Broadcasting live from the Mothership Connection, home of the extraterrestrial brothers…
Wow, haven’t blogged in a LONG time… Let’s try summarizing what happened in the past 5 months…
Ich bin ein Fluender !
In August, just before ending my internship at Fluendo in Barcelona, I finally got hired as Junior Developer (I am technically the youngest in the team… by 10 days !!), to carry on my work on PiTiVi and it’s dependencies (gst-python, gnonlin, GStreamer, …). There was a lot of partying to celebrate that 🙂
Back to the cheese and wine region of France
I took a nice long break from Barcelona starting from mid-august. Nice to be back in France after 5months in Barcelona. Also good because it’s not AS warm but still very enjoyable. Lots of barbecues and good food.
We also celebrated my parent’s 40th wedding anniversary. We had been preparing an evening with my brothers and sister in secret 🙂 The presents (digital camera and telescope) were appreciated and the meal was gorgeous. Also went Sylvie’s wedding, one of my cousins. Typical french wedding with lots of food and drink and also “la chenille” for the connoisseurs 🙂
Wrote my internship report, handed it in (OOo 2 powa’, kudos to whoever thought of the automatic completion), and prepared my final presentation which went down very well. The presentation was in English (which was not obligatory but strongly recommended) and Wim came to assist. For those of you who know Wim, I came with a suit and him with his typical black long coat… the folks from school administration thought I was the guy from the company and Wim was the student 🙂 Once again OOo2 helped me a lot (We had to have PowerPoint 2003 slides… OOo2 exports to that format like a charm)
Welcome to the land of opportunists…
So my parents took up to drive me down to Barcelona so I could bring most of my gear (Bike, bass, amplifier, clothes, …). The trip went fine… except for the very last part. When waiting in front of Christian’s place for him to arrive so we could unload the car somebody asked us the direction to a VERY WELL KNOWN street (Passeig de Gracia) in a mix of french and castellano… We gave him the directions, and then when 5 minutes later I went for my laptop bag which was on the front passenger seat…. GONE ! My personal laptop and the company’s plus some very expensive corrective sunglasses 🙁
But in every bad thing there are good things. I went to buy a new laptop at FNAC the next day, got an Acer Aspire 1522wlmi (athlon64 3000+) for 999euros, which is cheaper than my previous Acer Aspire, faster, better screen, better linux compatibility, etc…
… who only make up for a small part of the population.
I stayed at Christian’s place for the beginning while looking around for a flat to rent. I finally settled for a 75 sq meter flat just next to Cathedral, which is on the first floor, low ceiling, which adds a certain charm to it. Why such a big flat ? Well Emma, my girlfriend finally decided to come over and live in Barcelona 🙂 As soon as I got the keys she booked a flight.
The living room which is on the street side was a ‘bit’ (read: REALLY) scruffy, old brown-ish wallpaper, wires everywhere, etc… so I decided to paint it 🙂 Now if you’re Norwegian or Spanish (no pun intended), you’d just buy a bucket of pain, get a roll and on you go. But in order to get it well done (I intend to buy a projector in 6months or so, so I need a flat white wall), I took of the wallpaper… then discovered more paint and wallpaper, then painstakingly scraped it, then took off several cables which were going from nowhere to nowhere (!!), then sandpaper-ed, then plastered, then sandpaper-ed again and finally paint 🙂 It took over 2 weeks with the help of Emma. But I must say the result is amazing.
Life is moving on nicely, Emma is going to do catalan ‘normalization’ classes which should be fun. She also got a phone call yesterday from the headmistress of the Lycee Francais to look over kids at recess tomorrow, which has several advantages : she’ll finally be able to get a NIE (Identification for foreigners in Spain which is required to work, and to get it you need a job (yeah, administrative logic)), and they seemed quite impressed by her resume (Psychology, documentation, good experience with kids) so it might lead to a real job.
I too got my Nokia N770…
… box… empty 🙁 It was sent to my Paris adress, which my father forwarded to the office via Chronopost. When it arrived at the office… there was only the Nokia box inside. I tried complaining about it to Chronopost but they don’t want to refund it since it was accepted by the mailman at the World Trade Center (who then comes round and distributes it at every individual office).
Work
Since I’ve been back in Barcelona, I’ve been working on the python bindings which are now really solid. For the past week I’ve been working on porting gnonlin to 0.9 … and yesterday finally managed to do a miniature composition (using a 30line python script). The difference in processing overhead between gnonlin 0.8 and 0.9 is amazing ! So next week is going to be working on PiTiVi to get gnonlin working nicely with it and using the latest GStreamer API modifications. Good times ahead 🙂 Look forward to a 0.9 beta version within a month, and then maybe Santa will bring you something nice for Xmas 🙂
That’s the law around here, you got to wear your sunglasses.