I'm currently in (the really lovely) Philadelphia airport again, waiting for my connecting flight to San Francisco. I'm rapidly arriving at the conclusion that it is easier to enter the US once you've landed on US soil, than it is to depart from the country bound for the US. I had the most harrowing experience of my life this morning, trying to check in for my return flight. Due to the way various people's itineraries worked out, I ended up having to share a taxi from Badajoz to Madrid Airport at 12:30am. My flight didn't depart until something like 12:20pm, but the bus with the bulk of the people on it wasn't going to get me to the airport with less than 2 hours before departure, and I didn't want to risk missing my flight, especially given I'm feeling under the weather. So I got to the airport at about 4am, having had little sleep in the taxi. Terminal 1 has a real dearth of seating for people waiting to check in. I spent 4 hours trying to make myself as comfortable as possible on the hard floor, and didn't get a lot of sleep then either. For the record, check-ins (at least for US Airways) seem to open around 4 hours before the scheduled departure time. So I went to check in, and the way they were working it was there was a bunch of podiums out the front of what I would consider a conventional check-in counter. The people at these podiums then proceeded to give you your first Spanish Inquisition. I'd previously remarked to myself at how trivial it was to get into Spain... I was asked the purpose of my trip to Spain. I told the woman it was for a business meeting. She then asked where I'd spent my time I Spain. I told her Badajoz. She asked if I had a hotel receipt to show for it. I told her the accommodation was paid for my someone else. She then asked if I had any business cards to show for the business meeting. Sheesh, I thought. Luckily I still had all the copies of people's keys leftover from the keysigning we did, and some of them were in a business card format, so I pulled out a fistful of them and gave them to her. Oh, and she wanted to see a copy of my itinerary, and seemed satisfied that the flights were a reversal of what got me there in the first place. She wandered off with my passport, itinerary and the fistful of "business cards" and came back, seemingly satisfied that everything was in order. She stuck little blue stickers on my luggage and passport (the size of an Australian convenience-store price tag) and I was allowed to wait for the next check-in person. The rest of the checking-in process was fairly normal. I can appreciate the airline wanting to avoid having to deal with passengers being refused entry to the US, but I had a valid US visa in my passport, so that should make all of that a moot point. I don't know why I had to prove my trip's legitimacy to the airline. So I thought that was the end of it. Hardly. Terminal 1 of Madrid Airport seems to have heaps of gates, with a letter/number combination. Mine was in the B series, and I went through the security screening, and it became apparent that I had to go through another guard post looking thing to get from the A series to the B series. The signage looked like it said "Police". Anyway, the guy there had so-so English, and he initially was a little unhappy that I had an Australian passport and was flying to the US and not Australia. I pointed out the US visa, and he seemed less concerned. Then he asked me to say something in Spanish. I don't know if he was trying to be conversational, or I had to be able to speak some Spanish to get past or what the story was, but by this stage I was pretty tired, and this caught me totally off guard. I think I stammered out a Buenos d as or something. He then wanted to know how many hours it took to fly from Australia to Spain. I told him I had no idea, because I'd only flown from the US to Spain. He then begrudgingly gave me an exit stamp in my passport, and I was allowed on my way. I think the whole thing was made the more harrowing by the fact I was deadly tired, the Police guy didn't speak terribly fantastic English, and I wasn't expecting a second Spanish Inquisition (let alone the first). Oh, and closer to boarding time, they chucked everyone out of the lounge area closest to the gate, and rechecked everyone's passports and boarding passes. That was fair enough, and not unlike what happens in Sydney going to the US, but they don't even let you into the lounge area in the first place. That departure process was more what I would have expected an entry process to be like, and has put me off returning to Spain a little bit. The entry process was a joke. The guy barely looked at my passport long enough to give me the entry stamp. Fortunately I slept for the bulk of the flight from Madrid to Philly, and now I'm feeling a bit more human.

I feel a little stupid for my last post about my unstable machine. It was the hardware to blame and my hard drive finally crashed during a Linux conference in Mendoza, Argentina. Typical. At the conference there wasn´t much new for me and I regret that I didn´t get organised enough to give a talk about the Web and WHATWG stuff. Though I did manage to meet good people and talk about some topics that are of interest to me. As usual the fabulous friendly CafeLUG geeks from Buenos Aires were there, led by the wonderful DD Marcela. I also met an inspiring guy from Cordoba who founded a successful software company that works with free software. His brother gave a great talk about it at the conference. I really love to see Free software power people to start a business. Oh and about my thinkpad X40 hard drive replacement. With the help of another new friend Fredrico from Mendoza, we called up IBM in Buenos Aires and arranged a new hard drive and a battery within 5 days! I didn´t know if my machine was under warranty still, phew. Unfortunately IBM called the next day saying they didn´t have any stock and the wait from the US is about 2 weeks. Since I have no idea where I will be in two weeks (ok, probably Sao Paulo, Brazil) I cancelled that request and now I have found a free Windoze (hopefully not trojaned) terminal just over the Andes, in Santiago Chile. Tough life!

