skud

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

Well, I’m home. Have been for a few days, actually, but in between jetlag, flaky internet, and nesting, I haven’t gotten around to posting.

The flight home was ghastly and let’s never talk about it, okay? I am still processing my thoughts on the trip overall but I guess the quick version is: 2.5 months is a long time to be city-hopping, it was more expensive than I expected, it was great to meet people everywhere (hi! thanks!), and I really want to spend more time in Andalusia and in the north-east of England.

Now I’m home I’m sorting out money (yay Centrelink) and work (some balance of Growstuff and more audio stuff), settling into our rearranged home (we have a new housemate, and a significant turnover and reshuffling of furniture as a result), and trying to restart my social life. Incidentally, if you’re interested in my domestic blog it’s over here and likely to have lots of food/gardening/crafts in the near future. NESTING. SPRING CLEANING. MORE NESTING.

I’m becoming increasingly disenchanted with social networking websites and probably going to delete my Facebook account. Yes, again. Especially after they outed queer students to their parents and then blamed the students for not understanding Facebook’s “robust privacy controls” — despite the students having locked down their accounts, and Facebook ignoring those settings.

With the way Twitter is going these days, I may drop that too. Or at least stop using it as a primary interface to the world. I keep coming back to the fact that if I’m going to create stuff, I don’t want some corporate jerkwads shoving ads all over it, potentially ads for things that are anathema to me. See, for example, that time when LiveJournal put anti-equality ads all over someone’s post celebrating a same-sex marriage, or the “Meet Hot Gamer Chicks” ads we used to get on the Geek Feminism wiki. I’ll gladly pay money to support a service, but I won’t stick around for that sort of misuse of my words.

So, if you want to be sure to keep following me even if I drop off those places, you might want to subscribe to my blog (by RSS, or you can get email updates if you prefer — there’s a subscription form on the bottom of every page on my site.); or subscribe to my journal on Dreamwidth (mostly an aggregate of this blog and my domesticity blog, with a few other things from time to time); or on whatever the next not-completely-asshatty social network gets enough people to be worth the trouble.

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

I’m halfway through my 10-week-long trip and I haven’t updated in a month. The only excuse I can offer is that I wanted to include pictures, but my relationship with Flickr has turned out to be strangely complicated lately, and the whole process of uploading them (often via dodgy hotel wifi) has just seemed too hard.

Actually, I’m noticing something new in my picture-taking this trip. Just as, a few years ago, I purged any book from my shelves that was effectively obsoleted by Wikipedia or Project Gutenberg, now I am avoiding taking pictures that would be available by a Creative Commons image search. What’s the point of taking a photo of Notre Dame when so many other people have done so already, and undoubtedly better than I could? Sure, a photo of me standing in front of Notre Dame would actually have some individuality, but I’m not that big a fan of photos of myself in random locations, so I haven’t been doing that. Instead I’ve been carrying around a somewhat clunky, heavy camera (not a DSLR or anything, but an Olympus PEN camera) and using it to take pictures of odd, quirky things here and there, which I might as well just use my iPhone for. Ah well.

So, places I have been since my last update, and what I thought of them.

The week in A Coruña for the conference was a mixture of hanging out at the conference venue, sleeping in the university residence where we were staying because I had come down with a fairly nasty cold, and a bit of wandering around the city. I saw the ancient Roman lighthouse, but didn’t go inside; I spent more time wandering around the old part of town looking for food than I really wanted to; and I found a pretty good craft/artisan market near the bus stop where I had a awkward (due to language incompatibility) but pleasant conversation with a handweaver and bought a linen and alpaca shawl she’d woven.

On the second-last day, I daytripped to Santiago de Compostela, just 40 minutes away by train. Touristy, but I felt okay about it, somehow, knowing that it was a thousand-year-old pilgrim site and that many of the tourists had walked a long way to be there.

After the conference I took a night train to Madrid (cramped, overheated) and whatever the Spanish equivalent of a TGV is to Cordoba, in the southern part of Spain that had been Islamic during the middle ages. I loved Cordoba, its narrow streets and white-and-ochre houses with their courtyards and fountains. The cathedral-inside-a-mosque (or “mosquedral”, as I like to call it) was mindblowing. The city was hot and quiet and empty, as all the locals had gone on holiday, but I spent a few pleasant days wandering around and sitting in parks and eating tapas and drinking cheap wine. I’d love to go back to Andalusia and spend more time exploring its other cities and its architecture and its food.

