I'm a tad slow to write about things these days, I think I'm suffering from writer's block. But I'm finally able to sit down and write about my trip to Norway.

On 20 January, I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take me to Dorval. Instead of the normal ridiculously early flight, I had managed to book one for the evening. This was a welcome change and I was positively cheering going through airport security. I arrived early, so I sat about in the lounge, surfing the Internet, until the sun went down and we boarded the aircraft. I fell asleep immediately. When I woke up, we were just landing in London and I groggily collected my possessions.

I tried to get my bearings and stumbled into a queue. I went through airport security again, because the English don't believe that other countries do proper checks. Then I was spit out into some concourse shopping area. Heathrow is a very busy place, with people scurrying around and looking harried.

I pulled out my cellphone and tried to call Kyle. That's when I felt someone bump into me and I sped up my pace. Then another bump and I turned around to face my assailant. Oh, hi Kyle. We found a spot and waited for video screen to announce our gate to Oslo.

I dropped off again once we boarded the aeroplane and woke up for a snowy landing in Oslo. But it was 10°C warmer when compared to Montreal. I watched the luggage handlers unload our bags as people grabbed things from the overhead compartments. When we got out, I immediately noticed that the airport looked like a giant IKEA. We walked down a hallway with modular units, I ducked into a modular toilet, after passing a modular firehose, modular storage closet, and modular ventilation shaft. It was so modern that even the graffiti emphasized good design.

We found our way to the Flytoget, the airport expresss train, and bought some tickets using the automated teller. Then I tried to go through the turnstile but was defeated by my own stupidity. The security guard, who looked like a Valkyrie, took pity on me and waved me through. We got on the train and had just stowed our luggage when Daniel boarded our car. Hurray for chance meetings! We chatted as the train sped through the countryside and past snowy stations. I stared out the window as the bullet train made streaks out of tunnel lights.

An Ubuntu distribution sprint happens midway through the development cycle of each release. This one, for Oslo, concentrating on some last minute issues. Developers worked together on various features that required co-ordination, showed each other the bits they were working on, and had conversations about things that needed to get done. This was all done in the Scandic KNA, which is in the National Theatre district of Oslo. This was a short walk from the train station and we checked in with a minimum of fuss.

The next day, we got up bright and early. I spoke with Henrik about his idea for getting more people involved in testing the CD images we use to distribute Ubuntu. For the past couple of releases, we stop all development for a week before we release the distribution. Everyone stops and tries to install Ubuntu on all of their machines. The big problems with this method are that we stall developers for an entire week and we don't test the installer on enough diverse machines. His plan involves working with the Ubuntu Forums. Instructions for how to help out are there in a sticky thread.

The area around the hotel is pretty and relatively new. I think there's some kind of school or university across the street, students were always going in and out at around lunchtime. They had wrapped an entire building in plastic wrap and were doing some form of renovations. Tollef informs me that this area used to be the docks, but those got shut down and now it's full of condos. That's why everything is so convenient and hip and trendy. It reminded me of Canada, specifically Montréal, and alleviated some of the homesickness.

I also talked with Robert about bug triage and how to get more volunteers. Although the BugSquad and Ubuntu QA are growing at a steady pace, we still don't have the critical mass that keeps #ubuntu-bugs busy all the time. One of the suggestions is to create an announcement-only mailing list that tells people how to participate in new QA endeavours. People on the BugSquad should expect to be signed up soon.

On Thursday, to our surprise, the Monte Carlo Car Rally started just outside the hotel's front door. Car enthusiasts invaded, classic cars were parked in the garage, and we saw them queue up to start racing. Lovely, lovely machines.

We're definitely going to do things that make triaging easier and more exciting. For instance, bughelper is something that Henrik and Daniel have been hacking on. Bughelper is designed to help sift through bugs in the Ubuntu distribution and find what you're looking for. Be they duplicates, crashes, or a particular type of bug, it can help you in your searches. It's almost like a bug-grepper actually. And it's very, very helpful.

