Photo: Hannover has many very interesting architectural examples of goodness. And a lot more water than one might at first imagine.
I’ve uploaded a few photos from my trip to Hannover a couple of weeks back. I enjoyed walking along the waterfront and found the rest of the town to be quite inspiring. I will be popping over to Hannover again soon and will likely take some time to visit friends in Munich (not even remotely nearby) while I’m over there. I’ve got a trip to Brussels to get in too at some point and of course I am away a couple of times in October. I’m judging entries for some awards at the moment and really should get my nominations done, also probably should start to think about what I’ll say at LinuxWorld next month. I just gave my standard Embedded Linux talk (though quite randomly modified) at the September meeting of the sblug. Fortunately, although I had no idea I was going to be speaking, Hannah had randomly called me to tell me about it the night before – at least someone knew. Fun stuff.
I have to find a place that’ll let me send a prepackaged FedEx parcel sometime before I lose another day. It’d be good to get all this sorted out and get going. Mailed a few people about this over the last week and should have some extra help on hand when necessary. Hopefully I’ll get to go to Boston and New Jersey as part of my Christmas trip – we’ll see. But it looks like there will also be some moving to do before then as I look for somewhere in the Reading/Bracknell area on a reasonably short contract. Dunno exactly what’s happening with all that just yet.
Photo: Some enterprising young guys dressed as superheros charge bystanders for their photo with a random character on a Saturday night.
Wagamama sent me some vouchers, to the tune of 30 quid. But I’m afraid that’s not going to be enough since that’s only a free meal to them. I’m toying with returning them instead. If they’d sent me a real 30 pounds then I might feel less bothered because I could go and buy more Runrig albums with it instead. Meh. Looks like I’ll be nearby this evening anyway – so I might take it up with them if they’re not too busy. We’re going to see the newest remake of that Jane Austin book. Could they have maybe made another story instead for a change? Or maybe just paid Keira Knightly to make another random chick action flick? Still, it’ll be watchable and that’s all they want from the audience – they’ve already sold this to the over 50 crowd and adding Keira means there’s something for the descerning gentlemen who takes his girlfriend, family, or whatever affiliation. Gotta give Hollywood some credit for rehashing old stuff.
Photo: My sister models the latest issue of LU&D. You want to buy it.
The other evening was pretty amusing. I gave a talk on random stuff and had about 20-30 people turn up to listen to it. Good thing I found out about it. I took a few boards along with me with flashing lights and gave some demos – also gave an overview of programmable logic and dynamicly configurable hardware devices and their relevence to Linux. Especially how the IP rights issues affect people working with Open Source (that you just can’t reverse engineer some of this stuff, you need expensive development tools, but you can also have people who are developing open source hardware too). I gave examples of devices using FPGAs and explained how these things benefit Cray, the NSA, and your local nuclear missle or spy place (because the hardware is useless until it’s deployed and an encrypted configuration loaded). I’m glad I strayed from the slides as they were very technical and very boring – and I find that this is a good way to address cases where you have an audience member who seems to know it all.
After the evening formalities, we retired to a nearby bar and discussed random stuff. I’ve invited Tim Williams to join me/us on the little jolly up Snowdon (anyone else?). I went back to Hannah and Joe’s lovely house and had some cake with their next door neighbours (how cool it is having next door neighbours like Kat and David right on your door step). Invited them to contribute some LAMP stuff and then slept very well in the Wriggles’s spare room.
Photo: Ottawa really is south of London (England), by a few degrees.
Just so I don’t go a whole entry without any politics. I took a train back from Birmingham yesterday morning (and wrote a whole entry on the evils of Charles Clarke) and was reading shocking things in the Metro and Independent (I was given vouchers for the new Guardian, but can I even bring myself to buy that? Would I take it if it were free?). We now live in a police state where it’s forbidden to speak about many things or a fuckwit and his cronies might have you sent over to Cuba for an extended holiday. I hate what this country is wanting to become. As I mentioned in the entry I might post, I have decided to read about the soviet purge trails in Hollywood in the early 20th centuary – this is our modern day witchhunt and it is terrorism.
Jon.