You might know that Akademy 2009 is going to be held in the Canary Islands in July. It’s going to be fantastic and fun and hot and warm and we’ll be absolutely spending time at the beach rather than listening to some technical mumbo jumbo.

But I have to say – it must be one of the most ill conceived locations to put a conference. It’s far from the US. It’s relatively far from Europe, and it’s fucking far from Australia. The only people that will have a short trip will be those in Western Sahara.

My tentative flight route is ridiculous – via Singapore, Milan and Madrid. That’s 3 stop overs. 38 hours of travel time. Plotting straight lines from stop to stop puts the trip at a whopping 19514.39km. Just so you know just how far this is: it is 32% of the radius around Saturn. I’m not even going to tell you the cost.

I’ll start by saying that l think we had very productive week, getting lots of design and development done towards our goals for Amarok 2.0. We focused heavily on critiqueing the user interfaces of the major components in our GUI: the playlist, context view and each of our sidebar browsers. In between hacking hours, Mark, Leo and myself hosted design and release-breaking-issue sessions. These have provided valuable direction and motivation to all of our developers, so you can look forward to some exciting progress as we gear up to an imminent beta (and eventually final) release!

We also brainstormed a number of post 2.0 ideas such as interface adjustments to enhance your application experience, including, but not withstanding, mobile and embedded devices. Yes, that’s right folks, before too long (hopefully) you’ll be able to run Amarok on your favourite (maybe) small form factor device. The main use case would be for remote collections and streaming, but we’re not going to shut out users who like carrying 8GB of music on memory cards.

All this talk of small form factor devices is making me drool over my N810 as I write this. Some observations: all this very slow and awkward typing makes me much more coherent; leeching off random wireless to blog has never been easier; and, the inbuilt GPS has already proven invaluable to the Amarok crew as we used it to find our restaurant when we got lost cycling through the mid-west of Belgium. Note: never cycle 15km immediately after eating a huge meal, and never let Casey on a bicycle.

Finally, a big thanks to all that made Akademy so great: the organisers, the participants, the speakers, the boffers, the paparazzi, and all the people that were responsible for either brewing, frying or coating things in sugar.

– Paris has more museums than you could poke a stick at, all of which are sensational (Louvre, d’Orsay, Rodin etc etc)
– Stayed in the beautiful Hotel de Ville suburb, and went out to the Sacre Cour for two excellent evenings with the rest of Paris for evenings of music and singing
– Bought a museum pass which meant I saw a whole lot more than I would have otherwise seen, such as Saint Chapelle and the Concergerie. Saint Chapelle has all of Genesis, Exodus etc in tiled stained glass windows, which we could even figure out from the pictorials.
– It was easy to fool the French and extend the validity of the museum pass simply by scribbling a new date on the card.
– Have eaten a baguette every day, without fail. Need more fibre.
– Then discovered that croissants were actually invented in Bulgaria when it was under siege by the Turks in the 1600s. The shape of the pastry is meant to represent the cresent on the Turkish flag.
– The high speed train is very high speed.
– Have stayed in “hotels” with neon signs flooding the room, stained carpets and crazies shouting at our window for the price of a stay in a small castle.
– French people don’t understand any English unless you insert a dragged ‘le’ before every other word.
– Every meal seemed better than the one before it, it’s a gastronomical wonderland!
– Spent 5 extremely scorching days in Nice, went diving and visited Cannes and Monte Carlo
– Saw more Ferarris in Monaco than I’ve seen in my entire life

Currently in Belgium at Akademy where I’ve already had my fair share of Belgian fries, waffles and beer. More updates coming soon.

The Taipei 101 is also really cool because it has the fastest elevator in the world, going from top to bottom in an incredible 36 seconds! That’s 1000m per minute! Charlie and his glass elevator really need to upgrade. We also managed to find some Taiwanese fried chicken with mixed vegies for lunch in some back alley behind the world trade center (which we casually strolled through, thongs, singlets and cameras in hand) before discovering a totally awesome suburb of Taipei which only sold computer and camera gear. Seriously, it was streets and streets worth, probably bigger than my university campus (and that’s big, folks!).

The Confucius temple was lots of fun and very colourful, with red and gold decorations and pagoda rooftops adorned with intricate dragons. Seeing as our hostel was close to one of the most famous landmarks, the Chiang Kai Shek memorial, we visited this enormous plaza at the end of the day so that we had a quick getaway back to the hostel for feet resting time. I could not believe the magnitude of this place. It is probably possible to fit over 100 football fields in the space. My camera couldn’t capture the entire space, so here’s a panorama. If you want to get a feel for JUST HOW FREAKING HUGE it is, click on the photo.

Another grand attraction of Taipei is the Shilin night market where you can experience things such as:
– Stinky tofu (it smells worse than gtk+)
– Asian Elvis impersonators with awesome gold pants
– Never-ending arcades stacked full of Dance-Dance-Revolution machines
– Random old Taiwanese men giving random hints on life
– Buying “pets” as close to being Bonsai as you can get without shoving them into a jar
– Awesome fruits, like durian, dragon fruit and rose apple

And then there is the Grand Palace Museum, which true to it’s name is both very grand, palatial and is host to the finest collection of Chinese art in the world.

