Friday
Felt daring and listened to Explosions In The Sky on the plane flight to
Belgium. They were playing Barcelona that night and I was missing it so
this was as close as it was going to get.
Arrived home with the living room door open and my mother sitting outside
on the terrace sunbathing at five degrees Celsius. The drawbacks of living
in a cold country.
Drove to police office to report loss of identity card and driver's license.
Made sure the police officer didn't see me arriving or leaving in the car.
Raced to the administration office to actually get my new driver's license
so I could end my brief life of crime.
Took the train to Brussel to put my stuff at my friends where I would be
staying for the weekend. Went to the King of Spain (hm, I thought that was
me) on the Grote Markt to meet up with all of the other hackers. Good to
see all of them back.
Hallski provided very good picture source material; here
he demonstrates the size of a certain anatomical part of his.
dolphy wanted an authentic Belgian
restaurant to eat mussels and fries, so I took him, wtay,
jdahlin, Matthias and Noelle to some place on the Vismarkt.
Everyone was happy, though my mussels were a bit on the dry/overcooked side.
Saturday
Went to see Robert Love's talk. The place was packed. Novell cunningly
sent
a rock-star-like stand-in for Robert while
the real Robert
was probably
still locked in a basement somewhere in wintery Boston hammering out code.
Nevertheless the talk was very good, hope some people got motivated to pick
up some of the stuff the decoy talked about.
Went to see Jonathan Corbet's kernel talk, which was really good as well.
Gave me some insight in 2.6. Not sure if I'll be able to make use of it
though.
Left for the wedding. Lots of atmosphere, people started dancing
before desert was served. Someone finally succeeded in
making a decent picture of me.
It was great to see old friends again, and I even made it onto the credit list
of Tineke's movie - it showed "the winner took them all", and then a quick list
of past conquests :) The list was quite a bit shorter than I remember it to
be however.
All of her friends from school were complaining about how Tineke got married
before them ... If you're a single guy, weddings should be your favourite place
to go.
I'm having a harder time each time to restrain myself from killing DJ's that
manage to do any of the following
- download crap mp3's well below 128 kbps and use them at parties (I'll
take a listening test to prove them you really can tell the
difference any day)
- download the completely wrong/crappy version of songs
- manage to break off songs right before their best part
- TALK between songs
- play completely undanceable/crap/slimy slow songs
- bring a small set of speakers, then ruin the quality completely by
completely distorting the output
Seriously, it can't be that hard to make the musical part of the evening
at least enjoyable.
Ended the evening with a nice dance though with the bride. The DJ managed
to play Disarm right before I was leaving.
Sunday
Due to getting to bed at 4.30 I slept late and missed the DirectFB and X talks
I really wanted to see. The afternoon really didn't have talks that
interested me, so I had wished it was the other way around. Tried to uncover
the Robert Love stand-in by pretending to fanboy him and getting my kernel
book autographed, but he passed the test admirably. Gave up.
Tried to stay awake and not make too much of an ass of myself for the rest
of the day. Got drawn into witnessing the formation of a new Dark Alliance
between Dag and Matthias, scary.
Got the best news of the year up to now at the end of the day. We went out
to celebrate by buying real Belgian fries from a real Belgian fries stand and
ate them in the car.
Went back to friends, watched 24. While watching I noticed a big cardboard
box that read "Aibo" on the side (Hans works for Sony, btw). I asked him
if it really did contain what it said. He said yes. I asked him why it was
still packed. He said he brought it home two weeks ago but never bothered
to try it. The nerve of some people.
I unpacked it, but it wasn't charged. So I hooked it up, then Delphine and I
played the two-player Settlers card game. Called Kristien to buy it for us
too.
After that, played with the AIBO for a while. It really is pretty well done;
it asked for the ball, it followed the ball, it tried to get your attention,
wiggle its tail, express "emotions", and so on. But I can't imagine myself
shelling out that much for it until it at least makes less noise while moving
around and looks slightly less metallic.
Monday
Spent the morning waking up. Really wanted to see the Belgian movie
Steve + Sky since everyone is saying
how good it is and it's probably not going to be shown in Barcelona.
I went into the movie really wanting to like it but got disappointed. I'm
pretty sure if this movie was in English everyone would think the dialogue
and story is crap. For me the only entertaining thing was that the movie
was funny because it was in my local dialect, and it contained some scenes
filmed close to where I live, and I also spotted my best friend's sister in
the movie.
But if the movie had been in another Belgian dialect, I'm sure I'd have hated
it.
On the plane, back to Barcelona, and happy to arrive home. Then even more
happy to realize I really feel it's home. Then even more happy and unable
to stop smiling for two days at the good news I got on sunday.