Diego, el gnomo

Yay!. I’ll be seeing all you hippies from Saturday 5th (11pm) till Wednesday 16th (6am)!. I’ll be at the sponsored hotel as the cheap bastard I am.

Can’t wait to smellsee you all!

Yeah we had like THE earthquake over here. Thanks $deity Lima was not that affected, Ica on the other hand had a lot of disasters.

Cellphones and phonelines died for almost 3 or 4 hours after the Earthquake. Luckily I was able to communicate with my family via SMS. I’ll need to update their communication skills so they can use Internet which was the ONLY service that was still working. Police even had to use a local radio station to broadcast some info to the policemen.

Right now it’s 4:30 AM, no idea if I’m watching live coverage on local TV (maybe it’s just a rerun of earlier coverage). But hell lot of chaos. 155 people have passed away and 1300 is the estimate of injured ones.

You can follow up the event on Wikinews. Also some info is being archived on the Wikipedia article about the Earthquake. Also El Comercio, the biggest local newspaper, has a lot of coverage on its website (that looks pretty cool btw).

And yes, it was on GNOME’s 10th birthday :). Well, time to get some sleep but before I’ll put some stuff on my survival kit (which, guess what, includes my N800).

I joined the most incredible free software project out there. Thanks to that shy email to Glynn Foster and the less-shy question avalanche to Lucas Rocha. Lots of people have helped me among all the this -short- time contributing to GNOME. I can’t name them all without forgetting names so I prefer to avoid name lists.

I’m amazed of how in this short time I have came to know a lot of cool people and friends, people that live in the other side of the world, people that live on my neighbour countries. It has been a really great experience, and I’m sure I’m not gonna regret having spend my time meeting and working with such fantastic people.

Remembering all this makes me home^WGUADEC-sick, I can’t wait to see you all next year!. That also reminds me that some days ago, after watching Harry Potter I thought: “hah, GUADEC is like my Hogwarts” LOL.

Thanks to all that people that has helped me answering my questions, smacking me in the head, reviewing my patches, carrying me out of the pitch like a bag of potatoes, etc. I really owe it all to you guys!.

Finally I’m back in Lima. GUADEC was really great and I owe a big one to the people that this year helped me get there.

Among the remarkable things of this week, I can bullet point the following:

• Vincent is a cheater, his ice cream was way smaller than mine. We’ll see next year who wins.
• Bastien can now sleep, since he has this photo to counter this other photo.
• Thanks to Richard, Etrunko, Fernando and red-team-guy (Chema?) for taking me to the nearest trash bin so they could keep playing, also thanks to the medical team composed of random players.
• It was great to know a lot of people, a LOT!. But it was also great to know new people like Sílvia, Gil, Benjamin, Michael, Shreyas, Manuel, Ádám, Daniel… the list is really big!! Greetings to the Cheap Bastard Foundation founding members.
• I’m featured on the es_PE translation of bug 455415. Andre’s contribution takes the prize however.
• I’m using Ubuntu again, due to practical facts.
• Pisco Sour was a success, everyone liked it except the ones with fobia to egg white. Receipt to be released as FreeDrinkware soon (so J5 can put it on The GNOME Cook Book).
• My luggage is still somewhere in Amsterdam thanks to KLM. They say it will be here tomorrow.
• I couldn’t help buying this while being in Amsterdam’s airport:
  
• Got a lot of biz cards, I really like collecting them :P. Got a few coins too!.
• Lima is too cold :(, I miss the hot 14C of Birmingham, here there’s cold 17C (yeah I know, makes no sense).
• People here forgot to pick me up yesterday on the airport, they say they thought I was coming back today.

Also, I’ve uploaded almost all my relevant pictures to Flickr so you can check my set: GUADEC2007.

Fellow hippies,

I’m going to GUADEC this year. I just got my UK visa. I’ll be seeing you the whole week and of course being sponsored I’ll be at Etap. More details later.

Looks like I’m not stepping my foot on Spain after all. Let’s see if I can still go to GUADEC @ UK.

Thanks to GCubo guys for all their help.

Description of the situation:

I got sponsored to go to GUADEC 2007, which is obviously this year, at Birmingham - UK. On the way there I’ll be attending GUADEC-es 2007, which is held on Granada - Spain (that’s where The Alhambra is).
Being a natural from Perú, I’m required to get a visa (no, not the credit card) for almost any country I want to visit, no matter the reasons.

Description of the actual problem:

I have to be interviewed by the spanish embassy to get approval for a visa, good thing: I’m good at words and being loved by people, bad thing: my appointment is for July 2nd.

Suggested solution:

Seek for someone with friends to get you in as fast as possible. This is were I am at.

Meanwhile, GCubo people (organizers of GUADEC-es) have been very kind and helpfull with all the paperwork I have to do, turned out they now have to invite me to Spain via a police station of the city. Funny.
Of course, gnome-uk people have also been very friendly with me. Paul and Thomas have been worried about my adventures with paperwork and stuff.

Many thanks to all of them!

And of course, the ToDo is still huge. But at least now I fell I know what to do next.

NP: Mar de Copas - Sol Soberano