Tomorrow, Penny and I head off back home, and two months of living in NZ come to an end. (did you hear that, pleaserobme.com?)

Maybe I’ll find the time to write about my impressions of living on this side of the planet, and being immersed in Kiwi culture while going after my daily routine and trying to work as much as I could. But there is one thing that should not wait:

Thank you, Catalyst IT for giving us workspaces! For the better part of 6 weeks, you gave us our own room, monitors, keyboards, mice, and connectivity. And more than that: you welcomed us, let us participate in sessions, invited us to your parties, received our parcels, sent out letters, and generally provided us with a great environment to work. This was certainly well above what we had dreamed of.

At times, I was forced to stay into the middle of the night — 12 hours time difference with Europe is not always easy — and spent waking hours in your building alone. Thank you for your trust!

Catalyst is a fully New Zealand owned company who deliver critical open source business systems to some of NZ’s largest organisations, and organisations worldwide. Catalyst was also a major enabler of LCA2010, and a sponsor of Kiwi Foo Camp, both events that I had the privilege to attend.

Let me know when you’re in my part of the world. ;)

NP: The Mamaku Project: Karekare

I experience extreme ecstasy on this train ride to Fribourg to see the girl, who makes it no secret that she is looking forward to cooking for me. That per se is not the reason for my bliss; rather it’s seeing her again after an endless 24 hours apart.

I just had to share.

NP: Russian Circles: Station

It was a shower as good that I struggle to think of a similar experience. Now where have all my muscles gone?

NP: Dream Theater: Metropolis Pt 2: Scenes from a Memory

As readers of my blog know, I moved to a new flat just after Easter. Unfortunately, on that Monday afternoon, just after we finished hauling most of the furniture (the heavy stuff at least) over to the new place, I slipped as I was leaping off the transporter vehicle, lost an argument against gravity and hit the asphalt more or less horizontally after a 1.5 metre fall.

I landed on both wrists and my left knee, and while my consciousness never left, reality sort of blurred away, as I rolled over on the ground and waves of pain began rippling through my body. People started assembling around me and the adrenaline faded away, then I realised that this move of mine was not going to end as smoothly as it had begun. My body refused to bend my left wrist and knee and I knew I was injured, but it did not hurt so much for me to conclude anything serious. I remembered the ice packs in my freezer and had my cousin fetch them, then let two colleagues carry me to bed to regain my bearing, but the pain got worse and I started to accept that I would have to go to the hospital.

Still optimistic (“it’s just a contusion, it’s just a sprain”), I crawled from my cousins car to the wheel chair, into the hospital and onto a bed to await the verdict. Still thinking about returning home tomorrow, I spent hours on the bed, being pushed between the x-ray, casting, and diagnostic rooms until finally I was told of my fate: multiple fractures of my left knee cap, broken ulna and radius on my left arm with splinters in the joints, and a fractured metacarpal bone on the right — my pinky’s tendon was supposed to snap, but it proved too strong and rather caused the part of the bone to which it was attached to rip off.

They deciced to perform surgery on the two left limbs but to leave the metacarpal bone alone because of the complexity of the fracture and the proximity of all my hand’s and fingers’ nerves. Because everything was swollen like a balloon ready to burst, I had to wait three days for the surgery with casts and a splint on my leg.

The surgery was scheduled for Thursday morning and even though I was actually looking forward to it all (especially the administration of the anesthetic), I was simply too tired in the early morning hours, and the Dormicum tablet they fed me did the rest: I was asleep when we entered the surgery room and woke up at noon with new casts and a morphine injection pumping a comparatively large dose of the drug into my veins every eight minutes — apparently, my body was going through a lot of pain during the surgery, so the “pain management service” (in German, they’re just called “Schmerzdienst” — “pain service”, actually) opted to pump it up. Here’s what I looked liked shortly after the surgery:

Meanwhile, Gian-marco, my future flat mate, had spent the day packing up everything that was left in my old flat, where I had left an utter mess. A colleague of mine was to sublet the place starting that Saturday, so there were roughly 48 hours left to empty and clean it, and to hand it over. There are more pleasant things in heaven and earth than to have someone else empty your flat for you.

Morphine is a really crazy drug. Most people think of it as fuzzy and often joke about taking it if only they could get their hands on it. Having made the experience, I’d rather not take it again unless I have to. Watching television turned out to be impossible, even the weather report went too fast for me. Visitors appeared sort of blurry, I would often not follow the things they said, and it was definitely impossible to entertain thoughts for prolonged periods of time, or to engage in any sort of productive thinking. Organising a cleaning lady for my old flat and giving instructions to my cousin, who would hand over the flat took all my energy…

On Friday, I was to have an important business meeting with three people, so I organised a room in the hospital and asked the nurses to put me on optional morphine so I could be a bit more present during the meeting. As a consequence, I could press a button once every ten minutes for a dose of morphine, and with this new level of control, I began to reduce the drug amount in my blood gradually.

