recent history

i left guillemont a little too late to make my flight to lisbon; i reckoned that i had just made it, but even with half an hour to go before takeoff they closed the flight in case i was incapable of running to catch it.

i got rebooked onto the next lisbon flight without too much hassle, however, and so opted to go wireless sniffing and/or enjoy the pleasures of the british airways club lounge in terminal 1.

i found no wireless traffic whatsoever in heathrow – which disappointed me, since the impression i got from some colleagues was that it is littered with wide-open base stations; maybe i just wasn’t looking in the correct way.

then i got to the lounge, filled-out an application for a frequent-flyer card (i suppose i have gotta start somewhere) and walked into the lounge only to run into tom jones, huddled in a corner, nursing a tea with some elderly white-haired guy whom i am certain that i recognise but cannot place.

looked vaguely like bernie ecclestone or someone like that. i’ll remember when i see them next on tv, i’m sure.

i left them to it, since i can’t say anything useful regarding his music, and i am reasonably certain that he’s not much interested in defence in depth.

anyhow, here i am mid-flight, i have about half of the club-class seating all to myself, and a small bevy of flight attendants who are all being very very nice to me. flirting, chatty, personal.

it’s rather scarey, actually – makes me wonder if they want tipping or something.

monthly report done. e-mails queued. quite productive, actually. now we just have to get down safely.

my keynote went much better than i expected, not least the videos which simultaneously got the point across whilst keeping people amused. i was terrified that quicktime would crash openoffice or similar.

it didn’t. joy joy joy, now i have a new way to present. 😎

well, i am flying home – literally – and find a few moments to update the blog. i suspect i will land way too late to see Buffy, and will have to hope a friend has videoed it.

i was not looking forwards to this trip at the outset, in retrospect mostly fear of presenting and fear of technical problems, only the latter of which arose and was fortunately remedied – while doing some wireless hacking i removed and reseated my wireless card, and the ibook subsequently refused to boot…

and this, the night before my keynote presentation! argh! i am told that i went white as a sheet.

after about 30m of prodding we managed to resurrect the laptop, at the time blaming a possibly loose keyboard connector; in retrospect, given that it eventually resurfaced after removing the battery and mains power and waiting for some time, i wonder whether we hadn’t corrupted the machine’s device tree. when it reawakened it had lost its date setting and returned to Jan 1 1970, so this seems a possiblilty. Apple’s computer products share the OpenBoot technology which bootstraps SPARC, so maybe this too is a shared possibility? i dunno…

either way, i am gonna be backing-up platform-neutral content to platform neutral media from now on; fortunately that is not too hard.

i didn’t do an accurate headcount at madrid, but there were 205 in lisbon for the keynote and more arrived through the day.

i am quite pleased to have doubled my spanish vocabulary (not hard) although it will no doubt rot soon; my confidence has increased so i am (even) less afraid of making a fool of myself in public, maybe i should work on it?

also: the food! the company lunches for the customers have been superb, with cheeses and fish and custard tarts in lisbon, and calamari and chorizo and other sausages in madrid.

not to mention the two hour lunch with me, efi, brad, vic, and manuel and montse from the madrid office. oh, tapas! i managed to work that one into at least three security analogies.

hmm – seems like the plane is starting to descend into heathrow. i hope the weather is good. i wanna go biking tomorrow, and do a market run at the weekend. maybe visit some friends, too.

20:02hrs. bother. buffy’s started.

stereophonics playing on iTunes, with me wedged in an aisle seat right at the very back of a 737. it’s hell, but it is not as much as it is hell for the guys in the middle and window seats. the guy in the middle has manages to read four complete newspapers during the flight, and it’s all wedged in the seatback in front of him like some bizzare white, pink and black fungus. apparently the flight is full and flight weight is maxed-out, so i hope the tyres are in good nick.

turbulence and descent. time to save and post. here, back, on sofa, cats fed, tv booted, email to be synced; the skies over london were spotlessly clear with 50 miles of visibility.

key memories of the trip:

– lunch (tapas) in madrid with endless amounts of sausage, herbed potato, bread, olive oil, calamari and fish, followed by the best wine and steak that i have had all year.

– hearing efi in lisbon, speaking in portugese, and realise that he’s reusing my who here can ride a motorbike? who here can drive a car? who here can fly a helicopter? schtick.

