2005-08-03 10:58
by Vasil Kolev30 July
Last night I’ve tried to sleep in a wet sleeping bag, but at aroung 4 I woke up shivering and went to the NOC tent, with some stuff to dry (the air conditioners there really dry the air). At some point the good guy Maxim passed through and dropped a bottle of lemon schnapps (well, it was only 20%), which helped me warm :)
Through the day I went to fix a Cisco Catalyst 5000 – it refused to connect normally in our network (that was made with HP switches in the field and Foundry BigIron for the core). Turned out to be a problem with the spanning tree – I disabled it on all ports, and it was ok… The machine was English Pete’s, who after that gave me an Amstel beer (or was it someone else from the british?), which tasted the same as the one we have in Bulgaria:)
So most of the day passed in tracking and fixing problems, which I can’t remember now.
There was a pgp keysigning party, for which I was almost late, but managed to exchange information with about 9 people (and I just finished the signing, 03.08). It was pretty funny, everyone was inspecting, the other ones’ IDs:)
It was simply full with amazing people.
In the evening Bobson made his desert with vodka, cherries and chocolate – we treated everyone around, wired, wireless, etc. :) Everyone liked it, but some complained of the high alcohol level in it :)
I in the end I slept in the NOC (my tent was wet), with my head to the servers and feet to the air conditioners (configured in a way that they won’t cool me :) ), with the earplugs.
31 July
The sleep was great, the earplugs are a godsend. For waking up I read some mail…
In the morning I did the first round for unplugging cables, and got caught in a hellish storm, but managed to finish it (some jokers locked me for a while in one of the dixies :) ). I hate the rain.
In the afternoon I attended Rop’s closing speech – it felt incredible, we had made it :) The video is download-able (more on the video recordings – later), it’s worth seeing :)
Followed stopping of the switches in the field, at 12 we stopped the ones in the core.
1 August
Last day… I again slept in the noc, and missed a great fun – Arien and chervarium were sleeping in the noc tent when some people came and stared to dismantle it over their heads :)
We did some of the heavy stuff, like pulling a part of the fiber, loading some of the equipment, etc, after which I was at the end of my stamina (and then helped a bit with the carrying of the rest of the power cables – they were heavy as hell, some of them needed three people to be carried). Then me, chervarium and Bobson went with the shuttle to Boxter, where we took the train to Schiphol (the buying of the tickets was a bit weird, because there were no humans at the ticket office, and only my Maestro card worked).
At the airport I sat with my my luggage and just went to sleep, chervarium went to Amsterdam for a walk, and Bobson looked around the airport. I mostly slept, with some waking-ups.
2 August
We got normally on the plane (there was a bug queue at the passport control, and because of the steel caps on my boots, they made me take them off (еxposing the other people around to a biohazard :) ) . We landed in Bulgaria, passed through the passport control, and got kicked out of the terminal for a bomb scare. We waited a few hours in the heat, after which we could go in and pick up our luggage (there were only two baggage retrieval lines, they had luggage from 7-8 flights, and was really hard to find ours). After that Yavor’s mother drove us home, I did some home stuff, got in bed around 9, and got up at 10 in the morning…
I’ll do a better write-up in the next few days.