First week in Berlin

My first week here has been… fairly uneventful, actually. I spent a few days trying to get errands done and resist jetlag, got sick for the weekend, then went back to getting stuff done (plus a little hacking). :)

Pete’s friends have an impressive games collection. I tried to capture *most* of the board games part:

and then this caught my eye:

yes, aaron’s got his very own game. ;) It turned out to be a japanese teaching game, which would be fun to play – but I came home that night with a chinese book, would’ve had a latin one if J didn’t need it for some class she’s teaching, and I’m still fending off their attempts to get me back into esperanto ;) so I think I have enough languages on my plate already. Hell, today was probably the first time I tried to speak more than one word of german…

On the weekend, ossi came to say hi, and we ended up discussing activities. I’ve got a patch on reviewboard now that exposes kwin’s stuff, which will be useful in several ways. :D

Oh, and it turns out Berlin’s cheap rent is deceptive: when they say an apartment is unfurnished, they really mean it’s an empty, gutted shell. :P There’s a lot of paperwork involved as well, and apparently they’re not keen on renting to foreigners. :/ Pete managed to find one that came with kitchen cupboards, a stove, and light fixtures… but that’s it. Other than that, there’s not so much as a curtain rod. I’m surprised they didn’t take the showerhead too…

Pete bought some furniture and dishes before I arrived, but we’re still waiting for the fridge to arrive. Today I found a dollar store and got lots of little things like teatowels and garbage bins and so on… There’s still lots more we need; it’s fun to go shopping. :) But it’s turning out to be a bit more than we’d budgeted for. They don’t use craigslist in germany, and the big secondhand shop we went to was mostly full of clothes. :P

Other than that (and this damn cold) things are nice, though. Berlin is a city of good food and cheap beer :) and the weather’s a lot like vancouver (either it rains, or it bounces between rain and sun every hour)… it’s a lot more windy, though, so it feels colder.

Next weekend I should be over the jetlag and the cold, so hopefully I can get out and see what this city is like at night. ;) I hear some extra KDE folks will be in town too – whee, it’s pretty cool to be so close to so many of you. :)

Nomadic again

Land of the silver birch
Home of the beaver
Where still the mighty moose
Wanders at will

Blue lake and rocky shore
I will return once more
Boom de de boom boom, Boom de de boom boom, Boom boom.

In less than 12 hours I’ll be flying out of Canada. Once again, all my things are packed, either in suitcases or in boxes. I’ll only be gone four months – such a short time, yet such a long time too. I’ll miss Vancouver again, I’m sure. I’ll enjoy Berlin and the rest of Europe as well, though. :)

I was just beginning to get comfortable in this apartment, too… just starting to feel at home again. Well, that’s how things go. :) Time to start a new adventure.

Maybe tomorrow
I’ll wanna settle down.
Until tomorrow
The whole world is my home.

why aren’t you using rsibreak?

Summer is ending here, and the weather has driven me back indoors. :( This is good news for KDE, though, as I’ve been hacking instead of going to the beach.

Last weekend, after spending some time upgrading mum’s website, I decided it was time to get rid of some of the “papercuts” that have been irritating me. I have a long list of small things in KDE that get on my nerves, and I’m hoping to work my way through them over the next few months. :)

First on the list was Rsibreak. It… didn’t actually work. There was just a small bug that kept the timers from working with qt > 4.4, and it must not have many users, because I was the first to report it. I guess that means you’re all doomed to get RSI. :P Anyways, it’s happily working again in trunk. :) I’ve spotted another bug though, and it still looks kinda kde3-ish, so there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit here for anyone who wants to get involved. :)

I also got nepomuk working on my system (turned out I had a broken config). :) Yay! …but then Aaron went and removed the old activity config stuff, so I guess if I want to set icons on my activities I need to implement the new UI. ;) Or wait for him to do it. ;)

During the week, when I wasn’t dealing with all the little chores of moving, I was learning about xpath for work (odfkit, that is). It’s quite the powerful little thing… although for some reason, the “axes” stuff like descendant:: doesn’t work in webkit. o.0 oh well. There turned out to be another easy way of doing that… so now the xml of a flat odf document can be properly converted into the format needed for a zipped odf document. still working on the binary parts though. :)

This weekend – well, this friday actually, because I’ve decided friday is kde day – I started on something I’ve been desperate for all summer: session support for activities. Right now I have it hardcoded to close and restore all okular windows (the first simple app that came to mind) but soon I should have the basics working for activities! :) I’ll blog (and maybe even screencast) about that when I’ve made some more progress.