That’s a lot of links in one post. Here’s another one for good measure:linkety clinkety (completely factual)

Later in the afternoon Pradeepto spoke about the kde-edu project, and Ian and I spoke about Amarok 2. It was a little unfortunate that the number of attendees waned towards the end of the day but I still think the event was more than fantastic. Ellis and the folk from Asus treated us all to a wonderful Taiwanese dinner by the seafront in the waterfront town of Danshui. It was great fun . Here’s most of the team in a group photo:

Summing up, I had a great time. The summit was definitely a great endeavour and hopefully has brought on the right change and the first step to have free software and hardware promoted throughout Taiwan and the Asian world.

The aim of OTST is to promote open software and hardware to the Taiwanese, who are quite backward in their thinking of FOSS culture. We’re here on a religious missionary crusade to try and convince them to pick up free software! There were a number of interesting talks today, such as an introductions to OHI and OpenPattern, ultra cool speech recognition software for the EeePC and a general EeePC hacking howto. There were a few talks in Chinese, but I still found it easy to understand how cool it was to see compositing support on the EeePC.

In the early evening we had a light dinner party (which was quite heavy as we’d been fed all day), with two performances by local creative-commons artists. It’s heart-warming to see that Asus is putting a lot of effort into hosting this event and really trying to push the FOSS movement in Taiwan.

I’ll be traveling in Thailand, Cambodia & Laos for 6 weeks from mid-January till beginning of March 2006.

I’m very excited.
Very excited.
In fact, i bought the Lonely Planet publication for South East Asia on a Shoe String.

Cya, gotta go pack my avian bird flu antidote!

I’ve uploaded some photos, but here are some to whet your senses:

I suppose it’s not such a bad effort .

Soon to be expanding, I hope!

From Petra I returned to Aqaba, ate great Shwarma, then back into Eilat. I hung around Eilat for the day, but i found nothing to do there that i didn’t do cheaper in Egypt. Hence, I moved straight on to Jerusalem, where I stayed for 10 days.

Jerusalem truly is a city of 3000 years. Amazingly, the city is still split up into the old and the new. The old city, city of the ancient kings, still has remains from the time of David and Solomon. One such example is the Kotel/Western Wall, the last remaining wall of the Second Temple.

Despite all the religious tension in Israel, it is incredible to see the 3 major religions of the area in one place. The Kotel, the Dome of the Rock, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I managed to get to the Christian quarter of the old city on Christmas day, and it was an awesome place to be!

At one point I decided I wanted to go to the Dead Sea, so I did! Beck and I caught went to the Dead Sea, and spent 10 minutes getting into the freezing cold water (its winter here!). Covering ourselves with dead sea mineral extract mud, we got into the water, and floated! It was unreal. We then walked to Masada, yeah, from the dead sea! and when we arrived, we were told that it was closed for the day. Far out, it was only 3pm!!!! Might go back this weekend or something like that.

The end of the week proved to us that we would have to get into gear for study mode. The MDA (ambulance) program required a full week of study, involving studying from 8:30am -> 9pm, including food, and then studying our selves afterwards. Wow, we barely slept. Fortunately most of us in the course passed, and we have been volunteering on the ambulances since then.

It has been nearly 3 weeks since our first shifts, and we are having a great time. By the book, we are meant to be volunteering on the White ambulance, which is the lowest level. Being Israel and all, we have all had a chance (if not more) to be on the ICU (intensive care ambulance). For me, i have had most of my shifts on the ICU, which is great!

Infact, my very first shift was on an ICU – thats a cool story, i’ll tell you about it. I arrived around 6:45 to my shift, where an anxious paramedic comes to me and says – quickly, we need another person on the ambulance. We arrived at a house of a 200kg woman, who smelt like she hadn’t left her couch in weeks, and was sweating, leaving a noxious set of fumes behind. She was having problems breathing, and after heaving her into the chair (half-out), she was into the ambulance. Now it gets fun. Halfway through preparing an IV, the paramedic turns to me and says – do you know how to do CPR? I nodded certainly, causing him to rip open her shirt (and fat fall everywhere), and command me to do CPR on the little bit of her chest not obstructed by fat. Sorry with my obsession with the fat, but it was so overpowering that it got lodged in my brain like a clot.

For 15 minutes, I was doing compressions which i found out was very tiring. It was amazing to see how i was providing her pulse which I got to see on the Lifepack. We arrived at the hospital, still doing compressions on the patient on the stretcher, and then got to see all the cool stuff the doctors did in the emergency room.

Admittedly, from that point I had hope to see lots of really intense stuff, but old people are a bit of a disappointment sometimes! Regardless, I have seen a lot, from CPR to amputations to trauma in car accidents and falls. All this in less than 3 weeks! Yikes!

I am staying currently in Ra’anana, one of the richest areas in Israel which has its ups and downs. Ups – cool houses, very clean area, lots of parks, etc. Downs – very expensive. If anybody would like to send me a msg or something – my mobile number is: +972 525 851 099. I would love to hear from you.

So, at this point I must leave you all, and if you write back to me, and let me know what is happening with you, you will find more emails in your inbox .

Keep well, and have great holidays,
Seb