That evening, we went to Henrik's house for dinner. Phillip, who's working on his genetics Ph.D. made us all a very lovely meal. It was my first exposure to fishpudding, which appears to be something that Norwegians like serving to foreigners. A practical joke, perhaps? After dinner, we discovered that the neighbourhood football pitch had frozen over. After locating a tennis ball, a group of us went outside and played a variant of hockey. Until we lost the puck in the snow.

By now, people were starting to show signs of fatigue. Both Robert and Scott attended linux.conf.au right before they showed up. This meant they were disease vectors, which is what happens when you bring a whole bunch of people from all over the world into one big petri-dish of conference hall. Their particular plague seemed to be brutal, but not very contagious, as only some of us got violently ill. As usual, I happened to catch it.

On Friday night, we walked down to the fjords and stared out at the sea. They really are lovely, but there were a lot of people down by the docks so it was difficult to examine them properly. Tollef had made some reservations for us at a local Indian restaurant and we were treated to a lovely meal. Everything was cooked perfectly and left us happy and satiated.

Then came the bowling. Ben wanted to see just how many of us would lace up in smelly, rented shoes and embarass ourselves. I thought this was a marvellous idea. The first frame I ever threw was sort of a strange disaster. That's because I had never bowled before. So I tossed the bowling ball, which was far too heavy, backwards into my team. I managed to do reasonably well, for a beginner, by the end of the night. We stumbled back to hotel, tired but happy.

Early the next morning, Kyle and I woke up and headed to the airport. We caught the same flight to Heathrow, met Ben at the terminal, and then parted ways. I landed in Montréal feeling very tired and grumpy, but brightened up when I got out. Instead of my usual routine of catching the bus, I was swarmed by a group of friends. They had come, on my birthday, to whisk me away to a surprise party. I love you guys!

I had a very long bath and slept for a very long time.

I have a terribly sore throat. My left tonsil has decided to inflate to twice its size.

I blame the stamps.

Already, I am making headway. I've put the bedsheets in the dryer. And watered my plants.

I've also removed a shard of glass from my foot. It's been there since Sunday. No wonder it hurt so much to walk.

Maybe that is why I'm sick.

I have a headache, a backache, and swollen tonsils.

I finished making dinner, by myself.

I am staring at a sink full of dishes.

I have laundry to tend to.

I need to revise a brochure and finish a whitepaper.

I have a suitcase to pack.

I cannot find my passport.

I hate that I'm whinging.

I have to wake up early tomorrow.

i am completely overwhelmed.

Due to a confluence of freakish weather and constant activity, my body decided to crash. I noticed this, because I had gotten up this morning to do my daily activities.

I thought, "Self, you're not feeling so bad anymore. We've just got a little scratchy throat, is all."

So I went about making breakfast and getting dressed and catching up on e-mail.

Then, I found myself waking up to a crink in my neck and the sun high in the sky. Betrayed by my own body! Curses.

And in the intervening time, I seem to have received more e-mail. I cannot win.

I tend to get ill during the winter holidays; not every year, but often enough that I'm no longer upset that it happens. I've spent a New Year dreaming feverishly in a guest bed, Christmas ruined by food poisoning, and countless holidays propped upright in bed.

I think that my immune system just gives up at around this time of year. After I got out of university, I started sleeping more and trying to slack off, but this was just not my nature. So I've filled up my schedule again such that is comfortably hectic again. I think my body retaliates by conspiring to get me some proper sleep during the darkest times of the year.

So sitting in bed with a box of tissues is not a novel experience for me. It is somewhat mitigated by my trusty laptop which has provided me with a means of distracting myself. This holiday season, I managed to get ill while at home which means that I'm surrounded by people who will take care of me and that I have access to high-speed Internet. So I've just been wasting time for NITI and getting stuff done reading LiveJournal. No, wait a second, reverse that.

