Back in Göteborg

It's late spring, or perhaps early summer here in Göteborg. The flowers are in full bloom with their scent hanging in the moist air. I got back from Iceland yesterday and slept for about 12 hours. Friday and most of Saturday was heavily sprint oriented. The effbot and I finished up the string module. According to stringbench (a new benchmark program I wrote) the result is about 3 times faster. It's a biased benchmark as it only times the things I found interesting, and is weighted towards the functions we worked on, like string search and replace. On Sunday afternoon I experimented with improving PyArg_ParseTuple, using the assumptions that 1) most calls have 3 or fewer parameters and 2) nearly all calls will have a correct format string. First go (after some help from Georg) netted about 5% boost in pybench. Whoot! Need to flesh it out some before sending in the patch to pydev.

On Saturday we stopped at 5pm. It was gymnasium graduation weekend and the room was booked for a party. We had a closing dinner at the hotel. Decent meal but the kitchen door squeaked something fierce in the high high frequencies, like the squeal of the flyback transformer in an old CRT. Few others heard it. At the end Steve handed out a few fun awards. Fredrick and I got a ball of twine, because we've been slinging strings about. Georg got Asimov's "I, Robot" as he's now known as the "georgbot" or the "gbot". Uncle Tim got tupperware containers to store snot (he's been optimizing the snot out of things, or perhaps it's because he's as smart as snot). I think that was it for the awards.

EWT paid for the dinner then CCP took us out for a night on the town. We started at one club with drinks of .. I forgot the first one. It was like a tequila sunrise but with vodka. The second was a shot of akvavit, the third an "ass" (kicks like a donkey) which was vodka and ginger ale. It comes from the days before beer. Beer was prohibited until May 1 of 1989 so they ended up with drinks like that. Our host for the evening was Kristján from CCP games, who did a great job.

Kristján likes the 1970s, and dresses that way too. At 10pm we were a bit early but by 11:30 or so the club dancing started. There were perhaps a dozen on the floor, and it was normal club dancing which is something I don't do often. I feel awkward because I don't know what to do with my arms. On the other hand (other appendenages?) my feet move about twice as fast as most others, and more complicated. Kristján also danced and pulled out a large number of disco moves. I got the footwork down quickly, but it's the hands. I feel awkward doing what he did, but for him it worked well.

After a while we headed to a a couple other clubs. The first was rather crowded and the second had a long line so we went to the Intercultural House for a bit. By then it was about 2:30am so I decided to head back to the hotel. On the way out a couple of guys started dancing with me, but I said "det är inte för mig" ("this is not for me"), in a nice way. Walked back along the sea wall there at sunrise. I was hoping to at least touch the water but the 10 ft high rock slope, cold water, and nobody else there in case of problems changed my mind.

Got back to the hotel, slept for an hour, showered, packed and went downstairs for the 5am bus to the airport. Bus? Did I say bus? Turns out the bus needs to be called beforehand. Phoned up Steve (he was to take the same bus) and he said he did that the day before. The staff people looked again and said "you must have made a mistake because you booked it for tomorrow, the 28th". "Oh, today is the 28th." The called and paid for taxis for us and the other group to get to the bus station. The bus leaves there at 5:15. We made it.

The airport was a mad house. It looks like the first flights are all scheduled at the same time. There were long lines for everywhere except business and e-ticket electronic checkin. Because of the lateness of the purchase (I guess), Georg, Christian, his lovely wife Andrea and I had business tickets so we checked in quickly, but still had to wait in line for security. That wasn't bad as I talked some with Georg. Bought some items at the airport, hung around in the business class lounge, and made it to the airplane without falling asleep. Even made it through breakfast.

I asked for a direct flight to/from Göteborg but they routed me through Frankfurt on the way to Iceland and Copenhagen on the way back. Christian and Andrea were on the same flight as I so we chatted a bit more. My flight to Gbg was about 35 minutes on a puddle jumper. Even on a small plane SAS serves complimentary drinks, including beer and wine. Most of the rest of the day and night I slept. Here it does get dark at night still, at least for a few hours.

Today I tried to get some work done but the DAS work isn't that satisfying. The optimization work was more fun. I caught up with email and read some more of Hamilton's "Judas Unchained." It's a fun read, though it was 5 or so months since I read the first of the two novels ("Pandora's Star") I'm having problems remembering who all the characters are.

I checked for local salsa and last Monday the weekly summer salsa dancing at Liseberg started. It's a local amusement park, quite big but still managable. Not like Disney where it needs its own mass transit system. The mascot there is a green rabbit. I bought the summer & Christmas pass. Only $20, and a day pass is about $8. (The rides cost tickets, unlike Disney where it's free once you get in.)

It was the first time I danced salsa here since December, except for one night at Oceanen on the way from South Africa back to Santa Fe. It was good to see the people I had met last fall and started making friends with. I had a fun time. Afterwards I talked with Christian and a few others about what's going on with dance. There are no salsa classes during summer. There is swing dancing on Sundays. I need to check out Westcoast Jitterbugs.