A long day is just about at its end. I arrived at Charles de Gaulle yesterday. It’s a very strange airport which most reminds me of a futuristic movie from the 1960s. Instead of the usual every-long tubes you have to walk through, it has a bunch of satelites where the planes park. Worked well enough. Security was quite strange, since there was nothing hindering us from walking back into the “secure” zone after having picked up the luggage. Outside, however, I saw two soldiers and a policeman. One of the soldiers had a FAMAS, an ugly, bullpup-configuration assault rifle with no trigger guard stopping one from hitting the trigger by accident and walked around with his finger on the trigger. Scary.
I met up with the other people and we were in the elevator on our way back to bed, I threw a joke about having to adjust to the new time zone. Incidentially, I was the only person in the elevator not having flown to a different time zone and it all backfired on me when I woke up at 0530 this morning. I could not sleep for another hour, then slept a bit before waking up at about seven. Went for a swim, which was absolutely great. Daniel Silverstone was there too, so we spent the time between laps chatting. Jeff Bailey was supposed to be there, but didn’t show up until I had gotten out of the water and was on my way out.
Breakfast was surprisingly good. I tend to dislike hotel breakfasts since they don’t have good, Norwegian bread, the cheese is wrong and the ham is wrong too. This time, I found some nice apple jam, some decent ham and some smoked mackerel.
First half of the day went to doing a small presentation of all the specs. Yes, all 151 of them. The schedule was nice enough, I had a bunch of interesting discussions with various people, so that was nice, but I ended up being a bit grumpy in the end due to lack of food. We ended up getting a quite good dinner, but it took altogether too much time, which was a shame. I also ended up in an interesting discussion about how to get soyuz’s publisher to run quicker. It appears that we’ll get the build-from-accepted spec implemented and it’ll mean building will take a lot less time to get fixes in when it’s time-critical, like around CD release time.
I’ve also talked a fair bit with Karianne, I miss her a lot and am already longing to be back with her. Though, I guess longing once in a while means we appreciate each other when we see each other again.