On to Barcelona, which I hated. Crowded and unpleasant and I spent the whole time worried about people trying to steal my bag. To be fair, the Gothic quarter is pretty cool, and the Barcelona History Museum is amazing, especially the parts of the Roman town that they’ve dug up and you can walk around in the basement. The bits that fascinated me most were the dyeworks with the stone troughs still stained blue, and the place where they made garum (fermented fish sauce) in enormous round pots. I’m not much into Gaudi, so though I went past some of his works (the Sagrada Familia, etc) I didn’t get off the tourist bus to actually go in. I did try to go to Parc Guell, on the recommendation of many friends, but I’d somehow got the impression that it was a park, with, you know, green space. Actually it was a pile more building-sized Gaudi blobs, crammed full of tourists, and it made me angry. I got straight back on the tourist bus, and two stops later found myself at a 13th century convent (Pedralbes) which was operating as a museum, free on Sundays, and had a beautiful courtyard with fountains and grass and trees and no more than a handful of tourists, none drunk. I spent half a day there.

I’d heard that the food in Barcelona was amazing, and it was the best I’d had so far on the trip, but I don’t think it was enough to make it worth the unpleasantness of my visit. I suspect I would have enjoyed it more if I had been with friends and we’d been able to sit around and drink and eat and enjoy the nightlife. As it was, I found some delicious tapas that actually contained vegetables, which after a couple of weeks of subsisting on not much else than ham, and not seeing anything greener than an olive, was lovely. I had a wonderful dish of spinach, chickpeas, and some kind of pork that pretty much made my week. At a pinxtos place in El Gotic, I had a tartlet with some kind of sweet fruit paste, goat cheese, and fresh mint, and another where a sort of fish salad was topped with fresh dill and tiny slivers of candied lemon peel. They were delicious. And yet, I have lots of delicious food at home. Coming from Melbourne, it takes a lot to blow my mind, and Barcelona didn’t manage it. Sorry.

On to Avignon, which I was using as a stopover and to have a quick minibus tour of Provence because, well, if I’m going to pass through I may as well take the time to look around. It was, as expected, very scenic. I visited a lavender farm where I saw sweat-sheened young men exerting themselves heaving bales of lavender into a still to make lavender oil (they were well aware of their decorativeness, and posed for photos; there was also a tip jar for them by the exit), any number of medieval villages full of gift shops, where I wondered how or indeed whether anyone actually lived there full-time; and the Pont du Gard, an ancient Roman aqueduct, which was pretty awesome — you actually walk across it, or rather across a modern footbridge set up right next to it, close enough to touch. For the most part, though, Provence rubbed me the wrong way. I think I associate it too much with the sort of people who use it as a style of home decoration, and the result was that it all felt terribly twee to me. It didn’t help that the place was packed full of gift shops that seemed dead set on promoting that sort of thing: “Provençal” table linens made in China, and whatnot. Ugh.

Then the TGV to Lyon, and then a local train from there to meet Anatsuno who lives in an adorable little village, in a house that’s about 500 years old and is right on the village square, next to the bakery. We spent a lot of time sitting around, knitting, and eating cheese. By this point I really needed a few days of downtime, and especially of not walking on cobblestones in barefoot shoes, as bits of me were pretty achey. One day, though, we went to visit the Romanesque church at Anzy-le-Duc, which was gorgeous, and filled with amazing medieval frescos. My last night there, we went into Lyon and stayed over at another friend’s house, where there was a cluster of fangirls and pizza and watching Vividcon vids and then, in the morning, a visit to La Droguerie (the famous French button mecca) before the train.