– the scottish woman who was doing simultaneous translation of our presentations into spanish, running up to me to ask if i was from edinburgh because she thought she identified my accent to be of her native town.

– the lunch in lisbon, with lovely, soggy-porridge-fluid cheeses in fabric rind casings, sawn-open and lashed over crusty bread.

– the endless customer questions

– the flight disasters (one missed, one 0500h early start whose benefits were undone by the iberia‘s ticket-office not opening until 0700h.

– sheer panic with a temporarily dead laptop

– the “pointy” shoes of all the spanish women, and the occasional scent of talc as they walk by

– madrid hotel four-star breakfast, except for the vile, vile coffee.

– gilles wardriving en-route to the lisbon venue.

– sweeping the audience for wireless devices, and writing them up as slides to wire into the presentation.

…oh, and many more, but i need to sleep.

sod.

i went to the doctor this afternoon, to ascertain why the back of my throat looks like a streetmap and why i once more feel the creeping itch of an infection trying to crawl up into my maxillary sinus.

every time i get some ear, nose or throat infection, it invariably has a bacterial component; this would be fortunate, were it not for the fact that my doctors seem unconvinced that (again) every time i have a bacterial infection, the amount of antibiotics necessary to address the infection in a normal-size human being will suffice to fix it in me.

hence my usual modus operandi of getting ill, going to see a quack, being dosed with antibiotics, getting mostly better, waiting two weeks, succumbing to the illness for a second time, getting dosed with more, uber-antibiotics, and eventually getting cured after two or three iterations of this loop.

it can’t be good for mankind – i must be selectively breeding resistant bacteria, acting as a grep for the ones that can hang-on throughout a mild antibiotic dose.

anyway – i am once again on penicillin, with a two-week course; since i am due in belgium soon, i shall be a good-boy and stay mostly-off the booze until the presentation (for which i must be fit) is over.

once it is over, then sod it, i shall be sampling the local booze, pills or no. i’ll probably just stop them for a day in order to extend the course temporally.

there’s been some excitement in my village this morning – about 0200 last night, some drunk driver hurtles up the a30 from the eastern direction, slewed across the road, mounted the pavement/sidewalk, uprooted a small tree and the 5-foot-high cast-iron grille that protected it, and caromed off the wall/gable of the local vetinary surgery.

gossip abounds, of course – i was told about this by my neighbour who got the details wrong. coming home from the home-improvement store this evening, i stopped to take a look. he must have been going a fair clip, since the tree and cast-iron grill was broken off cleanly and must have remained upright as he hit the building behind, since that is the only way to explain the inch-deep groove in the brickwork, five-feet off the ground, behind.

some of the local teenage yobs were hanging around the local late-night store, about 20 yards away; they started cat-calling and such while i had walked around the scene, and one of them came over and gave me the story which was in line with my interpretation, though he missed the significance of the groove.

at least he seemed pretty bright, but his droogs were pigs and revelling in it. i don’t know why people get like that. ignore them and they treat keep at it, be sarcastic in return and they get worse / attempt to out-do you, but if you are relentlessly cool and act as if they do have a brain and respect that, at least they usually don’t exacerbate things.

the bright one filled-in some details: apparently the guy drove home with a broken leg, and then got shopped by his mum, who turned him in to the police.

yay for justice and crime detection, still dependent upon being turned-in by mother, after all this marvellous cctv technology has been installed.

why did i feel inclined to take a look at the accident scene?

i dunno. maybe watching too much inspector morse in the past. rare to have an opportunity to look over a crime scene and see what i can solve for myself before learning someone else’s interpretation of the facts.

at the suggestion of brad i have started watching a amusing comedy/drama called “monk“, about an obsessive/compulsive who got kicked off the san francisco police force due to his condition, who now makes a life as a consultant.

the worrying thing from my perspective is that i solved the cases of both aired episodes well before the finish, and – in the case of the pilot – i solved it in real time:

fx: [shot rings out]
perp: “it came from up there!” [points at gunman]
alec: how did he know that? you’ld never be able to place it in those conditions. he must have known.

…plus i recognise some of the lead character’s habits and overattention to detail in myself, not to the same extent, but…

hmm….