It's always morning somewhere, and right now it's still morning in Tokyo! (Although not for long anymore.)
I arrived here yesterday morning, found my hotel and some good food. I'll spend the next three or so days here and then take the Nozomi (very fast train) to Hiroshima for
IETF76.
My current plan is to find some breakfast, then go to Ueno Park and Akihabara (which is supposed to be like Fry's but then good). And generally just see what the city is like. Planning to join the Tokyo Bicycle Tour on Saturday, also. Any suggestions for other things to do here are welcome, assuming they have nothing to do with anime. :-P
Hey, it's more than two months ago already, but it's just in time for my thoughts on
HAR2009! I put
pictures on-line a little while ago already, but nothing else so far.
It's a pretty neat event. It feels like a
festival, but then completely stuffed with
geeks. And
talks instead of
concerts. And also,
fantastic decoration. Or maybe I should call it
light pollution? Also, we had our own
GSM network! Of course, we also had
police on site, because you don't want to know what this hacker scum does in their spare time. From the stories I heard, the police had a pretty unexciting but pleasant time there though.
All in all it was fun, and I met a whole bunch of people, including some happy BitlBee users and contributors. Most interesting was perhaps that I met a roommate of a former Mountain View teammate of mine at the train station before the conference already. The geek world is pretty small, I guess.
The Daily WTF once posted an image like this IIRC, and I thought "Come on, I see this all the time in Irish supermarkets!". For example, I saw this in Tesco last Saturday:
One 2l bottle of 7up for EUR 1.92. (How much does that cost in The Netherlands BTW, I wonder...) Now 2l is more than enough for me, but imagine it's not and maybe I want two bottles. HAVE THEY GOT A DEAL FOR ME!
TWO bottles for only EUR 3.95! What a bargain! But, wait... 2×1.92=3.84, so I pay five cents more per bottle if I get two. At least they're nice enough to give the price per litre for people who don't like maths. :-) Maybe this is Ireland's way of keeping its people on a healthy diet?
In other news, I miss
Maplin from two years ago. It used to be a useful store for electronics (and components) and there used to be a guy who pretty much knew my name and actually knew what he's selling. But now... Jelena went there to get me some 2.5mm heatshrinks. I gave her a pack of 1.5mm ones with order numbers of what I need written on the label. Back home, it turned out that the guy in the shop tossed away the 1.5mm pack she had with her, for one reason of the other ...
Or not? Last weekend I was in the shop myself, and guess what I saw in the rack of 1.5mm heatshrinks? MY PACK OF HEATSHRINKS! With my handwriting on it and everything. Even better, opened and everything (I already used quite a few centimeters since I bought the pack months ago).
That's not how you get yourself happy customers, guys...
The event happened almost a month ago, but I really did intend to mention it here.
Oxegen 2009 was a rainy bunch of fun. From what I still remember:
Bottom:
- The rain, there were some dry spots but especially on the last day I experienced some real showers. It was really good to have some boots.
- Careless people on the camping, please learn to walk people, I had to fix up my tent pretty much every morning.
- The average age of people there, which confronted me more with the fact that I'm getting old myself!
- People from Dublin, apparently all people who steal beer and beg for free cigarettes are from Dublin. The nice girl from Waterford (?) told us on Thursday evening that only Dubliners do that. ;-)
Top:
- The Mars Volta, played for only about an hour, which is way too short. Cedric (singer) didn't like this either and tried to destroy the stage clock.
- Mogwai, indeed extremely loud!
- The rain, better said, how nobody seemed to care and rain pretty much added an element of fun. Mudfights are fun as long as you can just watch.
- The people, mostly as much fun as they were last year. I was especially amused every time a group of 5-10 16-year-olds wade their way through an audience, holding each other's hands to stay together. Somehow seeing that made me feel like a car driver waiting for a family of ducklings crossing the road.
- The trip back, a few hours after the last concert. We managed to pack ourselves very quiclky in the dark and I think we didn't even lose anything. In the bus someone upstairs took a guitar and played Blur and Oasis. Things did get out of tune more and more as we got closer to Dublin. At some point the bus passed police cars that were stopping cars (for obvious reasons, especially in Ireland :-P), from upstairs we could hear a very loud "SHIT, THE GUARDS! HIDE YOUR BEER!"
