14 Jul 2008 mjg59   » (Master)

My trip to Istanbul by Matthew Garrett aged 28 and 4/365ths

Saturday

Arrive at Heathrow. Richard gets to be my special lounge buddy - we later discover Bastien sitting outside looking like a lost puppy. Flight is delayed by a mere hour, so we get to the hotel with little trouble and check in. Dinner with Luis and co on pillows on the street. This becomes a recurring theme. Drinking is involved. This also becomes a recurring theme. People complain about my shortcut finding skills.

Sunday

See beautiful things. Thankful to finally get to see buildings older than my old college. Dinner under some bridge with Red Hat folks where we discover the joys of the "special price". People once more complain about my shortcut finding skills. Suspect pillows are involved, but hazy recollections.

Monday

Arrive at the university by taxi. More to the point, arrive at the university by taxi without taking a 30km detour. Dinner with Canonical people, then a party in some overpriced bar on the top of a very big hill. Discover that taxi drivers in Istanbul either have no fucking clue where anything in the entire world is, or that driving tourists to bizarre locations is a national pastime. Avoid this fate and arrive home at something like 4AM.

Tuesday

Corporate whoring continues with dinner with Collabora people (delayed by two and a half hours because Christian values getting sweaty with other men over eating, or something), followed by more drinks on the pillows. Am vindicated when it turns out that my route back to the hotel would in fact be the shortest possible route back if people didn't keep insisting on making random left turns when we're almost there.

Wednesday

Fascinating (and increasingly drunken) discussion of the neurobiological aspects of colour spaces with Pippin precedes drinks on the roof of the university. Narrowly prevent Luis' attempt to leave the foundation open to flagrant copyright violation suits. More pillows.

Thursday

Wake up with a twisted ankle and a broken laptop. I had a good birthday, it seems. Collabora host a party on a boat. Miraculously, nobody falls off the boat. We head back to the pillows while others trudge up the hill to Taksim. Aaron wins the inaugural Aaron Bockover award for services to the GNOME community.

Friday

Dinner with Novell, demonstrating my even-handedness when it comes to accepting corporate favours. Miguel reveals his true nature as a Microsoft shill by admitting to owning an XBox. I advise him to raise his free software credentials by getting a Freerunner - as a bonus it'll crash whenever anyone tries to call him, preventing Microsoft from whispering more sweet nothings in his ear. A foolproof plan. Party paid for by Google. Ear bleedingly loud. Some drinking involved. Return to bizarro deviant pillows where we are treated to the spectacle of child labour. Spend some time wondering why Planet Fedora is discussing upskirt photos and decide that hating the entire human race is probably the best option.

Saturday

Turns out that while the Grand Bazaar is effectively just a shopping centre, it's a fucking giant shopping centre that sells nothing I can find any excuse to want. Wander over to Asia for dinner. Conversation with Lennart about using cgroups as a mechanism for providing application latency requirements and how the current lack of standardisation of mountpoints and exposure of irritating implementation details makes it almost impossible to use them for anything. Fascinating diversion into how to deal with getting a SIGBUS when your mmap()ed soundcard gets hotswapped, including deciding that the easiest way of getting a reliable indication of your current process maps is by, erm, parsing /proc/self/maps. Final pillows trip. Emotional farewells (by which I mean more drinking)

Sunday

Airport. Plane. Train. Home. Transfer hard drive into laptop with working screen. Discover that productivity not actually enhanced by having more than a 300x200 pixel area of functionality. Decide to write libelous article about previous week instead.

Syndicated 2008-07-13 23:06:46 from Matthew Garrett

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