On the ferry

I am writing this on the ferry Rostock-Hanko, which we took to get to DebConf. It is now a bit past 8 in the morning, meaning, I'll have to be bored for at least 8 more hours, if not more. It also means I got up early –at least to my standards. I'm bored, because there is an Internet connection here, but no free one, not one that I can connect to my laptop, and certainly not one that I can hijack using nstx or so. Also, Holger and p2 aren't awake yet (I wish I could sleep in a chair, but alas — and renting a cabinet with a real bed is much more expensive than what we did), so I'll probably have to keep to myself for a while. I already took a short tour of the ship (there isn't much to see anyway), so now I'll have to wait for 9 o'clock to get breakfast, and then try to spend the day doing something useful. At least this ship has working power outlets, so there's no risk of running out of battery power (which otherwise would be a real problem, given that the borrowed laptop's battery is close to being dead, and seems to be able to provide battery power for no more than 30 minutes to one hour or so).

Speaking of this laptop, I can hardly wait to get mine back. The keyboard is a bit broken: the 'k' and 'm' keys are loose, and the space bar doesn't work across its entire width anymore. Also, for some reason it mixes up the LSGT and TLDE keys, so I've had to swap those around in the xkb symbols map. And fix up some other things, of course, so that my keyboard is sane again (meaning, slightly different from the default one as shipped and intended). But of course those keyboard issues are nothing in the light of the much slower processor that is powering this laptop -- a G3 500 rather than my own G4 1333. Oh well; at least I've got something that I can use for debconf, and the alternatives that had been offered (p2's lombard-class powerbook G3 which is even slower and doesn't have a working touchpad, or Kris' Pentium 233) most certainly weren't any better.

Right. Let's check up on Holger and p2 again.