a few waitresses landed a few plates on the table, without asking or anything. A few minutes later I could see that the way they serve you is going around with carts with lost of food, and you either want it or not. We left dilinger at the metro station, and moved on to the SoHo. I wanted to go to the SoHo Apple Store to see if they knew about replacement Spanish keyboards for my Powerbook. My powerbook was bought in the US last year, so it has a US keyboard. This is mostly ok, but only mostly as it's missing a key. After SoHo, we went back to Chinatown to pick up bubbles. It was nice to see her after Debconf, and she made the effort to come just for a few hours even if she was ill and had lots to do in Philly. We headed to South Street Port, where I had a long chat about Cuba with micah while we sat on a bench looking at Brooklyn bridge. And then, we gathered all our braveness and headed to the heart of the beast, to the kernel of the system. We walked into the Financial District, and soon enough I was walking in Wall Street no less. If I breathed hard, I could smell the money. The road was paved in gold, and there were skyscrapers everywhere. I discovered the rulers of this world had opened a "public space" in JP Morgan's building. To their despair, probably, it had been taken over by the poor. I wonder what Bloomberg will do about it. As I walked up the street, a strange feeling in my heart grew and grew, until, behind a corner, I saw it. The source of all evil was ahead of me, guarded by George Washington himself.

The New York Stock exchange and it's black evil aura of Capitalism I was standing ahead of this building where so many people behave like bastards everyday, pushing millions to povery for a bit more profit margin. The doors were closed and surrounded by security officers, which despite being asked politely, didn't let us in for "security reasons". Next to it was the Church of Capitalism, at the end of the street. It's curious that such an old church still stands where it was build near the harbour probably a century ago, now surrounded by some of the most modern and tallest buildings in the planet. And then, we visited the bull, which I didn't know is the "friendly" symbol of how Capitalism works.

I had Capitalism by the balls We moved down to Battery Square, past the old US Customs building with the four statues representing the four continents. We saw the damaged sculpture which lived in the WTC, and sat down at the pier to watch a beautiful sunset over the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty seen from South Manhattan At that point, biella and micah had to meet some friends at one cinema to see the Wal-Mart documentary. We went to a funky place to have some tea, decided to go see Times Square and then walk to Central Park. At the time, mako was arriving to NYC on the Chinatown bus, so we agreed to meet in a restaurant to have lunch. Paul Sladen finally managed to get lost, after many tries during the day, and wasn't seen until we got back home. Mako and Mika waited for us at the door of an... ethiopian restaurant in the SoHo, despite Mako knows I can't stand spicy food. But in the end it wasn't so bad, I just needed a few more glasses of water than average. And I finally got to know mika, after lots of time of chatting over IRC. Greg, SPI's lawyer, also appeared, and was a nice addition to the group. Mako knew where to take us after that. The Belgian bar was packed, but there was a private party in one of the spaces and we took over some of that space. After a few rounds, we were ready to leave the pub and go for Falafel and some tea. I was terribly falling asleep though, so instead of tea we took a cap back to Brooklyn, where we found Paul waiting at the door. After an hour of inflating a mattress, we were ready for sleep, at 4AM. It didn't look like the morning after would be very productive...

After a not-so-easy ride with James Blackwell, and the last minute surprise of Paul Sladen joining us, we arrived in New York. The sky was dark already. Instead of arriving at 15:00 or so as expected, we arrived at something like 20:00. Behind, we had left great perils like an empty gas tank and finding no gas station, and noticing one tire could use some pumping; evil officials at the US border not liking the fact that it was the first time I entered the country, which involved fingerprints and a smily face at the customs offices after a long wait; a great meal (after a long wait to get served) at probably the best restaurant in the whole State of New York; the three of us becoming terribly sleepy half an hour after resuming the drive, and having to stop for a short nap and stopping for gas once again around 70 miles away from NYC. When we did arrive, we managed to get lost a few times around the city. We crossed four bridges on our way to Brooklyn, which accidentally let me admire the Manhattan skyline by night, and finally, got to Clint's place. When we were parking, I noticed the tire was mostly flat now. Surely not the best way to land in the city. We also found out Clint and the rest had left for dinner after a long wait, as neither they or us expected to arrive so late, and we were way too freaked out with the crazy traffic and finding our way to phone them. After a while, both problems were sorted out; Clint appeared and James was able to leave. James, thanks for all you did! I owe you a big one next time! We spent some time with Clint, dilinger, biella and micah, saw the great view of Manhattan from the roof of his appartment, and eventually went to bed. Apparently, they are taking me to a place called "Dim Sum" for breakfast. I wonder how dilinger's cat tastes.