I even found a pair of earbuds lying around, so I've been able to listen to the music on my laptop. This is in addition to the streaming audio that my last.fm account provides me; a feature I have only recently discovered. The nice thing is that since I have paid, you too can listen to the music that I do.

Whenever I get tired (which is often when one is ill) I just close my eyes and pass out. Each time I wake up, there is more tasty food to eat. I've tucked into numerous steamed fish, pork ribs braised with bitter melon, mutton belly with bean curd, and other tasty treats.

This is the best holiday ever!

cough, sniffle, cough

In a desparate attempt to get six loads of laundry done, I woke up this morning at 5:30. My brain was not quite ready to handle this transition, which is why I didn't do it very well. But this ungodly hour is the only time nobody else is using the washing machine downstairs, on the weekends at least, so I had to seize my oppportunity.

As soon as I was done, I passed out between freshly laundered sheets. Wonderful!

When I awoke, I got ready for a trip to Café l'Utopik. There, I found joenotcharles, vierge_en_trop, feygele sitting around a Scrabble board. With them was phoebus, introduced to me as a man distinguished by his choice of T-shirt.

There were some ill people sitting around the table, such that I could start to smell the disease. It hung in the air like a palpable vapour. I wondered what it was, until I noticed coughing. Oh dear, I hope I haven't caught anything. I always take forever to heal.

After the first game finished, iangurudata had shown up. Along with Liz and Jenny, whom I have never met before. I joined in on a game where I lost spectacularly, and incapable of spelling a word with two blank tiles. Benjamin spent at least ten minutes trying to figure out how to put it on the board, while everyone else packed up around him.

As a consolation, I treated myself to some ice cream. I'm not sure that was a brilliant idea, because I forgot to take lactese beforehand. Ah well, no pain yet, which must be a good sign.

I arrived home in time for it to be dark out. It seems to have turned out to be an excellent day: clean clothes, new people, and the return of my book. Huzzah!

I woke up this morning with a miserable voice and a sore throat. Oh great, I must have caught a cold from someone last night.

I looked in the fridge and noticed a tall jar of something labelled "Citrus Tea 柚子茶", which my parents left behind the last time they came up to visit. It has the look and texture of marmalade. In fact, it even tastes like marmalade. There are little strips of "citrus peel", which I presume is pummello skin. Unlike English marmalade, however, this jar of stuff still has the seeds in it.

The idea is to drop a couple of tablespoons of the stuff into a mug, pour in hot water, and drink that as a restorative. I'll have to say that it tastes pretty good, once you get past the seeds, and it's fairly nice on the throat. It certainly is better than popping vitamic C tablets and drinking plain hot water. Though I think I might go out and buy orange marmalade once this jar runs out.

I hear my heartbeat in my forehead.
The world is spinning out of grasp.
And I feel, oh I feel,
I feel ill.

The bus is lurching to a stop now.
I lean onto the windowpain.
And I feel, oh I feel,
I feel ill.

Let us step into the street night.
The air is damp as I am chill.
And I feel, oh I feel,
I'm so ill.

Simon Law
28 April 2005, 23:44.
Montréal, QC.

I seem to have caught a cold of some sort from last night. Which is sad, because I so enjoyed my time out. Now I have spent most of my morning shivering in bed, downing copious quantities of vitamin C and trying to ignore my fuzzy head. Oh yeah, it's raining right now, so my joints are acting up again.

elliptic_curve has just brought me a bowl of chicken noodle soup. That's pretty sweet of her. It's nice to have something warm to eat and I really appreciate it.

Yesterday, I started the day off right by sitting down at the computer and thrashing away at bugs until I got them done. I accidentally discovered a regression, but then beat it soundly because I remember what I did a couple of weeks ago. It's so nice to become familiar with a chunk of code again, because you grok how things are supposed to work.

