Go forward in time to October 2006.
- Fri 2006/Jul/28
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- Tue 2006/Jul/25
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In three more days I leave Dresden. I will surely miss this beautiful city, all my friends here, and the rhythm of life I had.
But life goes on, and I am looking forward to use what I have won here. It was easy so far, now comes the hard part. We'll see.
It will always be good to be in Plaza Italia again.
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- Fri 2006/Jul/21
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Yesterday Dresden suffered of temperatures of at least 39°C. We stayed in the Kitchen the whole afternoon, and for the first time, it was much better to keep the windows closed, because the temperature outside was much worse than inside the building.
A lot of Ice Coffee helped to stand the long hours learning Logic in this freaking weather.
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- Mon 2006/Jul/17
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Wrote last week DSH exam, the big German exam I was preparing for. It wasn't that hard as I would have thought, but I completely screwed up the redaction part. I had to write a text analyzing the usage of Renewable energy sources in Germany, and lacked a more powerful vocabulary about the topic.
Anyway, I think I may have passed it because I did much better in the grammar, reading, and listening skills sections.
Today I wrote the SDS exam, and as expected I wasn't able to fulfill the MSO logic part, so I didn't become a note but passed the exam anyway. Not the best result at all, but I would need at least one semester on second order logic before passing this lecture with a decent remark, anyway.
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Nór talked with my mom at the phone last night. It was such a great experience to hear her having her first Spanish conversation. They didn't talk too much but I think in a couple of months she will manage to have a good Spanish.
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- Tue 2006/Jul/11
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Am Samstag werde ich Test DSH schreiben. Ich hätte Test DaF vor zwei Wochen schreiben müssen aber da ich GUADEC besucht habe, war das nicht möglich. Ich habe dafür so viele Angst wie menschliche möglich ist. Mal schauen, was damit passiert wird.
Test DSH wird überprüfen, wie gut mein Deutsch eigentlich ist.
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- Sun 2006/Jul/09
- Fri 2006/Jul/07
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After GUADEC, now I have tons of stuffs to learn and very few time before the exams. I will probably suck this semester for several reasons but will try to do my best effort.
Summer in Dresden has finally arrived seriously. With temperatures over the 26°C everyday that feels like 30°C in my room in the afternoons, concentrating is really hard to do.
The biggest problem here, is that in about three weeks I will go back to Chile. My study term in Dresden is almost over and I will hardly have free time to enjoy the last days here as I should. Sometimes I think I should just quit learning and enjoy my last days in the Florence on the Elbe, but my sense of responsibility is big enough to fuck up my life.
Fortunately, Nóra will arrive on Sunday to save me from my isolation.
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- Sun 2006/Jul/02
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Yesterday, after arriving to Berlin from GUADEC, I had to wait several hours to get the train connection to Dresden. Therefore, I met my friend Karin who is living in Berlin nowadays.
We took a walk through the overcrowded Branderburger Tor and the Reichstag. It is incredible how Berlin has become in the center of the world because of the World Cup. People from all over the world wearing different colors, and it looked to me as a nice place to be. No differences, no hate, and only an incredible passion for football.
And passion for GNOME, too.
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Thanks Pedro and Juan Carlos for the presents you brought me from Chile. You guys are the best!
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- Sat 2006/Jul/01
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GUADEC 2006 is over. We had a great time in Vilanova i la Geltrú during the past week and I am sure that I will miss all the guys a lot.
Some of the highlights of the conference were:
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On Saturday, we played the FreeFa World Cup, a small championship where four teams showed that GNOME is not only about coding and hacking. In the semifinals, the Red team and its stars Dodji, Zaheer, Glynn, Tommi, Gustavo, Javi, and Chema, weren't enough to overcome their worst player: me. In a very controversial match, that we had to define by penalty kicks, we finally lost by 1 - 1 (4 - 3) against a GNOME Hispano powered team, composed by Germán Zamorano, Fernando, Pedro, KaL, Garnacho, Rodrigo, and the traitor Jordi (who was supposed to play red, but given that he got late to the field and we had to replace him, he didn't find a Red shirt, so decided to play Blue).