Other scary fact: We (Jelmer, Erik and I) got into the bus to the festival on Thursday, and I noticed the people next to us had a schedule with them already. I asked them where they bought that now already, and the response was "Wij spreken ook Nederlands hoor." Eh? And they were sitting right next to us! But in true un-Dutch fashion we did
not set up our tents next to theirs.
All in all, a fun experience. If the lineup is really good I may go again next year, otherwise maybe just for a day to pick up the atmosphere.
One week passed and in 24 hours I will already be almost halfway on my way back!
New York is great, both as a city and as a Google office, and I'll definitely try to have some more trips to here in the future. The first night I walked here, on my way from the Penn Ave LIRR station to the apartment, I already decided I'd spend as little time in the apartment as possible. Weather forecasts looked like they were going to get in the way, but the actual weather was pretty fine (almost) all the time.
What did I see? Loads of high buildings, walked along the water quite a bit, saw the building site that used to be the WTC (I expected to see some monument, but nope!), Times Square, a view from on
the General Electric Building, the Statue of Liberty from far away, a tiny piece of Central Park, another park near it closer to the water, and blisters on my feet after walking for many hours especially during the weekend. I tried to not be a typical tourist and probably failed, but I must say that I saw a few of these things by accident by just running into them while pointlessly walking around through the city.
I made over 500 pictures and will try to make a decent selection of what's actually interesting and original. This is probably going to take a while... :-(
Time to catch some sleep now; in the morning I will finish packing and spend half a day at work. After that I'll get the joy of travelling to/being at JFK airport the night before the Independence Day weekend. My planning was definitely "splendid" with that detail in mind...
For the next week I'll be writing from (who knows how often, keeping my blogging frequency in mind :-P) New York. Arrived yesterday, flied Aer Lingus long-haul for the first time and I'm actually quite satisfied, especially because they did not charge me for sitting at the exit. :-)
Staying in the middle of Manhattan and will spend most of my time at work, not so much doing touristy stuff. Although the nights will be long and this place does look like it's suitable for night photography. So let's see if I can finally put my Sigma f/1.4 lens to work.
Ooh. Also this seems to be my fiftieth blog post. 50 posts in 32 months. I guess that's not too bad. :-P
Sigh. If a PHP coder says "The complete upgrade path is automatted and can be performed with a single mouse click.", don't believe him. I just spent almost an hour on a Serendipity upgrade. Maybe it works well if you have a dumbass FTP CGI-exec webhost, but I miss the good old days without "user friendly" installer scripts, where installing a webapp was a matter of unpacking a tarball and feeding a database dump to MySQL. Stuff just worked without having to give the webserver write permissions pretty much everywhere.
But now, after the hackish s9y upgrade I lost the old theme, random plugins broke and I had to reinstall + reconfigure them (after resolving some more permission issues), and the best part must be that the upgrade script does absolutely no error checking. After tons of error messages it says "upgrade successful". Fortunately it's also dumb and didn't mark the upgrade as successful, so I could retry the upgrade after fixing permissions. One day I'll just figure out how to move all this stuff to Blogger. :-/
Anyway, I promised pictures. Lots of stuff is now on
http://wilmer.gaast.net/fotos/. Don't have very fast hosting for it yet, but I'll work that out later. Hilights are the pictures of
my first flight lesson, and also pictures of
my cool model airplane. Bought it in April (after mostly trashing my
Super Cub and leaving it behind in Beilen), and got some cool in-flight pictures. I also bought a 37g camera especially designed for attaching to these planes, so soon I'll be spying on people in the park and around here in Dublin. :-P
Some pretty hiking pictures from this year's Mountain View trip are also there:
Big Sur (under Monterey),
Rancho San Antonio (just under Mountain View/Sunnyvale). In other news, I'm flying to New York on the 24th. Not sure if I'll make any pictures there since probably everything there has been photographed to death already.
And my time in Mountain View is over again!
Had a busy time. At work, but also pretty cool weekends. Best of all was a one-hour flying lesson last Sunday, in a real Cessna 182. Pictures will definitely come!
One picture I have now is a fine piece of Macintoy PoS X security. And yes, those buttons are clickable even before I type my password to "unlock" my screen. I'm starting to wonder why we're even allowed to use these things for work purposes.