The meeting did not take place in the end but I came to regret my choice to reduce the morphine at around midnight, when the pain in my knee became unbearable. I kept pressing the button for more morphine like a madman, but the device would only deliver a new shot every 10 minutes. The nurse was not authorised to change that and instead gave me other pain and sleep medication, but not even the combination of morphine, Tramal (an opiod), Novalgin, Mefenacid, and Paracetamol could dampen the level of pain, and so I spent almost three hours in real agony, biting the pillow with tears running down my cheeks, until finally the medication won, I became indifferent (thanks to Temesta) and drifted off into sleep.

After breakfast the next morning, the morphine applicator suddenly had a fit, started beeping, and pumped more drug into my body than it should have. It took me about 20 minutes or maybe an hour (who knows…) to put my brain together, realise what had happened, and come up with a way to lift my finger to the button to call the nurse. Despite the horrible night, I told them to remove the morphine because I’d rather stand the pain than have my brain mushed like that, plus there are always plain morphine injections delivered by humans instead of machines.

In fact, the next night I could feel the pain approaching and since it’s easier to suppress pain than it is to remove it, I asked for a sleeping pill and a morphine injection. The injection did three things: first, it hurt so much that my knee immediately became pain-free while nerve central was occupied trying to figure out what the heck had just happened in my right thigh. Second, it did not take three minutes to kick in, and it kicked in so strongly that I just barely realised that my head was suboptimally positioned on the pillow and the lights still on, but failed to do anything about it. I did not wake once until breakfast. And third, I am glad to know that morphine does actually (still) work. Pain is complex, fascinating, useful, sometimes even pleasurable to some, but when you know the cause and you’d rather make it stop, it’s comforting to know that there are ways — the previous night had instilled some doubt in me.

From then it was all downhill and I left the hospital after eleven days on Thursday, got by without pain medication the same day and off the sleeping pills the next night. Two days later I was already racing around town in my wheel chair:

By now I can actually walk again, albeit slowly, and even though I still cannot lift heavy stuff or get my hands wet, my hands are a lot better; on 21 May, the casts shall be removed and I’ll be able to bend my knee again, but it may take up to a year to return to sports, such as running, to which I had just become addicted. In fact, I can comfortably claim that I had just reached an acceptable level of fitness just before the injury. Tough luck.

My mother has come to Zurich twice already to help unpack and with her invaluable help, as well as the help of Gian-marco and several others, we are actually almost done moving in. Ironically, it’s actually quite annoying to sit and watch others do your work; I would have helped as well, had the roles been inverted, and yet I am still greatly indebted. Human relations tend to be funny like that.

Let me end with two points: first, Zurich’s university hospital probably ranks among the best hospitals in the world, and that makes Zurich even more attractive to me (even though I certainly don’t plan my next hospital stay). I felt very comfortable throughout my stay, had the impression of being in very capable hands, and had most of my countless questions answered. In addition, the hospital is very nicely surrounded by a park and could not be more central, which makes it easier for visitors.

And that brings me to my final thought: thanks to everyone who stopped by or called in to make my stay a lot more pleasant. I spent eleven days in the hospital and I got bored and annoyed for the first time on Wednesday, the day before my release. Most of the credit for those ten days of lack of boredom goes to everyone who supported me. It did help that I had Internet access via a convenient 2€/day GPRS flatrate (even though I could not really type), but it became crystal clear to me that visiting someone in the hospital, whether you’re close to the patient or not, is one of the most beautiful gifts you can give. In the past I have neglected this opportunity occasionally; now I would want to make a special effort (even though I hope there won’t be any need).

And I would not be a geek if I did not end this post with a reference to Debian: I know of a case when one of our developers ended up in hospital and two others (or was it more?) drove hours to visit and check in on him/her. Now even more than before can I say that I am proud to be a member of a project in which such things happen.

PS: this post took me about 4 hours to compose. Sucks to be typing one-handed.

Today, Gian-Marco (with whom I grew up) and I are signing the contract for our new (rented) flat. It’s not far from where I currently live, but it’s more spacious and I’ll finally get to sleep and work in two separate rooms, for which I’ve been longing for months.

I’ll be moving on 9 and 10 April 2007. Let me know if you happen to be around with nothing to do.