After finishing up work for the day, I headed into the office. I know this seems sort of backwards, but it works pretty well. Anyway, into the office I picked up wlach and cpirate. We went into the métro and exited at Kanda, where elliptic_curve was already waiting for us. There was much gorging on tasty sushi at an incredibly full restaurant. It was a good thing that reservations were made.

After dinner, elliptic_curve and I went back into the métro to Berri-UQAM. We walked up St-Denis until we got to Café Chaos in order to see a show. You see, we both know aeon_of_maat who was playing in his band: "Panick and the Silent Folk." As well, elliptic_curve knew abelynx, a singer (?) in "The Scroll" from when she used to live in Montréal. I got to meet robotics_girl as well as Caspian. I think I saw Jamie from evildrgo's party there. She stayed long enough to see aeon_of_maat play and then left before I could say hello.

I've got to say that I lack the depth of experience and vocabulary to described what I experienced properly. I note that it was dark, smoky, and loud; but I'm sure those were only superficial descriptions of the event. I did notice that many people really enjoyed both acts of the show, so there is obviously merit that I'm just unable to taste now. Still, this foray into music produced post-1975 is probably something good for me. It's fairly embarrassing to realise that the only music I can accurately identify is from my dad's youth.

I was sick today, so I spent most of my time lounging around at home. And by lounging, I really mean being unconscious in bed. I think Timin got a little upset that I was sleeping more than he was, because he kept on waking me up and trying to get me to watch him eat.

Eventually, I had to kick him out of my room. He's nice to sleep next to, but he sure is persistent when he wants something. Right now, he is sitting, very demurely I might add, next to the mouse in the hopes of some affection. I've trained him not to step on the keyboard or bat at the mouse, which causes me horrible grief when my window manager is set to sloppy-focus. He's being adorable, just like he was in the afternoon.

I keep on letting him outside in the day, because I think that makes him happy. He's sharpened his claws into tiny knives, which makes it painful whenever he tries to sit on me, or sleep on my stomach. I have yet to get it into his little head that clawing me makes me upset, but I try. All throughout his time here, I give yelps whenever he does it, as if I am hurt. I think he claws me less often than he used to, but sometimes he forgets and I have to toss him off.

However, those claws are formidable weapons and so I am sure he is glad to go outside and hunt again. It will only be a matter of time before he starts dragging wildlife into the house. I only hope that he doesn't go after things that are bigger than his head.

Again, I must show up to the gym at 9:00 this morning. Lately, sleep has not been entirely restful, so I must do the following things:

1. Get a RAMQ card. Hangs head in shame.
2. Go find a doctor.
3. Go to a sleep clinic and get checked out for sleep apnea.

I hope that people take me up on my offers to exercise with me. It's been quite rewarding.

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I woke up cold this morning. This is unusual, because my room stays at about 27°C.

I'm sick. Not ill on my back like denizsarikaya but enough to say, "ha ha, very funny." I'm overdosing on vitamin C right now.

With great regret, I had to call Allison and Damian and cancel our trip to get library cards. When we were in the area, we were also going to visit Monas and spoil ourselves by buying kitchen things. I haven't engaged in rampant consumerism in… oh… a couple years. So it would have been fun to pick up some thick-bottomed pots. Or a new butane torch.

I'm leaving tomorrow for Toronto at 15:40, so I'm giving myself as much bedrest as I can today. I think I'll be better by the time I wake up. Besides, I have a lot of reading and writing that I'd like to do.

Oooh. I made a good decision. Instead of trying to transfer on the Greyhound, and completely missing the connexion, I'm going to connect through the trains itself. This should be fine for going to Kitchener, and strangely enough, it is cheaper too. I guess Kitchener isn't a wild and crazy town that people oft visit.

I'm back in Toronto once more after a boring 16 hour flight. This time, I took Gravol, so I slept through most of it. I guess the most excitement we had was having a left engine blow out as we descended into Pearson.

