So, today is the last day of Guadec. I’ll be heading home tomorrow. There was a GUADEC party last night that was a blast. I’ve met a lot of people from all around the world. Nokia is giving a talk right now about their involvement with Open Source. It’s very exciting to have a large company like Nokia announce their involvement with the community. I would really like to write more, but I’m trying to pay attention to the talk. I’ll definitely write a bunch when I get home. I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon sometime. I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed.

This is post number 2 from Germany. I went to Heidelberg yesterday. They have this big castle there which is conveniently placed at the top of a pretty high hill. The walk up to the castle was pretty brutal. I took a bunch of pictures from the top of the castle that came out pretty nice. I’ll try and post pictures tomorrow when I have access from my laptop. Heidelberg is much more touristy than Stuttgart. They have all these little tourist shops and restaurants. I also walked along the ‘Philosopher’s Walk’ which was pretty nice. It also suffered from being at the top of a steep hill. Well, I guess I was the one who suffered. It’s called the ‘Philospher’s Walk’ because Hegel used to walk along it or something like that. I was cursing him as I was climbing up the thing. I took pictures from there also. There’s a really nice view of the castle from there.

I’m writing this entry from an iMac that is in the internet cafe here. That would normally be fine, except this one has a German keyboard or something. It’s mostlty the same except the ‘Y’ and ‘Z’ keys have switched places. Oh, and there are a few more keys: öä€ß§°. :o)

It hit 38° C in Heidelberg yesterday. That’s like 98° F. In similar news, I’m having a little bit of trouble keeping myself hydrated. I’m drinking a bunch of water, but it took me a little while to figure out that that was the problem.

Stuttgart is so alive with people. There is this main pedestrian-only street called Königstraße which is just bustling with people. There always seems to be some kind of fair going on. I spent a bunch of time in the Schlossgarten (a park similar to Central Park) and there are always people there. On a Thursday afternoon the place was packed with people. Awesome.

Alright, I’m going to head over to where the conference is to catch the bus to Esslingen for a little medieval town action. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some pictures tomorrow.

Well, I made it. I’m posting this from some internet cafe in Stuttgart, Germany. The plane ride was a blast. It was really cool to see what I’m guessing was some part of New York or Long Island from that height in the dark. Each streetlight looked like a christmas tree light. The food they served us on the plane wasn’t that bad. While I was eating I was thinking about how flying is entirely ridiculous. We were never meant to fly. I almost laughed out loud. There I was something like 35000 feet over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean eating some pasta/chicken dish and a brownie. Fuck you nature – we’ll make wings. haha. I woke up over France. Yeah – France is just a bunch of farms. That’s it. I came over here and I looked at it and it’s all farms.

Once I landed in Stuttgart I exchanged my US cash for Euros. It’s a very weird experience to hand a person a bunch of $50 bills and have them hand you four pieces of paper that look fancy, have numbers on them, but don’t really hold any value in your mind. What are these things, fancy receipts or something? I dig that they have 1€ and 2€ coins though. Oh, when I got on the train, some kid sat across from me and he was wearing a shirt that said, “Long Island” on it. Pretty freaking weird.

It’s very weird to go to google and get redirected to www.google.de by the way. I’ve got to remind myself to setup webmail for myself because right now I don’t have a way of checking my email. That wouldn’t be such a problem except that if there’s any news about the conference I’ll be getting it in email. Bah. I took a bunch of pictures already, I’ll try and post them later if I get some access from my laptop. Alright – I’m going to try and find some food that isn’t *wurst. Later.

Alright, I’m leaving for Germany in less than 24 hours. I’m finding that I’m more nervous than I thought I would be. I’m kind of surprised because I don’t get nervous very often. It’s not the flight that’s making me nervous. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it’s not the flight. I think it’s just that I don’t know so many things about what’s going to happen in the next few days.

It’s going to be good to get away. I think it will be good for me to clear my head for a week or so. I haven’t spent 6 nights in a row in a hotel before. That’s going to be kind of weird. It’s long enough that it might make sense to actually put my clothes in the dresser that they have in the room.

There are a lot of things that I’m looking forward to doing in Germany. It may sound weird, but I’m really looking forward to just walking around the park that is in the middle of Stuttgart. I can’t imagine it being anything too special. I’ve seen trees, grass, and hills before, but these are German trees, grass, and hills.

I’m going to try and post to my blog when I get over there. I’ll probably be posting pictures as well. I’ve got to get to sleep now if I have any hope of falling asleep on the flight and dealing with the 6-hour time difference well. Later.

So, I’m leaving for Germany in just a few days. My plane leaves Wednesday at 9:00pm. I’m very excited and very anxious. I’ve never been on a plane (or even inside of an airport). I’m more scared about the airport than I am about the plane. I keep picturing this scenario where I entirely blunder the process by which I get on the plane and miss it. I know it is very unlikely, but I feel like there are processes in place at the airport that I don’t understand and am likely to mess up. “You can’t say bomb on an airplane.” I’ve got to keep that in mind.

In preparation for my trip I’ve been buying all kinds of things. I bought a new pair of sneakers since my other pair have received their fair amount of trouncing. I like the new ones:

They’re also the first pair of sneakers that I’ve ever seen which have Alkaline Trio lyrics in them.

I’m giving the presentation at the next LILUG meeting. The topic is “Logical Volume Management and Software RAID”. It’s a pretty neat topic for people who are interested in managing their hard drive space in interesting ways. There will be a lot of, “Wow, I didn’t even know that problem was even solvable.” moments during the presentation. That’s what I kept saying to myself when I was first reading up on the topic. It should be fun.

I’m going to try and crash the Silent Majority show at The Downtown tonight. I don’t have tickets, and I’ll probably do anything for them. So, if you have a ticket and you need someone dead or something, get in touch with me. I pretty much need to get in. If I don’t get in, I’m going to be a fair amount of miserable for the rest of the day.

My brother got these ridiculous stress relieving balls that look like breasts. The texture isn’t too bad. I mean, it’s not going to fool anyone, but you’d be hard pressed to find more realistic feeling stress relief balls. Nak, Raghav and Steve were over the other night and we played some poker. After Nak dropped out of the game, he passed out on the couch. I couldn’t resist taking this picture, and I couldn’t resist posting it either. Sorry Nak.

Update: I got into the Silent Majority show and it was entirely awesome. I’ve never seen a crowd go off like that. I hope they were able to raise a bunch of money for James MacCauliffe (I know I just butchered his last name’s spelling). I’m really glad that I was able to be there for the show. I ran into a bunch of people from high school who I hadn’t seen in a while (Matt Tutrone, Melinda, Dave Weck, etc.) It was a good night overall.