Tue 2009/Feb/24

• On my trip to Chile, last November, I bought a small bunch of books from the Latin American authors I've been interested to read for a while but never managed. During the idle time in A Coruña (which was much more than what I would normally like), the vacations in Germany, and now in the Helsinki winter, I managed to read them almost all.

  One of the most interesting ones was El Roto, by Joaquín Edwards Bello. This novel from the beginning of the XX century describes in a very direct way the Chilean society and the enormous social differences (something that unfortunately is still a problem), while criticizing the role the Catholic Church had on this. It is not a big surprise that this book was censured on its first publications, in times when the Church had a huge influence in the Chilean society.

  Also read Llamadas Telefónicas, by Roberto Bolaño. The short stories are quite interesting to read, nothing really brilliant, but somehow the writing style of Bolaño caught me. Most of the main characters in these stories share an inability to remember somewhat important details on what they are telling, so phrases like "she told me her last words, or maybe not really her last words but something important, the point is that I don't remember anymore" are quite common. I wonder if that's a reflection of Bolaño's personality.

  Anyway, I also read a couple of compilations by Cortázar (Bestiario and Todos los fuegos el fuego), and I'm currently reading a compilation of poems by Nicanor Parra and Vargas Llosa's La Fiesta del Chivo. It had been a while since I last felt so passionate about reading, so that partly explains why I've been a bit away from computers in my free time.

Syndicated 2009-02-24 13:18:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

Thu 2009/Feb/12

• On Monday, I came back from Brussels after FOSDEM '09. This was the first time I attended this event and I am certainly impressed by the huge amount of people who gathers during these two days. Not only I met many old GNOME friends, but I also got to know many fellow hackers that I had worked with but never meet before. Pretty cool.

  I attended the talks in the GNOME, Crossdesktop, Mozilla, and Embedded developer rooms. It was a good opportunity to know a bit more about many different projects that I unfortunately haven't managed yet to try on my own but interest me in different ways (like nevimer, rygel, and all the stuff around geoclue and geolocation). I think now I have more reasons to play with them, when I finally get a bit of extra energy.

  One special thing of this FOSDEM was that, finally, Lucas, Felix, and I were in the same event, meaning that the whole current Eye of GNOME team got to finally meet. It was the first time that Felix attended an event involving GNOME people, so Lucas and I were introducing him to some of the guys. Jokes here and there, we could realize how well defined the roles in our team are: Felix does all the hardcore work, I do the releases, and Lucas gets the all the credits as the maintainer (partly a joke, partly true, since lately Felix has been really rocking on making eog pretty rock solid. Dude, you rock!). We discussed some of the things we would like to do in the near future. Somehow I feel an extra motivation after this meeting, so I will be trying to summarize these points and what we agreed and mail them to the eog mailing list. If you are interested, please join (and poke me with a stick if I take too long to write this mail down).

  Other cool thing that happened was to meet Jorge Bustos, a Chilean friend from my times in the Universidad de Talca, who is currently working in Madrid with the people from Libresoft. We randomly met in one of the corridors and the expression of surprise of both of us was just amazing. There are not that many Chileans abroad working in FLOSS related projects, and when it's about a friend, this is a one in a million coincidence (although I have to say that I also met another Chilean, who works for Nokia/Trolltech, and also Duncan Mac-Vicar from the Kopete/Yast fame was around).

  In general, a nice experience. I only wish the schedule wasn't so packed and Belgian beer wasn't that good, but that's just complaining for free.

Syndicated 2009-02-12 10:41:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

Sat 2009/Jan/17

• Thanks to the kind support of Igalia, I'm going to FOSDEM this year. I've never been in Belgium, so this will be an interesting trip. Of course, many friends will be there, so it's gonna be a good opportunity to catch up with all of them.

  

Syndicated 2009-01-17 10:48:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

Sat 2009/Jan/10

• Felix did the final work to remove the Eye of GNOME dependency on libgnome. Great work, dude!

Syndicated 2009-01-10 08:08:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

Sun 2009/Jan/04

• Vacations ended up being really cool, in spite of having lost the initial connections and having had to spend the night in a scary terminal of Berlin-Tegel. That night ended up being really funny, as I met some backpackers in a similar situation and realized that getting stuck on a terminal is a fundamental part of life. I decided that, later at some point, I will take a few months to backpack the world that I still don't know. Then, I'm sure I will find my Tegel experience just irrelevant.

  I spent Christmas in Zuschendorf, at Marie's parents. This was the most German Christmas I've experienced ever, with pyramids, Räuchermänner, Klösse, beer, and so on. I even tried ice skating and proved to be completely useless for it. I should definitively try again here.

  

  Later, Prague. Francisco, Edgardo and I went for a few days to the Czech capital. I enjoyed once again the delicious Czech food and beer. We took a few walks through the typical places, and made lots of pictures. Weather was nice: although it was always under 0 degrees, we didn't see a cloud during the three days. Not bad.

  

  For new year, we traveled to Berlin –the good thing of Dresden is that you can reach many interesting cities in less than two hours– and met other Chilean DAAD scholars. We made it through the crowd in the Strasse des 17. Juni until the Brandenburger Tor, and enjoyed the fireworks and party afterward. It was really cold (probably around -5 or -7 degrees), but Glühwein, continuous movement, and dancing stopped us from freezing.

  

  Then I spent the days after walking around Berlin-Mitte and Berlin-Kreuzberg. There is quite a lot to see, and I definitively will need to visit the city again, as time and energy weren't enough to go all the places I wanted to see. At last, I was so exhausted because of this trip, that I ended up sleeping more than 12 hours a day during the last three days. Crazy.

• So, I'm back in the North pole after my nearly two months world tour. During the last two months I visited Santiago de Chile, Talca, Curicó, Lima, A Coruña, Dresden, Zuschendorf, Prague, and Berlin. Fortunately, the last few days have been quiet enough for me to recover energies and I am already missing work. Let's get it on!

Syndicated 2009-01-04 20:04:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog