Tag Archives: travel

As Hot As HEL

Yesterday was a little more productive. Finally got round to starting
merging irssi-text and irssi-snapshot into a irssi package. Need to do
silly little things like putting files into the right packages, and then
I can start merging some of the patches from 0.8.9-9.

Finland appears to be playing havoc with my hayfever. Typically I
forgot to being anything and the chemist was shut. A very nice lady
answered my plea for an anti-hystamine, but I don’t think it completely
prevented me feeling like crap. Also woke up to find that I’m being
eaten alive by mosquitos. Bastards. Weather should be 25C today, so a
few degrees lower than the last two days, but higher humidity. I was
expecting hot weather, but this is silly

In some kind of HEL

I’m in Helsinki. This is good.

I’m awake. This is not so good

Left Laura’s flat yesterday at 1pm and proceeded to visit pretty
much every bomb site via the northern line, to drop her off at Euston so
she could return to her parents and then on to Paddington by bus to meet
Robot101. Rather surprisingly we managed to meet up without too much
hanging around and then catch the slightly slower, but much cheaper
Heathrow Connect. The train is on the departures board as being to
“Hayes & Harlington. Also stops at Heathrow.” despite
heathrow being beyond Hayes. It might as well have added “but don’t tell
any one”. I suspect Heathrow
Express might have words if they advertised
going to Heathrow too much. I really don’t think it is worth paying
14.00GBP over 9.50GBP for the ten minutes less it takes for the non-stop
service.

Met up with various other people at Heathrow consisting of Scott James
Remnant, Steve McIntyre, Rob Taylor, Phil Hands and Simon Kelley. Flight
delayed by 25 minutes, although it was about 18:40 befre we actually
took off. Arrived in Helsinki around midnight, only to find it doing
some impression of dusk. Surprised to be met by Jesus and other locals
so we didn’t need to work out the busses, even though various people had
been organised enough to print out the lovely photographic guide to
HUT.

It’s now 8am localtime so time for breakfast. It has no right being
this bright, this early in the morning.

GUADEC 6

Yesterday my employers, Runtime Collective, decided
that it might be a good idea if one of us attended GUADEC, and as I was
the only one that could make it, I am going on a trip to Stuttgart.
Yesterday afternoon was spent frantically hunting around for train
tickets. Managed to find tickets going out on Saturday evening and a
sleeper from Paris to Stuttgart arriving at 6:20 and returning Tuesday
night, Wednesday morning. Annoyingly we have seats on the overnight to
Stuttgart, but bunk beds on the way back. Fortunately, they had run out
of standard Eurostar tickets, so we get to go first class for the same
price. Should make up for spending 8 hours trying to sleep in a
seat.

Things in particular I want to see are keithp’s talk on the future of
X, Owen’s talk on Cairo and jdub’s talk on Project Topaz. Seeing as this
is a work trip, mjg59’s powermanagement, the Linux Desktop Migration and
the Public Sector Desktops will be required viewing too.

Oh and I’ve managed to drap lauranat along to be my official
translator, seeing as my only german phrase is likely to get me arrested
for perversion. That and the fact that she would have actually killed me
if I’d gone to Germany without her. Now I wonder if I can get work to
pay for her train ticket …