Tollef Fog Heen's blog

It doesn't feel like I have been here very long, but it's almost ten days to the hour now. It's been a fun, long week with lots of interesting people and chats about everything from culture through free software and language. My Portuguese is still crap, but I understand a bit more than I used to, so that bit is at least going in the right direction.

I'm really not looking forward to the plane trip from Sao Paulo to Frankfurt. Too long in a cramped plane. Oh well, it's going to work out, and if I am really luck, I will be upgraded.

For once, I haven't written a single post card while here. It gets a bit tiresome after a while when you travel much, so I skipped out this time. Maybe next time. And next time here in Brazil, I hope Karianne can come. I think she would be happy here.

It's now been 2000 days since I wrote my first blog post. Wow. That also means Karianne and I have been together for about the same time. Time sure flies when you are having a good time.

Right now, I am in Brazil again, visiting Globo.com. On my trip here, I first went to Porto Alegre, for FISL. There, unsurprisingly, I met a bunch of people I already know, like Bdale Garbee, Elizabeth Garbee, Gustavo Noronha, Knut Yrvin, Otavio Salvador and a bunch more. I also met some people I had no idea would be there, like Dan Bernstein, who was presenting his work on DNSCurve.

DNSCurve is a quite interesting approach to DNS security. It uses elliptic curve crypto, which is faster than the more traditional RSA based public key encryption. It is a bit of a shame it probably won't ever make it through the IETF process. The reason is it abuses the name field of the name server to encode a public key.

Other interesting people I met was Jacob Applebaum (whose talk I fell asleep in, since I had been up for far too long the night before, my apologies) and a lot of the Globo.com crowd.

FISL isn't just a big free software event, it's turning into a big event in general. The Brazilian president was there, big banks (Caixa and Banco do Brasil) and media companies (Globo) are exhibiting and it looks like free software is becoming mainstream. Yay.

I've been in Rio for a little more than a week now. While going here for vacation is what people usually do, I'm actually here to work. Installing Varnish for the people at Globo. The weather has been so-so, fairly wet with rain almost every day, but temperatures in the 20-25°C range. I am not complaining.

Armenio, who's the datacenter manager has been taking excellent care of me, from meeting me at the airport to taking me all around the city, even during the weekend when we went to the Sugar Loaf mountain.

We were supposed to go see the monument to Christ the Redeemer, but it was far, far too foggy for us to see anything, so we went to the Copacabana Fort instead. The picture below is from Saturday when the weather was slightly better.

We went on a tram too, hanging on the outside as I do in the picture (except that it was going at 20-30 km/h while we did that. Across an aquaduct I didn't get a picture of). It rained quite a lot, so when we arrived in Santa Teresa, we were both drenched and got a pair of fresh t-shirts in order not to catch a cold.

Brazil has coconut palms, which should not come as a surprise to anybody, but I have never seen one "in the wild" (I think it was planted).

Today, it rained a lot. We got stranded in the restaurant for about half an hour before the water finally went away.

Apparently, they have dragon shops here too. I don't actually remember what they sold, but I am fairly sure it wasn't dragons.

Karianne is in Trondheim this weekend, for a LARP. This means I get to spend time on whatever I feel like and schedule however I like, which is nice. I was at my mother's on Thursday, trying to fix something when an old friend, Alexander, called. He was just trying out video calls, but I asked him if he wanted to have a beer on Saturday. I was planning to have dinner with Øystein and Ingvild on Friday, but they cancelled and Alexander happened to ask if I wanted to join him and a few friends from the Aikido club at the university, so I did. Odin joined in too and charmed everybody. He was quite tired (but so was I too) when we got home.

Today (Saturday), I have barely done anything. A bit of cleaning, but apart from that I fell asleep in a chair in the backyard, then went indoors and slept some more. Met up with Alexander at seven-ish where we first went to some friends of him, then on to some friends of Alexander's friend again. After a small detour to find useful things to drink out of, we settled down and had a good time. Got home and picked up Odin for a walk around half of downtown Oslo with Alexander, before he finally gave up finding the right place to meet a friend.

So far, a great weekend. Hoping dinner at Øystein's and Ingvild's tomorrow will be good too.

After my last diary post, we had porridge for lunch, as is customary on December 24th. Børre, Karianne's father got the marzipan pig. Dinner was good, with both lamb and pig's ribs and cloudberries with whipped cream for dessert. Mmm.

The rest of the evening was a bit like what I have had it like in Oslo, but also very different. Presents were handed out by Kristine, Karianne's little sister, one at a time. This took quite a while, so Karianne and I went to bed fairly quickly after we finished the gift session.

On Dec 25th, not much happened, at least not until dinner. Some of Karianne's aunts, uncles and cousins were visiting and we had a good time, including knocking down the pyramid Francis and I had built.

