First day of the NeedForSpeed sprint

I woke up early, about 6am. It was light out. Sun sets at 11:45pm or so and rises at 2:15. "Or so" because it changes by 8 minutes a day. I was prepared. I brought my night mask picked up on some plane trip or other. Alarm went off at 7 but I didn't get up until 7:30 when the construction started next door.

Went down for breakfast. The normal Nordic smörgåsbord, with a few things I hadn't seen before. Talked with Steve and a few others who were up early. Most weren't as they partyed late with the CCP folks. (I left at 10:30 the previous night. Others ended up going to a bar.)

The sprint started at 9 but many didn't get in for another 45 minutes or so, and a few went back for naps. Also in part because of jet lag. We discussed what we'll work on. I decided to help the effbot with string performance. I started working on a set of comparison tests between the byte string and the unicode string implementations. We found a couple places where the algorithms of one were faster than the other.

Once done there are a few things I want for string processing. A "chomp" function or equivalent for the special case of "remove a terminal newline if it exists." Needed when processing lines from a file. I've found that string.split is slow for my GFF3 parser because it reallocs the list 3 times to store 9 elements. I can make that faster several ways. I'll work on those tomorrow, perhaps as well with gzip's readline performance.

I didn't get as much done as I thought because I got a bid on my house. It was nearly 17% below asking. The offer was strictly based on sq. ft. and much lower than reasonable, for reasons I won't get into here. I declined the offer. Writing the response took a long time. That's usual for me.

Steve Holden treated us to lunch today but we were on our own for dinner. I asked the hotel desk and they pointed out a place a few blocks from here. It was quite windy and cold. It snowed some on and off throughout the day. Unusually cold, the locals said. I was prepared. Others less so, so the 8 minute walk was far enough. It was a steak and burger place. A burger and water cost 1200 ISK, which I think is about US$20. The 2nd St. Brewery back home makes a much better, bigger, and cheaper burger. With green chilies too.

Sean and I headed to a local store afterwards to pick up some groceries. Junk food more like it. It had chips and salsa so i'll probably pick some up Thursday or Friday for the gang.

Came back, talked with Christian and Andrea. Got the two of them to repeat some German tongue-twisters. Had fun talking with them. Tried practicing some of my nearly non-existent German. I'm liking these Germanic languages.