NP: Emerson, Lake & Palmer / Brain Salad Surgery

I have returned home after five weeks of Ph.D. research in Limerick. I’ve come a bit further on the way towards my thesis but still have not reached the critical mass moment when my inertia makes me go on and on until the work is done. But in all fairness, I’ve made a good deal of progress and now should have all I need to work on this in my spare time at home too.

I also had a fabulous time outside of the office, being immersed into a wonderful circle of lads and ladies from the very start. I would not be able to capture all the fun in writing about it, so I won’t and instead resort to looking forward to my return for a two-day workshop in a little less than three weeks, and another longer stay in April/May.

This time, I won’t lure my bike along. It was a good idea, but there was too much rain and mud to really enjoy it. Even though transport to and from Limerick (which isn’t exactly well-connected to the rest of the world in terms of transport) was mostly painless (thanks to people like Ewan, who’d take me along to Dublin and drop me in front of my hotel), it’s probably more trouble than worth — especially since I doubt I could get bored around “109/110 Elm Park” (which is where I lived).

Daren, Mel, Claire, Jonathan, Cliona, Cathal, Sarah, Caitriona, Lisa, James, Jerry, Karen, Jurij, Gary, Eoin, and everyone else whose name I didn’t manage to store (forgive me), I miss y’all already…

NP: Amorphis / Elegy

Update: On the subject of “craic”, Peter J. Cavan has to offer:

“Craic” was a Gaelicization of “crack”, which was popular during the 20th century in Ulster and northern England (and originally came from an older Scots word). The term was then re-adopted into English as an ‘Irish English’ word. The Irish intelligentsia (yes, there is such a grouping) aren’t fans of it; being a ‘foreign’ word and ominously close to ‘cráic’ (which means something rude).

Conviviality or good atmosphere are the generally intended meanings (here in Ulster anyway), used in “have a bit of craic in the pub” and “the pub has a bit of craic about it” respectively. Venting enthusiasm may be a by-product, but not the focus of the word.

When my (ex-) lab was (forcibly) suggested to move out of the main campus building to an office building in the north of Zurich, it was rather beneficial to me. The new building is a mere 500 metres from my flat, and the university cut a deal with the nearby Turbine Personalrestaurant to offer us our choice of three excellent meals for lunch each day for a mere CHF 7 (4.25€; less than half of what you generally have to pay in Zurich for lunch). That restaurant is within eyesight of my flat. I could not have asked for more, really.

Since then, the rest of the Department of Informatics has moved to another building across the street. Initially, the what supposed to include our group as well, but we resisted successfully. Even after I had left the lab, I continued meeting my former colleagues for lunch every other day, which was a great way to stay in touch.

Anyway, with now more than 100 university employees in this part of town (which is supposed to become the third campus over the next ten years), the university opened a “Mensa” (university cafeteria) and subsequently stopped the subventions of our lunches at Turbine.

This is a serious degradation of quality of life for all of us. Granted, Swiss university cafeterias must rank among the best in the world, but they still suck: you are treated as a number, no exceptions (like if you leave your ID card at home), and the food (which is far less appetising when served in masses) is slapped onto your plate without much love.

Also, the new cafeteria is now much further away from my flat, so I am less likely to join the others for lunch on a regular basis. While most of my former colleagues are in the process of graduating anyway and I haven’t really linked up with the new ones yet, this would have happened gradually anyway, but gradually is better than immediately.

So now I am depressed and pondering whether to just not eat anymore. Damn you, university!

Due to my physical incapacitation of the last 10 months, I have become a user of Workrave. The programme now bugs me to take a five minute break every 25 minutes of working on the computer (but it’s smart about figuring out when I actually do use the machine, or another one in my network, so it’s not as much of a useless nuisance as it may sounds to be).

So every 25 minutes, I am being told to take a rest break. In response, I find myself doing one of three things, in decreasing order of likelihood:

• click “postpone”

• get up, wander about and keep peeking at the screen to ensure that I’d be back at the keys not any longer than 301 seconds after the popup.

• do something useful and come back to the screen when I am done.

My challenge for the times to come is to get rid of the first two points on that list.

As some of you may know, I am currently in Ireland, spending most of the summer at the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre to get a start on my Ph.D. research. This is the story of how I got here and how it’s been so far.

In the middle of July, I left my beloved city of Zurich and headed for Dublin. I commenced my stay in “the green country” with a three-day Debian workshop for the Google Europe sysops, which was intensive and yet enjoyable. I had between 4 and 10 participants, and the syllabus was to cover most everything, from APT basics to advanced concepts. That’s a lot for three days, and I usually advise clients to consider a five-day or even two-week course instead, but after convincing the organiser to plan for three days rather than just two, I figured I’d be dealing with pretty good people anyway, given Google’s hiring standards. I was not to be disappointed.