The other semifinal, was a smashing 14 - 1, in which the Dark Blue team, leaded by Bastien, classified for the final. Therefore, my team had to show that we do not suck, and in the match for the third place, we smashed the White team for 13 - 0, in the half of the time that the Dark Blue needed, because we decided to play only 30 minutes instead of the 60 of the semifinals.
In the final match, the GNOME Hispano team showed that they were very lucky that day, and defeated the White team by a tight 2 - 1.
It worths noting that nobody scored against us, because the only goal the GNOME Hispano team scored to us, was really a self made goal product of a bounce in somebodies leg.
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On Monday, the Fluendo party that I already talked about, was a nice opportunity to meet people. People says that we had about 500 liters beer and 100 liters hard drinks, and although we were only about 200 people in the party, we drank almost all! The number of drunk guys was amazing. Nothing really bad happened after all, and only a couple of guys forgot to maintain respect with the locals. Fortunately, nothing serious enough to opaque the level of the conference and the attendees.
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Tuesday was the day for the Nokia Maemo One-Year-Old Party. Last year Nokia announced the Maemo project, a platform for the development of software for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. Now we celebrated one year since this, with sandwiches and drinks in the Carpa.
In the opportunity, the Wifi team of the conference arranged to get a TV broadcast of the France - Spain match in the Carpa. We watched the match while The Drooling Macaque Band, composed by John, Lucas, Davyd, Garnacho, Thomas, and some others. They played amazing, even when they only rehearsed like 3 hours on Sunday, and had probably never met before.
I was insistently asked to go to the stage and play something with the band. People, used to see my hackergotchi in the planets think that I am a good guitar player (reason enough to change it, I guess), and insisted a lot. I hadn't play continuously for almost a year and I have forgotten most of my repertory, so I declined and declined.
But when the jam part of the day came, in which several guys took the instruments and just played, no matter the quality, only worried about having fun, I decided to face my fears and took the guitar. Then Lucas, Chris, and I played Nothing Else Matters, and suddenly Alberto joined us and sang in the most emotive way I have ever heard. It was so damn funny, that J5 and others joined to sing also and we broke the funky environment so far and pushed some metal winds in the Carpa. Just funny.
Of course, we were all sad to see Spain be kicked out of the World Cup. Although we made a lot of jokes to the Spaniards, we were really sad and only joking all the time. No bad feelings about it.
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Wednesday night something beautiful happened. The Spaniards invited the Chileans to a hackfest besides a Bungalow in the GNOME Village, and we were sitting there with a hacked wireless connection available for all. At the beginning, I would say that we were no more than 7 people sitting at a table coding, drinking beers, and joking.
For some unknown reason, some guys appeared asking "Are you the guys running the GUADEC Wifi network?" and then joining us in the so called party. I didn't realize when exactly, but it didn't take too long before some guys needed to bring another table to sit beside us. Short story: after less than 2 hours there were about 50 people and 40 laptops connected to the GUADEC network. The network was at that moment practically useless and slow, and also the big crowd of people was too loud, even when we were asking to stay quiet to avoid to bug the neighbours. Of course, it was very difficult to maintain so many people quiet after all the beers we drank, so we decided that would be a good idea to put the network down, so everybody could go home.
That was the night when everybody got to know the verb "to afilate", a roughly translated version of the Chilean verb "afilar". Damn hilarious.
Regarding the talks and non-social aspect of the conference, I got what I expected. Too many talks, all of a great quality; a bunch of heavily interesting projects that are arising (including Gimmie and FUSE) and others that are slowly getting mature (NetworkManager, Beagle, F-Spot, MonoDevelop, among others). The software around GNOME is getting more and more interesting, the quality of the developers and projects increases very quickly, and the interest that the corporate world is showing in our project is amazing. This would make any other project feel envy of us.
But what I think is the most important thing of GNOME, as I learned during GUADEC, is the human quality of people. I could write long about the great talks and work that GUADEC gathered, but I think that they are not really important compared to the social aspect of the project. I feel I have several new friends now, and that it worths to work as much as possible on making this project bigger and better. I like the desktop, yes I do. But I have to say that now, I love the people behind it.
Thanks Quim, thanks GNOME Foundation, and thanks Vilanova i la Geltrú for making possible this wonderful experience.
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Go backwards in time to June 2006.