However, we weren't off the hook yet. Even though we cleared customs easily, Mom and Flora weren't able to find Terminal 1, so we stood out in the cold for the longest time waiting for the van. After we loaded everything in the car, it started making strange noises. By the time we got to the Weston Rd. exit on the 401, the engine decided to give out. We lucked out, and were able to pull into a parking lot before we lost momentum. Half and hour and a tow-truck later, we are now back home.

Oh great. LiveJournal is down. Oh well, what's another batched post?

Being ill means spending most of the day in bed. I suspect that last night, I forgot to take my cough medicine before going to bed. This caused me to fail to sleep at all until I had my morning dose. Note to self, when you are coughing your lungs out and you think you've already taken your cough medicine, it's still probably alright to drink some more.

We walked down a street lined with stores, and bumped into a store that carried the new cellular telephone my dad had on him. It's a BenQ S700, and is priced at HK$3680. That's ludicrously expensive, and quite a generous gift.

We went into a mall, looking for a particular audio-visual store where we know. Wandering down a floor, we were suddenly accosted by ugly looking men standing outside their shopfronts. Now you have to imagine this mall like this. It's a square, with escalators bringing you up a corner. When you get to the floor, it's only 2m tall, so tall people would brust the ceiling. Each shopfront is maybe 2mx3m, the size of a small bedroom. And the hallways are just wide enough for two people to pass by. So standing in these hallways are men who are calling out to people as they walk past, trying to get them to buy (obviously) duplicated Video CDs and DVDs. What was disconcerting was seeing pictures of naked asian women with their privates pixellated—while walking down this hallway with my dad. Quite surreal actually.

We eventually escaped, and were able to make it to this AV store. Sadly, we discovered that SanDisk only makes MiniSD cards as large as 256MB. We were hoping for something in the 512MB range. Ah well, it will have to do.

I spent all of last night coughing instead of sleeping. Every half and hour or so, I'd be woken up by my body's reflexive, and unsuccessful attempt, to cough up a lung. I've got some phelgm stuck in there that's obviously giving me some irritiation. The pollution here is ridiculous, so anyone with a breathing disorder should probably stock up on puffers before coming here. Maybe I should go around wearing a mask or something?

I'm also completely surprised at how many people have commented on Home, which was a little piece I wrote to disprove ayria. This backfired horribly, as people actually liked what I wrote. Now what do I do? Write more, and post it?

More importantly, how much do I bare my spirit? Moreover, since I am such a private person, can I handle having people know my private thoughts? As regular readers may have noticed, I have yet to make a private or protected post, since I've been presuming that anything I write will eventually be known by the public anyway. Which means that my journal lacks the je ne sais quoi that angsty teenagers imbue in theirs.

Today, we moved out of Uncle Luk's place and into my paternal grandparents'. I'm sitting on my grandmother's bed, being absolutely miserable.

I went to the western doctor this morning, which was rather interesting. You register with the receptionist, up front, as usual. Then, you're ushered in to see the doctor, who makes a diagnosis. This particular doctor enters your information into a database, instead of actually writing into a file. Then, he prescribes some medication. Here's the odd part. You walk back out into the waiting area, and the receptionist is filling out the prescription. You pay both the doctor's fee and for the drugs right then.

After taking some of the medicine, from child-accessible ziplock bags, we had to send Flora and mom off to the airport. This was a reasonably good journey, as I drifted off halfway through. By the time I'm writing this, they should be flying over Siberia.

There's an open wireless access point in the vicinity, and I can sniff it, but I can't seem to get anywhere. DHCP doesn't offer me an address, but I can see other Windows boxes kicking around. Perhaps more time with Ethereal running will lead to Internet goodness?

After a nap, I found a new access point that's wide open. Yay!

There's a big Buddha statue up on a Lantau island. I was in a photo-taking fenzy as I climbed up and down it. Then, we rushed about to go places, and I collapsed in exhaustion.

Too ill to remember much. My camera will have to do that for me.