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Weird things I've noticed in hotels lately...

I've been crap about blogging lately. Let's see if I can fix that.

Back in February and March, Jo and I went on vacation for 2 weeks touring California and Nevada. We had an awesome time and we got to see and do lots of fun stuff. I'm not going to go into all the details, as it's a long time ago now...! I've got a massive set of photos online, though.

However, two things struck me as odd when we were there. I'm travelling quite regularly to the US these days due to my work in Linaro, but these still seemed new when I saw them this February/March. These are, admittedly trivial things, but they really stood out for me. Maybe I'm a little weird? :-)

Curved shower curtain tracks

I guess I'm not the only one who's been annoyed by shower curtains sticking to me in the shower, but I'd not really paid much thought to it until now. Suddenly, as of maybe 18 months ago I'm seeing most hotel bathrooms replacing the straight curtain track with a curved one, to stop that happening. This photo shows that process with both tracks visible...

Waterproof/washable TV remotes

This one really surprised me. As Jo will attest, I have a little bit of an obsession with TVs and set-top boxes in hotel rooms. This dates from my time working for Amino where we made set-top boxes, and I got into the habit of checking what products were in the hotels I stayed in. I've seen a range of weird and wonderful setups over the years, but never this one before. In two of the hotels on our trip, they had replaced the normal TV remotes with washable/wipe-down ones. Weird...

01:02 :: # :: /misc :: 4 comments

Mini-Debconf in Cambridge, November 6-9 2014

For the second year running, we held our mini-debconf in Cambridge last weekend. Roughly 70 people turned up this year to the ARM offices in Cambridge over the 4 days.

Alongside our originally planned general sprint work on Thursday and Friday, the Release Team had their own sprint to work through remaining post-freeze decisions about policies, architectures, naming etc. The rest of us worked through a range of topics all over Debian: installer, admin, ARM arch support etc. We even managed to fix Andy's laptop :-).

Saturday and Sunday were two days devoted to more traditional conference sessions. Our talks covered a wide range of topics: d-i progress and an update from the Release Team, backup software and an arm64 laptop project to name but a few.

I was very happy that the Release Team announced Zurg"Stretch" and "Buster" as upcoming release names, and obviously it was lovely to have arm64 and ppc64el confirmed as release architectures for Jessie. It's a shame to see the kfreebsd ports dropped from the official Jessie list, but let's see if the porters can do an unofficial release anyway. I'll help if I can with things like CD builds...

Several volunteers from the DebConf video team were on hand too, so our talks were recorded and are already online at http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2014/mini-debconf-cambridge/webm/. Yay!

Again, the mini-conf went well and feedback from attendees was universally positive. We may run again next year. More importantly, I can confirm that we're definitely planning on bidding to host a full DebConf in Cambridge in the summer of 2017.

Thanks to all our helpers, and of course to our sponsors: ARM for providing the venue and infrastructure for the event, and Codethink for helping with food costs.

00:25 :: # :: /debian/mini-debconf :: 1 comment