GUADEC
Got the first volunteer for maning the cameras at GUADEC yesterday. As he pointed out though there was little information about the talks listed in the schedule so I ended up spending quite some adding a page with some short abstracts and linking to that page and the Multimedia Track page which already had descriptions of the multimedia track. So if you click on the talk title in the GUADEC schedule you should now be taken to a page which contains a description of that talk.

That said a lot of the descriptions are not really that good, I ask that all people doing talks check it out and if their talk is missing, have a less than optimal description that you write something down and either commit it yourself to the guadec-web cvs module or send it to me and I will update the page with the text. I also ask that everyone makes sure that co-workers and friends who do a talk are aware that a small abstract is needed for that page.

Free from debt
Also decided over the last few days to get rid of my student loan. While studying I had borrowed money from the Norwegian government to pay tuition fees, books and living costs while studying. Its generally considered a very favourable loan with good terms, but after moving here to Barcelona having those bills trickling in from Norway have become to much of an annoyance. So I now in the process of selling some of my shares to be able to pay the remainder of the loan in one go. Might not be the best financial move I ever made as I still expect the shares to increase in value faster than the cost of interest on the loan, but it will make my life less complicated which has a value in itself.

Flumotion
Wim is working hard on getting everything up and running to do RTP streaming with Flumotion. amr and h263 encoding and decoding is starting to work nicely together so mobile phone streaming is approaching fast.

World of Warcraft
I decided yesterday to let my World of Warcraft subscription lapse, so 6 days from now my account gets closed. So when I logged in yesterday I thought, only 6 days left, need to make sure I use them. What I realized just after logging in however was that the game is completely uninteresting when you don’t plan on playing it for a long/undefined amount of time. As all my long term plans for character development where suddenly invalidated by only having 6 days left, there was really nothing of interest to do in the game. So I ended up logging out again after 30 minutes. So I guess without the ‘builder’ aspect the game is just a huge chat channel mostly consisting about complaints about people speaking Spanish and insults about the use of that language flying back and forth.