Gunshot

So I went to Europe last week for the first time ever, and visited three countries in nine days. The whole thing is a bit of a blur and I can't remember to whom I've told what, so this is the best I can do:

In an effort to avoid bumming around Brooklyn feeling sorry for myself while Nina hung out in Italy with her family, I decided to go to this "bug-squashing party" in Gütersloh, which is sort of a suburb of Dusseldorf, Germany. By way of explanation, sometimes Free Software projects throw these kind of marathon programming sessions before a new release, where a whole bunch of developers hang out in a room or something and try to fix as many bugs in the software as possible -- so that's what this thing was supposed to be. It was hosted by the German head of the Skolelinux project, whose aim is to make a sub-distro of Debian for use in primary and secondary education -- it was his girlfriend's house that we (yours truly and a bunch of French dudes) were put up. Also in attendance was the head of the debian-installer project, which was supposed to be the focus of the party.

I flew out of JFK on Friday afternoon and arrived in Dusseldorf early Saturday morning. The plane trip was uncomfy (tried to sleep but couldn't, unlike the short, standoffish woman who had the window seat next to me and conked right out) but uneventful; flying over the Atlantic was very cool -- I think we must have been flying between two cloud layers, because whenever I looked out the window, we were suspended in this kind of dark blue soup, with no way to tell which way the ground was. When I got to Dusseldorf, I hopped on the train to Gütersloh and was on my way. German high-speed (well, medium-speed) trains are as impressive as you might imagine they are -- they're fast, punctual, and practically silent. I sat in the first-class upper section of the train by accident, but second-class, to which I was escorted by the conductor, was equally well-appointed, with comfy seats and big tables. We passed a few stations in towns whose names I recognized as being... significant during a time when a bad thing was happening in Germany.

The bug-squashing party turned out to be a bit less productive than I thought it would be, though it was a lot of fun nonetheless. The Skolelinux offices were located in a "kulturezenter" that had been converted from an old weaving mill (the sign above the door said "Die Weberei") and also played home to a nightclub and a pizza restaurant -- as part of the details of their lease, we ended up eating a lot of German pizza, which is not actually as bad as you might think, though it's more like a loaf of bread (with a whole lot of cheese melted on top than it is like a pizza. The first day, I got to the kulturezenter right after I got off the train and just plain sat down to work, pretty much passing out from exhaustion around 11:30 at my host's girlfriend's house. I did the same thing the next two days, as well, though I took more smoke breaks and walked around the grounds of the kulturezenter a bit more. Testing and fixing bugs in the installer is hard, because you can't actually run the installer on your computer without fucking up your own operating system, so you need to run it on a virtual machine, which is slow, and getting your code fixes into an out of the virtual machine is incredibly frustrating. I was the only guy who knew C, so the official Debian representative guy recruited me to do some native fixes for IBM's S/390 architecture, which I did but couldn't test (or even compile, much less debug) without his help with the emulator. Ultimately I ended up fixing about one and a half bugs over the course of three days; I think the representative was a little disappointed in everyone's output -- nobody besides me fixed any bugs, I don't think, and the testing they did was mostly on this piece of software that wasn't related to debian-installer at all. Oh well.

Everyone there was very friendly, especially Kurt, my host, whose girlfriend's place was totally charming and cozy. She's an architect, apparently, and designed the house herself, full of naked wooden beams meeting at acute angles. One room had three walls of windows; Kurt called it a "winter garden" and said they slept there sometimes in the snowy months.

Mike Bell is living in Budapest now, where he's doing this math program at the American university, and I flew from Dusseldorf to Budapest via Prague to stay with him for a few days. He's living in this great, ancient-looking apartment house in downtown Budapest, a few blocks from the Danube. I'm not much of a student of history, but the buildings there all looked like they hadn't been touched or rebuilt at least since the first World War, and there was a very sort of Soviet aesthetic to them: Block-long faceless, doorless expanses of plaster with rows of grim little windows set into them -- very intimidating and beautiful.

