Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

Keeping up the appearance that planet grep is a collection of drunks, I accepted Elise's invitation to join a whisky tasting with a group of people able to compress their thoughts into 140 bytes or less.

First of all, I was impressed at the decompressed presence of all participants. They failed to depict even a single stereotype! Except maybe taking pictures of bottles, but I think that can be forgiven. ;-)

I was particularly impressed by the Caol Ila and perhaps even more by the Black Bush. The Sazerac Rye was also highly tasty, but I felt it was no match for the Templeton Rye Brooks introduced me to a while back.

In addition to whisky, the tasting session also included an amazing stilton and cheddar (not of the radioactive orange variety). I found these went very well with whisky.

In the end, I bought a bottle of Laphroaig 19 year old tastiness. Yum!

I don't think this will be my last whisky tasting session.

Our TINA microvillage at HAR is right across from the BlinkenArea village. Dangerous!

Yesterday, I bought two DotBlox kits and a BlinkenBadge. I started soldering up the first DotBlox yesterday and finished it up today. Pb-free solder is not my friend, but it looks pretty good. I'm going to put green LEDs on the second one when I get home.

In the mean time, I'm having fun writing software for the ATmega168 (16K flash for 64 LEDs, whoop!). Unfortunately, the DotBlox design does not include an ISP connector, so I'm making do with a not-so-neat wirewrap contraption.

The -168 supports a kind of "bootloader-mode" so I'm going to try to fiddle something with that.

Hacker camps rule!

Sometimes, xkcd can be so...

You should talk to the girl down the hall; I think you'd like her. Lemme know if you find out why she's ordering all those colored plastic balls.

Mmhmm... No comment. :-)

Countdown to holiday: two days. On Friday, Mark, Dieter and I leave for Canada and the West Coast Trail. Since the "West" is often spelled "Wet", I spent some quality time in the company of bees wax and my boots. Wax on, wax off. Seams getting stronger, leather getting darker and ... well, leatherier.

This weekend, I also gave my leather hat a similar treatment. Pity I didn't take before/after shots. It looks much nicer now. More aged. More water-resistant too.

If now we don't see one drop of rain... No, no, I don't think I'll be grumpy if it doesn't rain at all.

Now for more packing. And more unpacking.

The things we drag with us into the bush.

No, I'm not dead yet. Just otherwise occupied. Nothing to see here. Move along now. Plans for world domination are ongoing.

Geeks love puzzles. To kill time before our flight and to satisfy gnn's need for trains, we went to the Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. George got to see trains and we all enjoyed a number of amusing demonstrations of things not to try at home with liquid nitrogen.

In the museum shop, there was a large selection of tanglement puzzles, which of course I could not resist. I bought one called The Anomaly, which is classed as "mind boggling". And the classification was dead-on too. It took me hours to solve this one. Useful use of jetlag!

I'll take this one to work tomorrow and share the frustration with the usual suspects. Muaahaha.

I am Philip and I recommend this puzzle.

It's that time of the year again. Soon it will be the next Geek Dinner and now there's also a Boy Geek Pints event, which is new.

I'm a bit concerned about the use of the word "geek" for this style of events. It appears that more and more of the people who show up to them are "geeks" because they keep a weblog or make funny noises on twitter and fewer and fewer of them are into traditionally geeky things like hacking operating systems or playing with electronics. They also don't have hobbies like mathematics or astronomy, and are unlikely to understand jokes in binary or hex.

Of course I have nothing against these people and I'm sure many of them are very nice and interesting. I also certainly don't mean to imply that geeks of the traditional sort are in any way "better" than the new sort. They're just completely different social groups and overloading the same term for both is a recipe for confusion and disappointment and awkward dinner conversations. You might as well go to a non-geek event and try to strike up a conversation with a random party-goer.

Perhaps it is time for a "Hacker Dinner" for geeks of the traditional sort? Or perhaps the "Philip Conspiracy" (which doesn't exist, of course ;-)) should meet for dinner more often? :-)

The trains have been working too well for the last couple of weeks. It couldn't last. I am currently stuck in Mechelen for an "undetermined" amount of time while they fix the signalling. sigh

Eventually, I'll get to work, I guess...

For the first time in years, it's finally winter in Belgium! Proper winter, with temperatures dropping firmly below freezing and white stuff falling from the skies and staying on the ground for a bit. Of course, it's not quite as properly winter as in - say - Scandinavia or Canada, but it's a step in the right direction!

I love winter. Cycling on snow and ice is lots of fun. Provided you remember Rule Number One, as carefully noted by Our Hero (Sir Isaac): Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed. Applying the brakes in a low-friction environment in other words is asking for trouble.

After brief amnesia earlier this winter, the reflexes of obeying Sir Isaac's laws have come back. I cycled to the station this morning in a pile of snow and ice without episodes of uncontrolled effects of inertia.

Let it snow!

While 2008 hasn't properly ended yet, my calendar for 2009 is already starting to fill up at an alarming rate. So far, I seem to be attending and/or speaking at: FOSDEM (Brussels), UKUUG (London), AsiaBSDCon (Tokyo), BSDCan (Ottawa), EuroBSDCon (Cambridge) and Chaos Congress (Berlin).

There will be others, no doubt.

If you are a conference organizer and you want to invite me, your best bet is to catch me as soon as possible. :-) I'm particularly interested if your conference happens to take place in a country known for good food yum or if I've never visited your country before.

I guess I'll spend most of the Newtonmas holidays writing papers again. A small price to pay.