I feel a little stupid for my last post about my unstable machine. It was the hardware to blame and my hard drive finally crashed during a Linux conference in Mendoza, Argentina. Typical. At the conference there wasn’t much new for me and I regret that I didn’t get organised enough to give a talk about the Web and WHATWG stuff. Though I did manage to meet good people and talk about some topics that are of interest to me. As usual the fabulous friendly CafeLUG geeks from Buenos Aires were there, led by the wonderful DD Marcela. I also met an inspiring guy from Cordoba who founded a successful software company that works with free software. His brother gave a great talk about it at the conference. I really love to see Free software power people to start a business. Oh and about my thinkpad X40 hard drive replacement. With the help of another new friend from Mendoza, we called up IBM in Buenos Aires and arranged a new hard drive and a battery within 5 days! I didn’t know if my machine was under warranty still, phew. Unfortunately IBM called the next day saying they didn’t have any stock and the wait from the US is about 2 weeks. Since I have no idea where I will be in two weeks (ok, probably Sao Paulo, Brazil) I cancelled that request and now I have found a free Windoze (hopefully not trojaned) terminal just over the Andes, in Santiago Chile. Tough life!

Thanks, Damog, for starting yet another pissing contest^W^Wnice and informative meme. And thanks, B3co, for writing yet another tool to waste my oh-so-scarce time. Which needs some CSS work if people like me keep showing up just to say "I'm also a frequent flier". Anyway, here I go.
I found at least one Metro I've been to missing - But hey, maybe the people at M nchen U-Bahn could not be bothered to come up with a logo? Update Well, B3co updated the site and included M nchen - What can I do if not update my listing? ;-)

I’m at my parents farm in Cornwall and there is ridiculous amount of work to do around the place. It’s difficult to hack bushes at day and then try hack at night. ;) At least we now have “broadband”. A couple of days ago I opened up a clueless bug report. Everything was unstable on my Unstable system, especially under 2.6.17, but not 2.6.16. Then I upgraded, not the kernel. I think udev (usual suspect), not sure, and everything works again. I was upgrading frantically after every pulse and last night I noticed 2.6.17 was working again. Now I am uneasy as I really don’t know what was at fault here. If I had more time I would have chased this down. Though as I’ve whined about before, you can’t roll back and diff that easily between upgrade snapshots. In other news I’ve switched from Ion3 to dwm. dwm sort of requires some tweaks and a recompile, so it’s another package to maintain. ;) Below is a screenshot: In about a week I’ll be off on my first expedition to South America. I’ll begin at Buenos Aires to learn some of the local lingo.

Hundreds of elderly people living in Zaragoza, Spain, will find a Debian-based KDE desktop in their elderly centers. The Zaragoza City Hall has just deployed a thin-client solution using PXES, Debian and KDE in six elderly centers with more than ten computers each. The number of elderly centers will grow up to some dozens in the future. We have dealed with the installation details. It has been officially presented today and people have already started using the desktops, browsing the web with Konqueror and enjoying the last annular eclipse using KStars.

Long hot days in Montreal -- which means a lot of fun for me. Yesterday, I had lunch with Marc Laporte, a Montreal Open Source developer and project lead for Tiki CMS/Groupware. Marc sent me email a week or so ago -- he saw on GeoURL that we lived right across Parc La Fontaine from each other, and since we had such similar interests it made sense to meet up. Wednesdays are my Daddy Day with Amita June. I try to work 4 10-hour days a week, and take Wednesday off to spend with the baby (and let Maj get some work done). It doesn't always work out that way -- I tend to work late night and weekends anyways, and Wikitravel never sleeps -- but at least theoretically I take the baby on Wednesdays. So I had the baby, and we went and met Marc at Universel Caf on Cherrier and Parc L.F. It's a nice place -- not too pricey and the food is good. It's also got a terrasse so we could sit outside in the sun. Marc is a lot of fun -- Tiki's got such an active user and developer community, and such a unique development strategy (very liberal CVS access) that we had a lot of fun and things to talk about. Marc spent six months in wt:Buenos Aires developing software, which is just about my dream job. I've wanted to go there for a long time, and it's on our list of "next places to live". We also talked a lot about how active Wiki culture is becoming, and how great that is, and how many blechy parts there are too. As when most Wiki makers come together, we bemoaned the lack of a Wiki markup standard, but hopefully the development of a text/wiki RFC will spur its growth. At least I hope so! tags: marc laporte amitajune montreal universel geourl tiki buenos aires wiki wiki markup standard

