This will not wait until the daily summary: in Extremadura all mainterance costs of all LinEx distributions, including a dedicated system administrator in every school and including three developers only cost them 1.08 euro per computer per year !!!
This is simply fenomenal.

Let us try out a photoblogging format for the daily Debconf5 reportings.
I only arrived here yesterday and here is the schedule of the bus from the center of Helsinki to the campus region:

After following the many friendly signs, I arrived to the site and spotted the first developers:

Some more were just around the corner:


After trying to start the wireless according to several mystical HowTo's and giving up after two hours, I had to plug myself into the Ethernet jack in the dorm room and start working on the presentation for tomorrow. Actually I was not the only one doing that on the last night - developers are lazy :)

The night was long and funny

Around 70 developers were said to have arrived on this day


No photos from the dorm sauna, sorry :)

In the morning we only got up half an hour before the end of the breakfast - around 8:30.

Hurrray!
648 in favor (of rejection), 14 against, 18 abstentions

A couple of days ago I was at an event of the local anime society - half a night of anime. The selected movies were really psyhic. It started with a simple and easy "She and her cat", continued with a nice and romantic "Voices of a distant star" and then went into overdrive with "1001 night", "Perfect Blue", "Cat soup" and "Tales of the Labyrinth". In the end there was a chillout period with "Ghiblis" and another version of "She and her cat".

As that was not enough for us - we went for an afterparty: watching "Fruit basket" 'till the morning :D

When I came back from Brussels, my bag went missing in the airport. It seams that BXL airport folks lost a trolley or something, as I was not alone in this. The airport people took my phone number, home address, tag and ticket numbers and a description of the bag.
The next day they called in to say that they found it. In a half an hour a delivery man from the airport came to my house to bring my bag.
All well what ends well.

Yesterday I started to try to configure my desktop and my notebook to talk to each other via wireless using the AdHoc mode. The results were far from good - the best I could get, after few hours of desperate hacking around, was a working link with 100 Kbit/s.
The best thing was that my desktop started behaving erratically - almost all programs started to have strange 2 minute hangs all the time. Strace showed that they tried to connect to the portmapper. Disabling, enabling or even removing the portmapper didn't help. After much head bumping I traced the culpit back to a SNAT statement that I put up to allow my notebook to get some Internet - I appeared to SNAT all localhost connections and they had to timeout instead of getting an instant 'Connection refused'.
Doh!

Today I cook for the FFII apartment and nobody can stop me :D
I am trying out a variation of the spagetti with a meat/potato sauce, so nothing can go wrong there. Or so you thought ...

A slow start of a slow day - I broke my 5 am rule :(. I only woke up at 9:30. The breakfast hall had a lot of Russian tourists - you cann't avoid them anywhere :).
Nothing FFIIish to do today - all Latvian MEPs are gone. For that reason I am in the FFII apartment catching up on my mail, filling Google SoC application and tax forms (I hate taxes!) and helping all the guys here to make the decision that they do not want to make :)
It turns out that at least five separate groups have tabled our "Rocard-Buzek compromise" amendment sets and there is a bit of a confusion in the tabling office regarding the name of this set in the official papers.
It's a pity that I've not yet started writing anything for the SoC - that is bad. I will spend the whole of the next week on that to catch up with the schedule that I still have to make :)

I woke up at 5.00 local time without any alarm clocks! That is one hell of an accomplishment. :)
Today I planned to visit (without prior notice) all Latvian MEPs. I had a small setback when I found out that most of them have the whole day busy at different group meeting and then all of them leave home this evening. After finding that out I changed the strategy a bit and gave all the revelant information to the assistants asking them to give it to the MEP and still to try to schedule a meeting with me today. It worked in some cases.
At first I was simply walking around and telling everyone how we would like to fix the directive using the "Buzek-Rocard compromise" amendments. After the lunch, Erik came up to me and asked to also collect MEP signatures on these amendments to table them. At first I went to Lansbergis from Lithuania and spend almost an hour convincing him to sign. In the end he was convinced and did the signing.
After that success I called the assistant of Andrejevs and asked if his MEP would have a few minutes to meet and sign the amendments. The assistant replied that Andrejevs liked the amendments and will sign them as soon as he gets back to the office. This one was easy :)
After that a call came from assistant of Girts Valdis Kristovskis saying that he will meet me at 17.00. I was very glad about getting the previose two signatures, but a bit discuraged by yesterdays talk with Krasts, who is in the same party as Kristovskis. To my surprise Kristovskis didn't mind that his party mate didn't agree with us - after 5-10 minutes of explanations, Kristovskis was ready to sign the amendments. That signature came as a pleasant surprise :)
All Latvian members of EPP followed Dombrovskis and Piiks and signed the amendments - I consider that a great success, especially as I didn't even have to ask them for that :D
After the very busy day at the Parliament I went to the FFII apartment to assess the Web. Me and Jan were there. We were late for the regular FFII status dinner at 20:00 which was taking place at my hotel - 20-25 minutes from the apartment. It was raining. I wanted to take a taxi, but Jan wanted to walk. We made a compromise - we would walk until we see a taxi, and that we'll take it. Unfortunately there was no taxi in sight untill we were 100 meters from the hotel. Doh.
Some bits of Chinese food and dinner talks later I went to bed. This was one of the hardes days in my short lobbying career :P

I arrived to Brussels, slept two hours on the plane. When to the FFII apartment to check the mail and forgot to change the clothes in the hotel. That's why I had to go meet Latvian MEPs in jeans and shirt instead of the nice suit I had bought earlier.
First I met with the assistant of Georgs Andrejevs. He has not followed the issue too closely, but in the end was very positive and interested. I need to send him more details about JURI amendments and our "Buzek-Rocard compromise amendments" and he will inquire the ALDE position.
Then I met with Guntars Krasts from UEN - he seams to be very poisoned by the EICTAs lobbying and would very like to see another Microsoft emerge in Latvia, claiming that we would definitely need patents for that :P. I did some convincing and presented our industry position, that got him thinking. I need to send him more anti-swpat arguments and also the amendments with justification.
I missed both FFII meetings (12.30 and 20.00) - first because I needed to be at the first meeting and the second one because I needed some sleep. When I returned to the hotel at 17.00 I put up an alarm clock for 20.00, but it couldn't wake me up. So I only woke up on the next morning.