My next stop was Strasbourg, or rather Mutzig, a little town just outside Strasbourg. I stayed with some people from AirBNB, who turned out to be an ex-sysadmin-perl-guy-turned-professional-origamist, and his wife who’s a guild-trained painter who does things like restore Medieval churches. They were completely delightful, as was their village. On my first full day I went back into Strasbourg, which was an interesting architectural and cultural change from the more southern areas I’d previously been in: definitely more German, with lots of steep-roofted half-timbered houses and sausages and the like. On the second day, my hosts offered to take me for a drive up into the hills to sample some of the local food and wine, which was utterly delicious. I had some kind of pork thing in a creamy sauce with mushrooms, and spaetzle, and the local pinot noir, Rouge d’Ottrott, which is unusual because Alsace mostly goes for white wines. Anyway. Strasbourg and environs: surprisingly awesome!

After that I went to Paris, but I’ll save that for a subsequent blog post. I’m glad to have caught up this far, at least.

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

So, here I am in Madrid, after about 30 hours in transit. I flew Emirates for the first time, and Emily was right — they’re pretty good. Went via Changi where I didn’t have time to do any of the fun stuff you can do there if you have a long layover, a brief pitstop at Colombo which is notable only because it afforded us a Sri Lankan curry for breakfast (yay! I would eat curry for breakfast all the time if I could), and Dubai, where I found myself thinking a lot about the dark side of Dubai and how much of their prosperity is built on slavery. Then I remembered that I lived in the US, and, hey, the former British Empire. So. I don’t have any answers to that, but I will say that coming into Dubai around 5am, with the sun rising through a haze that made it impossible to see the horizon, I saw a lot of compounds on the edges of town, ringed with security fences and lights, before we got to the bits that are trying to look like Versaille and/or something out of science fiction.

We flew over Cairo and Alexandria before crossing the Mediterranean to Spain. After a lot of very dull desert, it was amazing to see the Nile and its fertile plains and the sprawl of civilisation that’s grown up around it. Most of the fields under cultivation are all long and narrow, like English ones before enclosure, and a fairly uniform dark green. I realised I have no idea what they grow there. Most of my knowledge of Egypt stops somewhere around where year 8 ancient and classical history and “curse of the mummy” type pop culture left off. Also on the ignorance list: Tunisia and Algeria, or at least the coastal bits of them, are way greener than I expected.

Crossing Spain from the Mediterranean coast to Madrid, I saw what I think must be citrus plantations: regular specks of dark green against the yellow-brown land like the dots on a Roy Lichtenstein piece. Couldn’t help thinking a lot about Stephen Maturin and about Sharpe. I suspect they will be my regular companions over the next couple of weeks.

After landing, there was a painful and frustrating episode at the airport involving trying to buy a SIM for my phone, which I’d rather leave behind me (albeit with a credit card chargeback against the assholes in question); the Internet, especially the Prepaid With Data Wiki, was entirely right and I subsequently went and got a working, non-phone-crashing SIM just like they said.

Finally Google Maps-enabled, I headed out for a few hours wandering round to keep myself awake and see a bit of the city. I didn’t go much further than a few blocks from where I’m staying, but here’s a picture of the Royal Palace:

That’s one end, not the front view, which is even bigger. Apparently Philip V, who built it (or rather, who decreed that it should be built, and then had others do it for him… at least I presume so) died before it could be finished; it was meant to be 4 times larger. I read that there is a guided tour of the “50 most important rooms” and my feet hurt just thinking about it.

Tomorrow I’m planning on a little more wandering, before I get aboard the train to A Coruña for GUADEC. Here’s hoping it goes through interesting countryside, and not just the back sides of industrial areas as all too often happens with passenger rail in Australia and the US.

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

A few weeks ago I got a fairly sudden invitation to travel to Europe and speak at a conference. I decided to spin out the trip and spend 2+ months touring around while I was over there. And so for the last little while I’ve been madly running round trying to get everything ready and do all the things I need to do before I leave.

It’s meant that the sewing phase I was heading into was abruptly arrested just as I was finishing the red dress I was working on.

It also meant I put down the woolly shawl I’d just started working on, and cast on something light for the European summer, using some yarn I picked up from a pop-up yarn shop on Lygon Street a couple of weeks ago. Although it had no label, I think it’s Avril linen-cotton slub in colourway “00″, a natural bone sort of colour.

The pattern is Shaelyn, a fairly easy triangle shawl using a variation on feather-and-fan lace. Easy enough to knit without a pattern, but with a bit of interest so I don’t doze off completely. It’s going far slower than I hoped it would despite the swathes of plain knitting; it’s been weeks and I’m only just finishing the first 50g ball! Still, I’ll take it with me on the plane, and hopefully finish it not too far into my trip.

