Debconf, continued

[bwh]

Wednesday 13th

This was a day off from talks. Around 10:30 most of us boarded one of two boats that took us to Suomenlinna/Sveaborg, the "fortress of Finland", that once defended Helsinki against attack from the sea. The boats also carried supplies for our lunch. Having unloaded these, we were divided into a number of manageable tour groups and led around various parts of the old defences. Unfortunately the guide for my group would start talking as soon as she arrived at each waypoint rather than waiting for everyone to get within earshot, and didn't speak very loudly either, so I missed much of what she said. I did learn that the fortress had been occupied by Russian, Swedish and Finnish armies over time, and that their living conditions weren't very good. That's about all I can tell you. I took a number of photos around the place.

Having completed our guided tours, we gathered together again and walked to a grassy area, some of us carrying supplies for lunch. Here we picnicked, chatted and, for the most part, relaxed, into the early afternoon. Then at 3 and 4 respectively, the two boats carried us back to Otaniemi, taking a scenic route past various islands and part of the harbourfront of Helsinki, which I also photographed.

By this point in the week I was suffering somewhat from lack of sleep, so after dinner I took a nap, while others went to the large sauna which had been booked for our use that evening. Upon waking around 8 or 9 I wandered over, not knowing whether the sauna would still be open. Thankfully I discovered it was going to be open for most of the night, so I stripped off and got in there. This was my first time in a sauna and it was very enjoyable, though I found the steam overwhelming after only 10 minutes or so. I went out and had a shower, then a swim in the bay, and then sat around and chatted for a while. There was something strangely comfortable about lounging around in the nude, but then I'm comfortable doing that at home anyway. I repeated this cycle several times through into the early morning, when most people remaining reclothed and started to dance amusingly. I have a couple of crappy videos of this dancing on my phone which I may get round to publishing at some point.

Thursday 14th

I went to several talks, which you can read all about on the Debconf web site, so there's not much need for me to describe them. In the evening there was a formal dinner, though it was formal only in structure - the level of dress and the standard of food were pretty much the same as other evenings, though there were three courses. Most people were seated at a number of long tables on the main floor of the canteen, lit (mostly) by candles; a few had to sit upstairs. Various Debian notables made speeches between courses, the contents of which were generally good though not particularly memorable. After dinner people congregated in spaces away from the tables and upstairs on the roof. Some of the British attendees decided to collect beer "glasses" and stack them into a tower. Over the course of an hour or so the tower grew to overshadow first Branden, then later Matthew Garrett and eventually even Bdale.

Friday 15th

More talks of course. In the evening, the keysigning. This has to have been one of the largest keysigning parties ever, with nearly 200 keys and maybe 150 people involved. We spent nearly 3 hours shifting up and down a car park and scrutinising each other's identity documents. I now have about 80 emailed signatures sitting in a mail folder waiting for me to add them to my key; I must admit I have yet to sign anyone else's, but will do so shortly.

Saturday 16th

Yet more talks. I finally got around to writing a couple of postcards. I'm afraid I don't remember anything else of the day, besides packing suitcases again.

Sunday 17th

There were several talks I would have loved to go to, but we had another ferry to catch, and cleaning to do, and so I shall have to rely on videos (of which, I shall say more later). Having swept our room and the corridor outside, packed or otherwise disposed of everything we had with us, we checked out and said farewell to those we passed on the way to the bus stop. I was annoyed to find we had just missed a bus and the next would not leave us very much time to get to the port. Thankfully the bus ran perfectly to time, and we were soon able to transfer to a tram running from the bus station to a stop near the port, leaving enough time for me to find a post box in which to post my cards. The ferry left on time and we rested for an hour or so while it made its way to Tallinn. From the port we took a bus to the airport, from where we believed we would take another bus to the Mahtra Hostel, based on the information on its web site. Unfortunately, we found that the second bus route no longer existed, and we would have to wait for a bus back the way we'd come before catching a third bus to the hostel. I was sufficiently tired and frustrated at this point that I couldn't face more Estonian buses, so we got a taxi to the hostel. This was in the "modern", i.e. Soviet-built, part of town, which was really rather grim. The taxi ride cost most of our remaining krone; in fact I thought it required slightly more than we had, and embarrassedly made up the difference with some euros at a generous exchange rate, but later I found a few more. We checked in and picked a room, then crashed for a few hours, too exhausted to see the city as we had meant to. In the evening, feeling somewhat refreshed, we went to find dinner. Nattie wanted to go into the city again, as she had information about several restaurants there, but I wanted to look nearby first. The hostel receptionist (and quite possibly manager) directed us to a place a few blocks away, and also to the bus stop. We walked among the tower blocks, Ladas and Estonian chavs to find an eatery attached to a neon-lit casino, and immediately decided against that. So we went to the bus stop and shortly caught a bus into the centre of town. Here we walked around for a while and quickly found many acceptable restaurants. We settled on Olde Hansa, a restaurant with an admittedly quite cheesy medieval theme. A costumed and rather handsome waiter served us with delicious, if rather salty, soup, game, and beer in generous portions. We then returned to the hostel by yet another bus.

Monday 18th

We ate a rather bizarre breakfast provided by the hostel, consisting of the contents of various packets. I seem to remember the coffee being OK though, and that's probably the important thing! We took further buses to the airport (knowing more or less what routes to take, this time, though we had to talk some way between the two routes). We had a fair amount of time at the airport, during which Nattie bought some of the local liqueur (Vana Tallinn) and I attempted to pay for wireless Internet access by phoning a given number on my mobile, resulting in a spoken message in Estonian and no authentication details (but no charge either, so far as I could see). Our plane arrived and took us home, only a little late. The rest is boring.

Aftermath

During the conference, since no-one else had mentioned it, I suggested that it might be a good thing to combine the videos of conference sessions into DVDs. Then, since no-one else offered to do it, I felt obliged to have a go myself. So I did. You can't download DVD images, because I can't afford that bandwidth, and besides it would take me over a month to upload them, and they're not finished anyway. You can get the scripts though. Once the videos and the scripts are complete, however, I will be offering to burn DVDs at cost.