All in all, a different celebration than I'm used to. I'm a bit sure if I can get used to this way to do it, but we'll see.. Later today, we're going back to Oslo again. It will be nice to see our cats and such again.

So, for the first time in my life, I'm not in Oslo and with neither of my parents on December 24th. I am in Molde, with Karianne and her family. It's a bit weird, but given that all the traditions on how today's evening have broken down after my grandmother died, I am hoping this will be nice.

Before, as in, when my parents at least lived in the same house, even though they no longer shared a bed, we always celebrated at my grandparents' place. There was a lot of rituals on how everything was conducted. Those would probably looked weird, silly and arcane to an outsider, but they were how we celebrated. Then, my father moved out and later met Vigdis. (I am in no way sad for this, but it was a deciding factor in how things later developed.) This (obviously) changed how we celebrated and my siblings and I shuttled back and forth between mum and dad.

Since this day is just a regular day if it weren't for all the traditions on how it is celebrated, this was particularly hard on me. (To be fair, I haven't discussed it with my siblings, so I can't tell if it was worse for them than for me, and it's not particularly important either.) I haven't looked forward to celebrating for the last three or so years. At all. I have also been a wimp and not really told any of my parents about it either, so they haven't been able to understand anything.

So, now I am in Molde and it's nice. I don't have much of an idea what traditions live in this household, but am eager to find out. And, I have Karianne here, so I'm sure it will work out fine, some way or the other.

On Friday, Karianne's sister and her fiance arrived. I also got my new computer. Really nice setup, which is very, very quiet and sweet, with two nice and shiny LCDs.

Saturday, we got a lot of stuff from Molde, by way of Karianne's parents. Lots and lots and lots of boxes. We also bought some more shelves at IKEA, which I put up the same day and on Sunday. Karianne's family (aunts and so on) dropped by to look at the apartment and say hi, which was nice, but luckily they left fairly quickly to avoid complete overcrowdedness in here.

Sunday was spent in Tonje's (who I think is Karianne's cousin once removed) confirmation. Nice ceremony (even though I'm not a fan of church rituals at all), and very nice party afterwards. I unpacked a few more boxes and put the doors onto one of the shelves when we got home, before catching a bit of relaxation and going to bed, just about now.

Woke up around 7 as usual today. Hacked on casper the first part of the day, general bug triage the last part. Went out and had some beers with drift@hardware later. Nice evening.

Got a lot of stuff done today.. Talked to the bank about a loan, at least a temporary one until we can get the apartment in Trondheim sold. Talked to the real estate sales guy too and arranged to have another stylist call us about the apartment. Talking to the lady who was there yesterday was horrible as our communication was more or less non-existent.

I was in Levanger with Steinar, Anders and Kjetil Jørgensen and had a fun time. We drank lots of strange beers, getting slightly drunk before taking the train back at approximately 22:16. Marius Kotsbak showed up after a few hours too. We had fun and drank more beer.

I am going to post some pictures of my advisor once I get home. I am convinced he is mad (or at least slightly off-balance).

Ubuntu Down Under is over and I am almost home. The wireless network was cut off on Saturday afternoon, then we all went on a bus ride around Sydney so we actually got to see places like the Opera. In the end, the bus dropped us off near a cinema and we all went to see "The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy". I was very happy with the movie, it had the basic story of the first book in it while still being very seeable for people who hadn't read the book too. The special effects were good and not drawn completely out of proportions. So in end: excellent movie. I think I'll try to get Karianne with me to watch it too.

We then had a very nice meal at a nearby restaurant before taking the bus back to the hotel. Thom, Matthew, Fabio and I went to a pub in Kings Cross. Later, a few more people showed up and we had a good time before getting back to the hotel at about three in the morning.

Kings Cross is a strange place. It's Sydney's "Red Light District" so a fair amount of prostitutes, sex clubs, strip clubs and so on. However, unlike for instance Oslo's red light district, the area wasn't deserted or felt unsafe in any way. It was just weird and strange. There was a decent amount of regular bars, such as the bar we went to. Strange area.

My plane left at 1420, but Colin and I decided to go early, so we were at the airport around 1130. Nothing particularly fun happened there and my flight left on schedule. My flight out of Kuala Lumpur, however, was delayed by one hour. I was a bit nervous about the connection in Amsterdam, but it turned out I would end up with two instead of three hours for the transfer, something which is plenty.

Plane trip from KL to Amsterdam was boring, but I got to sleep a lot so I won't complain. Had plenty of space with the seat next to me vacant so even though it was a 12 hour flight it wasn't too bad.

Got a bit on IRC from Amsterdam and shopped a little bit around, but they were out of the blue toblerone (milk chocolate on the surface and white chocolate core). The girl behind the counter told me they might not be getting it again which I would consider a shame. That chocolate is good!

I'm currently approximately above Oslo somewhere and the plane is scheduled to touch down in a little less than an hour. It will be good to get back home to Karianne and my own bed.