Mike speaks enough Hungarian to ask for the good stuff at the enormous indoor marketplaces where we bought our food. I managed to pick up a little of the pronunciation; the requisite "please," "thank you," and "sorry;" and absolutely none of the grammar. On the second day I was there, we walked over the Danube and up this enormous hill overlooking Pest. We also walked around this ancient stone fortress monument into the side of which was built an enormous government office building. There were big square slots left open in the sheer face of the rock where the Nazis or Soviets had removed / destroyed the enormous statues that (we think) used to hang there. We also visited Terror Haza ("Terror House"), which is a museum about the Soviet occupation of Hungary between World War II and 1990, installed in the former national headquarters of the Party. In the basement, we got to walk around in the dank rooms where political prisoners of note were kept (and executed), including a closet-like solitary confinement "room." It was pretty fucking terrifying. Mike's apartment building had a basement area that, weirdly, you could only access from the second floor. There no lights that we could find, and it was filled with rooms that were currently stocked with rubbish and broken appliances but which had doors with ominously-shaped gratings and movable slots, the purpose of which seemed a lot more suspect after visiting the museum. We were never able to spend more than a few minutes down there. (I suspect Nina, had she been there, wouldn't have had a problem with it, but from what I can tell, she's basically a Kender.)

The first day I was in Budapest, I got the go-ahead from Nina to join her and her mom and brother in Rome, so, amid much fretting and ticket-searching, M-Biddy and I booked some tix there. The flight got into Ciampino at noon, and I got to Roma Termini, the major transit hub, by around 2:00. While I waited for Nina to pick me up, I watched a bunch of off-duty cab drivers torment an old drunk near the exit -- he'd scream at them and wave his fist (with his dentures in it; he'd always take them out before beginning the invective) for a few minutes, they'd let him calm down and trudge a few paces away from them, and then they'd say something about his mother or sister or something, and he'd come roaring back.

The Priccis were staying in a pensione two blocks from the station, in a building that was also home to three other hotels, all situated around a strange little indoor courtyard with palm trees and electric light.

We spent the first day just kind of walking around the popular parts of the city -- we saw several enormous fountains, a couple of columns (Trajan and Aurelian), and the Pantheon, among other things. In the evening, with Nina's brother Michael, we crossed over the Tiber into the Trastevere district, which is what we were given to believe was the Roman equivalent of Williamsburg. This turned out not to be quite true -- it was more of a market district (a la St. Mark's), with a main drag packed with gypsy types hawking bootleg DVDs and mangey-looking parakeets. We bought some gelato and sort of lurked around the alleyways and side-streets until it got too late to go on. Way more than Budapest, Rome seems to be less a city than, you know, an exhibit. I didn't really see any stores that sold the amenities of everyday life, even in the more residential areas we walked around in. Even the houses themselves seemed kind of temporary, like lean-tos amid the ruins. This is just three days' worth of impressions; I understand that many people find it quite livable.

The next couple of days, Nina and I explored the Palatine Hill and the Colosseum, which are both kind of preternaturally quiet and beautiful despite being thronged with tourists. The ruins on the Palatine are shot through with these strange, enormous trees that all seem to fork in the same place near their tops. At the Colosseum, we took turns repeating to each other the words of the little audioguide earpiece we rented; best fact about the games: During one victory celebration held in the arena, an enormous mechanical whale crafted in the shape of a real one that'd washed up on the beach during Septimius' reign was wheeled out to the center. When the whale opened its mouth, a multitude of bears came charging out to meet the swords of the beastiarii.

You guys already know about my adventures getting home, I think. The Virgin Atlantic flight I got on was about as comfy as a 7-hour flight after a 13-hour sleepless sleepover on the floor of an airport can be. I watched episodes of Extras and Little Britain, as well as the movie Brick, which was pretty perfect.