Allez les bleus On the way back from lunch, Amita and I stopped in the great playground by the baby pools in Parc La Fontaine, when my friend Niko called and invited me over to watch the World Cup semi-finals between France and Portugal. Niko lives on Marie-Anne and DeBullion -- about half-way between the Portuguese neighborhood surrounding Iglesia Santa Cruz at rue Rachel and St Urbain, and the Barouf, a bar on St. Denis that has become the unofficial centroid of French World Cup fans in Montreal. Amita June fell asleep on the way there, so we didn't get to Niko's until the game was almost over. But that was OK -- it was kind of a boring game, as far as I can tell, and France won 1-0. What was fun was walking out to St. Denis afterwards. The police had blocked off the street for several blocks in both directions, so we were able to walk up and down the street, while people cheered allez les bleus and waved the tricolor and generally had a mad good time. We couldn't help ourselves -- we had to walk down rue Rachel and see how the other half was doing. Which was, in fact, not well -- there were an awful lot of glum Portuguese people hanging out at Rachel and St Laurent. The street wasn't blocked officially, but cars really couldn't get through the crowd of mopey, extremely well-costumed folks. It got a little ugly -- one drunk France fan came around waving a tricolor and nearly got his hat handed to him by 12 angry Portuguese, including one guy in a red, yellow and green wig with a big red clown nose. A car with a French flag driving up St. Laurent also got stopped. We figured it was time to get out, so I took the baby home and put her to sleep and hacked on my OpenID MediaWiki extension for a few hours. Things are going well -- I'm really close to a consumer and a server. The little UI niceties will have to come later -- right now I'm concentrating on the mainline functionality. tags: openid mediawiki world cup montreal amitajune france portugal allez les bleus

Sun! Sunlight is a wonderful thing. Yesterday I came back from a six day vacation in Madrid. The weather was not warm, a bit warmer than in Finland, but especially it was dry and sunny. Pretty good autumn weather, actually. The best week I've had for a while. This was my Quest for Sun '05. I stayed at Amaya's place, slept well and long every night, had a wonderful time with some Debian people, and walked outside and visited a couple of wonderful art museums. Thank you, especially, Amaya, Holger, and Miriam. And also vi and emacs, the feline foot fetishists who rule Amaya's apartment. I took some pictures. They're touristy snapshots, not meant to be art. I meant to make notes about my experiences during the week, but the nice, classy Moleskine notebook I bought especially for the trip got lost the first full day. Some moments stuck into my mind, however.

• Amaya's cats attacking my feet while I slept. At one point, one of them sat on my knees for a while and pounced every time I moved in my sleep.
• Tapas is a very good never-ending style of food. It just keeps coming: every time you get to the end of the plates you now have, the waiter brings more.
• Food in general was very good. Even cheap fast-food like kebab.
• Art museums in countries with a long history of art are bloody big. Both the Museo del Prado and the Museo de Arte Thyssen-Bornemisza seem to require about seven straight hours for a proper visit (I spent about three at each, and saw half of each). I think this is so that people will attract fewer cats by being too tired to move their feet during the night.
• Telling the history of love, bed, and sex to Amaya and Holger over a meal. I really should write that down some day. (They're editors.)
• One of Amaya's cats is crazy and likes showers. Or at least likes to sit in the shower after someone's used it.
• The Retiro park is wonderful. I could spend a lot of time just walking about in it. I did.
• Food in Spain is good. Spanish eating times are crazy, but you get used to them.
• Me: "Back when I was working on Kannel...". Person next to me: "Oh you worked on Kannel? It is such a nice program". Moments to live for. Enough to motivate me to write and publish some more free code.
• "Gracias", "buenos noches", and "de nada" is enough Spanish to get you live well for a week. Helps to have native speakers as guides, of course.
• Did I mention that the food is great?

Since the Quest for Sun '05 was a success, I definitely will do it again. A week of light (and sleeping properly) really improved my mood. Maybe even enough that I will be able to deal with the remaining months of dark, gloom, wet, and cold of the winter in Helsinki. The only big negative thing about this trip was flying. I suggest that international air travel henceforth shall be called "The Cattle Drive".