I’ve often found that hotel room carpets are great for blocking non-fiddly shawls, in any case… the weird velcro texture of them is enough to hold the shawl in place if you spread it out into shape, and the air conditioning (assuming there is aircon) dries it in no time. When I used to do a lot of business travel, I’d often take unblocked shawls and a little bottle of wool wash with me for that very purpose.

Anyway, I guess this is just to say, don’t expect any cooking posts between now and October. I suspect there’ll be a few knitting updates from on the road, though.

OK so! Music Hack Day! Didn't suck too much, but also just didn't grab me. Plusses and minuses:

+ cool venue (Red Bull Australia HQ) reminded me of ridic startup offices in the Bay Area (I'm actually kind of fond of stupid startup office decoration)
- venue full of stairs, and my knee was being weird and twingey (I think a side effect of some bike-riding strain from a month back), so ow
+ ran into a couple of people I knew and met a few new nice/cool people
- there were a few hipster douchebags there, most notably the guy the ABC had sent to promote Triple J's new open API, who was wearing a shirt with some kind of pinup girl/lingerie model pouting and posing all over it... way to guarantee I don't talk to you about your API, dude.
+ mostly hung out with a really nice guy who was making a Guitar Hero controller out of a plank of wood, and who turned out to be a regular Geek Feminism reader and friend-of-a-friend via many channels
- didn't really find any hardware hackers doing anything I could join in on usefully (guitar hero guy didn't really get going on his stuff til after I left)
- lots of people doing the sort of API hacks that I really didn't want to work on (too burned out after Freebase etc)
- most of the hacking seemed to pick up overnight, at really late hours, which I wasn't all that interested in. I don't feel safe/comfortable staying in overnight at a hack thing with lots of booze, without many friends there, and in a bit of an industrial deadzone with no transport etc
+ some actually quite good and enjoyable discussions about open/structured data... I'm not actually burned out on that subject in general, just on Freebase/Google, so yay
+ good food provided... I ate a whole bunch of the really tasty vegetarian wraps with roasted pumpkin and pesto and goats cheese and spinach
+ MHD tshirt is not too ugly and I might actually wear it
- but of course it didn't come in my size so I ordered a men's XL and will now have to modify it to fit, bleh... tired of having to do this all the time

So I came back to puzzlement's place around dinner time, to meet up with people and have dinner and watch DAAS videos, which was pleasant if kinda low key. Sadly, I think I caught sundress's cold, because today my plan was to wander slowly, via Glebe Point Rd and King St, back to the hack day to see the demos/prizegiving in the afternoon... but halfway there I realised I was cold and shivery and achey and really wanted a) a warm jumper and b) a nap, or else I was going to fall over. So once again, back to puzzlement's, napped, and am now catching up on internets.

When I signed up for MHD I gave myself permission to be as involved or uninvolved as I wanted to be, with no guilt, because I wasn't sure whether I would find it fun or whether I'd find it stressful/unpleasant/triggering. In the day or two beforehand I was on the verge of meltdown level OH GOD NO (especially after they tweeted about how much beer they were getting in for the event) but actually it wasn't that bad, and I quite enjoyed it, and I think if I hadn't been so burned out I would have built something and got more into it.

It looks like there were a bunch of cool hacks demo'd this afternoon, but unfortunately the only ones I've found links for that are available online require you to sign up for Rdio, which I can't/won't do because it requires me to choose a gender from a binary selection, before even allowing me to try the service out. So, no.

Current status: somewhat snotty and headachey, pondering food, pondering packing for my early morning departure. Another 12 hour train ride tomorrow, back to Melbourne. I suspect I'll sleep a lot.

I'm in the Air New Zealand business class lounge at SFO. Yeah, I said fuck it and upgraded to business class. I'm probably never going to take a long-haul flight again with a bank balance that looks like mine does right now. It's doing a lot to assuage my very mixed feelings about leaving SF.

Anyway, I land in Melbourne Saturday morning, and I'm available for social shenanigans from, say, Sunday onward. Looking forward to seeing people!