We started the course with installation problems, because the 2.6 kernel install which I suggested could not deal with the SATA driver in the new IBM T43p notebooks which the participants were using. While one guy decided to try a 2.4 install with the IDE-sata driver, I opted to go down the debootstrap route instead, and was especially delighted — at first — to learn about a working netboot setup in the Google LAN. My joy vanished when I found the Ubuntu rescue image not to contain debootstrap, so I didn’t have much choice but to prepare a root tarball and offer it for wget download. This worked, and after manual tweaking and making the system bootable, running into some issues after inadvertedly upgrading the entire system to the backports.org archive (which still does not offer a proper default pin), we decided to just go with testing and be done with it.

I have to say that I really like courses where stuff does not work, as I believe those to be far more valuable to the participants. This time around, it was also the first time (after having taught maybe 60 or 70 courses in total) that I did not let myself get stressed out. Realising this put me in a great mood and made those days even more enjoyable.

The rest of the workshop went without further complications, but judging from feedback over cigarettes, lunch, or the evening beer(s), the guys and girls still appreciated it. I have to thank Google and all participants for a great three days of hospitality and challenges, interesting discussions and fun. I really ought to reconsider my decision not to accept their offer for a sysop position…

The last day saw me getting sick though, it must have been the air-conditioning. When I reached the hotel after the course, I definitely knew I had high fever and was developing a bad headache and cough, so I didn’t get to enjoy a Friday night out in Dublin. Instead, I slept from 18:00 hours until the late morning, when I had to drag myself to the train station to catch the train to Limerick… which was painful, but I managed. Some time in between, I tried out nstx and managed to get a decent SSH connection to the outside world from the hotel room (just don’t forget the -a -x flags!).

Arriving in Limerick, I registered for the student apartment I had rented and found myself in a small room with a bed and desk, my own bathroom, a common room and kitchen I share with my room mate (whom I barely saw), including a TV, fridge, oven, microwave, and enough “little stuff” to make me conclude that this place was livable — for 60€/week not a bad deal. I spent most of the weekend sleeping, but it was not until Tuesday that my state had returned to normal.

The place also has an Ethernet jack, but that turned out to be unusable as it was (a) behind a fascist firewall, and (b) on the same network as about 40 other users, 17 of which seemed to be running peer-to-peer filesharing clients all hours of the day. In my office at the university, I found myself in the same situation as (a), but at least I managed to install OpenVPN, and dsniff and was thus ready to take back the net in my apartment. I wrote a little script which would (a) spoof ARP replies from the router for all hosts for a few minutes, (b) analyse the traffic it got to identify obvious P2P machines, and (c) proceed to poison their ARP cache every few seconds, effectively shaping their connection. I had to go this way, because tools like tcpnice (part of dsniff) do not work in a switched network very well, and neither did macof. Unfortunately, I lost the script in the recent XFS fiasco, but the major P2P offenders seem to have left anyway.

Thanks to OpenVPN, I also got VoIP working and am happily tunneling through the university’s proxy (which otherwise would require me to use the SOCKS4 proxy protocol with proxychains, which would be a nuisance). I really don’t understand why a university blocks outgoing traffic. Oh well…

It’s been three weeks since I’ve come to Limerick, and my feelings are mixed. I’ve been spending most time in my (temporary) office (pretending to be) doing work, I have not really acquainted myself with the food here, the university campus is filled with hundreds of 14 year old summer school students but nobody of my age, and, well, research is coming along slower than I had hoped. I guess that’s normal in a sense, but I also know for sure that I have a lot of work left to do on my discipline. I am a master of procrastination, you see, and Debian is a dangerous drug, a black hole that sucks in your time while it excites your synapses and splashes endorphines all around. But I’ve not lost my hope at the very least…

Thanks for caring.

Mainly to make my life as a foreigner here in Switzerland easier, but also for tax purposes, I am founding a company… tomorrow actually. It’ll be a “GmbH”, which is the German equivalent of “Ltd”/”LLC”: a separate legal entity with limited liability from the side of the participator (that’s me).

Only problem: I don’t have a name.

Part of me wants a regular German name (none of the “let’s choose English words to make it sound cool” approach). The other part of me already operates internationally.

Part of me would love to found “moo LLC” or “madduck consulting Ltd.”, and the other part would prefer a little bit more seriousness.

Part of me can’t be bothered and would be happy to settle with “Martin Krafft Schulungs und Beratungs GmbH”, and the other part doesn’t really think that’s very compelling.

Both parts of me are tired. Let’s hope the morning brings new ideas, for I don’t have time to wait much longer.