Last night, Rancid played at B.B. King's Bar & Grill in Times Square, and I went, because, you know, how often does that happen? Not often. They were okay. I dunno. I've never quite gotten used to this vibe that I think is sort of peculiar to West Coast punk and that was heavily on display at the show -- namely, this idea that punk rock is some kind of extended family for you, and that all those sweaty naked fat dudes in "the pit" are just there to have a good time, and, you know, that you love the band and the band loves you. I mean, come on, right? At one point a fight broke out near the stage and Lars stopped the show until it was broken up. "Either you guys work it out or we're leaving," he said. "There's no fighting in punk rock." What? I don't know, I guess all these guys were in gangs or something, so this type of dare-to-be-sensitive shit is important to them, but it doesn't do it for this snotty, middle-class software guy. Another ridiculous moment: The band came out for the first encore and did Tim Armstrong's song about his divorce all-acoustic -- Lars, Tim, and Matt all standing at the edge of the stage and sort of swaying gently. Ugh. But they played a really solid set otherwise -- fanboyishly, I could've really done with a little Maxwell Murder, which was missing, oddly enough -- and Matt Freeman is an incredible bass player, so, you know, all told it was a good time. And Larry Livermore, whom Chrissy Rodney may remember as being the object of address by Joe King's "Hey, Livermore, you fuck" on some live Queers record, was in the audience, though I didn't get to see him up close.

Then Eve and I met up and got shitfaced at O'Connors.

The Rase bought me a copy of Dragon Quest VIII for my birthday, and I've started playing that these last couple of days. I like it okay, but I'm getting my ass handed to me pretty frequently by the Mischievous Moles, which is frustrating. The game comes with a playable demo of FFXII, though, and I played through part of it that really makes clear the new difference between Active Mode and Wait Mode. The game is gorgeous and the part that I played was super fun -- who knows? I may actually buy a video game for the first time in a long time. Might get it for a like-minded friend, also.

Tonight I'm taking my boss out for what would be a bachelor party if he were the kind of dude who'd have a bachelor party or I were the kind of dude who'd throw one. I think we're gonna grab a bite to eat with Chump Change and then head over to this. We'll see what happens.

M-Biddy re-did his 'blog. I put Ubuntu on snark-star and changed the hostname.

Thirteen Hours In London Heathrow

...is what I'm experiencing as I type this. So I went to Europe, everyone, and there'll be a full post-mortem shortly, but at the moment I can't really think straight because I've been using my sneakers as pillows for the past 6 hours. Alitalia overbooked the flight from Rome to London that M-Biddy helped me schedule, and, as a result, it was an hour and a fucking half late, causing me to miss my carefully-booked flight back to Newark. Virgin was nice enough to put me on the first flight to JFK today, but those Etruscan cunts refused to cover me for a hotel room (not to mention threatening to raise the alarms because I decided my $17 sleeping bag wasn't worth waiting for at the baggage claim), so I'm all "fuck it."

Anyhow, I'm boarding in 5 minosk. In the meantime, check out my photostream.

Squash-A-Bug

Had another road test; hit the curb; failed it. This seems to surprise many of you who took your road tests in these sleepy little suburbs or in DMV parking lots, and not at the toughest DMV test site in the toughest state in the union, but, yeah. It's hard. And it's a real fucking bummer to fail the test, because I don't have my own car to drive at the test site, so it costs big U.S. Auto School bucks whenever this happens. At least I didn't cry tears of frustration in front of Lester (though my face got a bit pinched up).

The Rase bought me If I Should Fall From Grace With God. Like I think I've mentioned, I spent a lot of my childhood listening to The Pogues and only realized embarrassingly recently that it wasn't just weird "world music" that my dad had scooped up somewhere. I'm listening to the album at work and it's stirring up these really vivid memories of sitting on the warm windowsills with the built-in radiators in my parents' apartment on 4th St. and staring out the thick, gritty chickenwire windows at snow falling on the Old Merchant's House. Maybe a cup of hot tea and a notebook. Orange streetlights. That's the setting when I think of my childhood in Winter. Why Turkish Song Of The Damned was in constant rotation in my dad's stereo during the holidays is a bit hard to fathom, but, you know. Don't even get me started on Fairytale Of New York. I basically can't even listen to that song in public; it's just too much.

KT had a little birthday party at The Friends' house on Saturday, and someone got hold of a camera. I think this sums up my relationship with Tom pretty nicely:


I've bought a ticket to Germany for next week, so expect to see me next week... if you're fixing debian-installer bugs in Gutersloh. That includes at least a dozen of you, I know. Razor and Chrissy Rodney kind of crapped out Headliners-taking-Europe-wise, so I'm Trying to arrange spending a few days with M-Biddy in Budapest, where he's been attending Math Camp for the past ten years. Why hasn't he solved tic-tac-toe yet?!