Et tu, Cthulhu

It’s that time of year again, which means I have to renew my Mexican FM2 visa. Everything was going smoothly until the immigrations clerk asked for the “founding declaration” of Novell and a list of all its employees (!). I provided the former document last year, so it should have already been in their files, and the latter document is not on the official list of required paperwork that I was given.

To top it off, these are confidential documents that Novell de Mexico cannot release to me, so the immigrations office has to make an official letter requesting it. Hopefully the added potential for screwups resulting from this process won’t be realized.

Today, most Mexicans celebrate the “Día de los Reyes Magos”, which loosely translates to “Three Kings Day“. Kids get their “Christmas” gifts today, in line with the Bible’s tale of the baby Jésus and the Three Kings. More importantly (for the grown-up atheists among us), there’s also delicious cake to be had - it’s called rosca and is a kind of sweet bread with dried fruit and a little bit of rum in it.

Maru’s mom makes this cake every year, and this year Maru decided for the first time to try her hand at making her own. She turned out five totally awesome roscas, of which we’ve only managed to consume two so far - with a little help from our friends.

In the year that went:

• My old blog went south. Which is just as well, I guess, since the hosting was pretty shitty. I now have a shiny new blog hosted with a more reliable provider. Maybe I’ll even be able to rescue the old content…
• Our cat, Tina, died.
• The trees in our garden were infested with an assortment of parasitic organisms, and had to be completely cut back. They’re already sprouting new growth, though.
• I turned 30 on a hot day in Havana.

I’m at the GNOME Summit. Right now watching the Hotwire talk.

Oh, and since my blog was broken when it mattered, I’m late to the party - but what the hell: openSUSE 10.3 is out! And it’s actually not too shabby, with GNOME 2.20 and all.

Spent last week in Stockholm working on GVFS with Alex. We made great strides - pretty much all of the file system operations are now implemented in gvfs-daemon, gvfs-fuse-daemon and the SMB backend. Plenty of work remaining, though.

We bought a used car. Ford Fiesta 2003 (American cars are cheaper), gray. Four wheels. Now all I need to do is learn how to drive.

Last week was a pretty busy one. I spent part of it in Mexico City, seeing friends and looking for some computer gear I needed. Everyone’s talking about the new abortion legislation that will legalize the practice in the Federal District (the state that contains a large part of the city). The progressives, although (arguably) losing the presidential election, hold a majority of seats there and have struck back with legalized gay marriage, and now this. The church and other conservatives have, predictably, made a lot of fuss over being dragged into last century. Even the pope has contributed his share of outrage. I say congratulations, DF - it’s about time.

Paolita and Leo in the DF

Only two days after the above picture was taken, Paolita suffered a burglary in which she lost most of her computing equipment (read: livelihood). Since she’s an independent contractor, she’s counting on finishing her current job to pay for new stuff.

On Thursday, Leo and I set course for Poza Rica, where we’d been invited to give talks at their FLISOL arrangement. The plan had been for Paolita to come with us, but sadly, the above turn of events left her without the time and money to do so. We started out making good time, but found the highway blocked by a trailer crash, and had to backtrack a couple of kilometers for the “scenic route”. It was slow due to ongoing road work, but at least it wasn’t jammed with cars - apparently we were the only ones with a map.

Blocked highway

Alternate route

All in all, getting there took about twice as long as we’d hoped, and once in Poza Rica we found that our talks had been postponed to Friday. We got to know the local Linuxeros - an excellent gang.

Poza Rica gang

From left to right, that’s Leo, Adlair, the waitress, Marco, Christian, Xochitl and Jorge.

Although the event didn’t turn out exactly as hoped, we got to do the talks and there seemed to be some interest. The slides and source for mine are available. It’s a tiny project that illustrates how to get started writing and distributing free desktop software. It’s called “PopoMon”, and is a web-scraping taskbar alert level monitor for the volcano we all know and love, Popocatepetl.

On Saturday I was back home, and on Sunday we were invited to visit our neighbors and friends, Omar and Silvia, at their cabin. It’s located in the woods on the outskirts of Xalapa, less than an hour away by car. Once you leave the city, things change quickly:

Peace and quiet

More Xalapa countryside

Omar and Silvia

Me and Maru

Maru inside of a big ol’ tree

People were raising and serving fish nearby, using water diverted from a river. We ate some. It wasn’t at all bad.

Fish in a pool

Fish in a bucket

I bought a bicycle.

Robust with a couple of gears, reasonably priced. Unfortunately, there was not a single one for sale that didn’t have front-wheel suspension. Apparently you can only get “urban bikes” without suspension, and they are - irrationally - not in season. Oh well. I’m pretty happy with it anyway. It’s been about 8 years since I last owned a vehicle, and I’d totally forgotten the thrill of speed and the satisfaction of putting momentum and gravity to work for you.

Dark. About zero degrees. No snow.

In preparation for tomorrow’s Mexican Revolution Day, federal police today hosed down a peaceful demonstration for women’s rights with water and tear gas (hard to find coverage in English). This in Oaxaca, where autocrat governor Ulises Ruiz has stated that “only God can install or remove authorities”, receiving blessings from the church. Several demonstrators and media representatives have been killed in the ongoing conflict.