Madrid
I'm in Madrid now. On Friday afternoon, I returned to Cambridge from Vienna. Unfortunately, I couldn't start packing straight away because I had to work on a paper which was due Friday night. At about midnight my co-author noticed that the deadline had been extended until Wednesday so I went to sleep. The next day I finished packing and then started moving everything into my office at the university. Unfortunately, that took much longer than expected and I missed my bus to the airport. Turbo boost (aka taxi) to rescue and I was at the airport in time.
I'm really slowly getting fed up with moving and need to settle down. It's just so much work, and that even though I don't own terribly much. I wonder how other people cope... in the last five years, I've lived in London, Innsbruck, Vienna, Melbourne, Cambridge and now Madrid. Hmm.
Anyway, Madrid is fun. I'm sure I'm going to enjoy my time here. The people in the group I work with at the university are incredibly smart and friendly. Last night, Gregorio (my main contact at the university), Diego (the guy I'm staying with) and I went out for dinner... nice food and Sangria! What more do you want? The place I'm staying at is nice... Diego is friendly, we have wireless, a fairly big apartment and there's a balcony where I can see myself sitting with my laptop working on stuff and sipping Sangria... I don't know yet how I'll cope with the commute given that I've always lived very close to work (5 minutes per foot in Cambridge was about all I needed for everything) but I'm sure I'll find something to do. It will also be a really interesting experience to life in a country where you don't speak the language.
Vienna
I spent Monday to Friday in Vienna, visiting some friends from school. Quite a few people I know moved to Vienna after finishing high school (or later), so I thought I'd go there for a few days to meet up with some of them.
On Monday evening, I gave a talk at Debienna, the Debian group in Vienna. I started with one of my presentations about quality issues in free software, but given that we were a small and informal group we often interrupted the presentation for discussions. During these discussions the generic issues I mentioned were applied to Debian and we discussed a number of problems in Debian and what we could do about them. I think it was quite interesting, although it stretched the talk quite a bit and some people were getting restless towards the end. This was also the first talk I gave in German. I originally planned to give it in English but then thought I'd try to do it in German. It went pretty well, although I couldn't think of a number of words on the spot and just used English words instead. (Not counting technical terms, obviously, which I didn't even try to translate.)
On Tuesday and Wednesday, I mostly stayed in bed working on my laptop. This was, after all, only a pseudo-holiday and I had plenty of work to do. On Wednesday evening, Veronika (the friend I was staying with), maks (Maximilian Attems) and I went to B72 to see a concert by Das Bo. There was also a DJ from Waxos who was great. Das Bo was pretty good too, although he talked too much crap between songs.
On Thursday, Veronika and I went shopping and I bought lots of new clothes. Friday morning, just before leaving, I met with Stefan Holek to do an interview about release management in Plone for my research. He raised a number of really interesting issues.