As Jelmer already said, Irish people rock. Spent last weekend at the Oxegen festival, and I really meant to write something about it, so that's what I'm doing now. :-)

A little while ago Jelena saw an ad about Oxegen on TV. As soon as I heard of it, I checked the lineup and got as happy as a four-year-old kid on his birthday. I absolutely had to go there! Until then I really had the impression none of the bands I care about ever come here but just to the UK. Turns out I was wrong.

Aphex Twin was there, the schedule promised a half-an-hour gig, which turns out to be a whopping ninety minutes of, errrm, eargasm. And of course RATM on Sunday evening was great. But what we both really liked were the people. Some say that at Lowlands everyone's your best friend. Sure, the atmosphere there is nice, but still, it's a festival full of closed and shy Dutch people who live for themselves. :-P

The Irish at Oxegen, however, were absolutely lovely. Everyone seems to know you. People are more open (like how people here are anyway, especially outside Dublin), kinder. Random people walk greet you and/or want high fives, especially after good gigs. Of course the free hugs, people who ask how tall I may be (complaints about my hairs also appeared near the end of the festival, but I must admit my hair "styling" doesn't really improve from not seeing any shampoo for four days ;-)), someone even asked if we were maybe speaking Finnish (I guess this was the first time he heard Dutch)... At the Seasick Steve concert I helped someone to make one movie, since it was easier for me to hold his camera high enough to actually see something. The guy thanked me at least three times. :-D At Lowlands, where everone's supposed to be "your best friend", nobody trusts you enough to hold his/her camera in the first place...

The camping really never "slept", many people had a guitar with them, everyone speaks with a great accent, neighbours who explained us how to say "Shut up" and "Kiss my ass" in Gaelic. And of course, at the end of the festival, most people were too lazy to actually clean up their tent. We left a camping that was so full of tents, but otherwise so empty...

It was fantastic. Just a little bit expensive. More than 200 euros for the ticket. Any decent food costed at least seven euros. You even had to pay ten euros to get a programme (which was 50% advertisements). A beer costed eight euros (although you could get three back if you return the cup) There were lots of security folks on-site, I suppose a lot of the money went to them. Even at the campings there was always a security person on every 50 (?) meters. Not that they could prevent some tent graffiti and camping fights from happening, but okay...

Maybe the most amazing thing was that, even though this was a festival with almost 80k visitors, we never ever ever had to queue for ANYTHING. Well, okay, we had to wait for a few minutes to enter the supermarket once, but once we were inside everything went very smoothly, and we were back in the tent in no-time with some buns and slices of cheese (much better/lighter on the stomach for breakfast than the hotdogs most people were eating).

Anyway, it was absolutely great, and well worth the extra money. I can go on about this for ages, but I should be sleeping now. Thanks for reading this until the last line. ;-)

Maintaining a weblog indeed seems to be one of those things I'd better not be doing. I'm in Mountain View for a month and two days already and this is the first time I actually write something here instead of postponing it. Good, because in five days I'm leaving already so it'd be too late. Today's Memorial Day, an American bank holiday, so I'm not even at work.

Had a good time here, both at work and in the weekends. More productive than last year, and more exciting evenings and weekends. My bicycle was still waiting for me, and after I blew off all the dust it gathered in almost a year time, it's quite capable of getting me to and back from work again. :-)

Of course with how well EUR is doing compared to USD, one should always spend some of his/her time in the US on Amazon.com. I decided to do the same and am quite hooked to Mario Kart DS now. It's just a fantastic and very addictive game. Also bought a Nokia N800, which is a great toy, but not as great as the DS.

Last Saturday hoyhoy took me to a comedy club in Santa Cruz. Kasper Hauser (of SkyMaul fame) was there, which was quite amusing. We failed to see what was funny about the other artist though, especially since we were pretty much the only persons not laughing at all. :-)

Other hilights include how I found out telephones do not like salty water and taking a non-triband spare phone to the US is pointless. I'm a bit sad about my poor 6310i (I tried to save it by washing it out with non-salty water and then letting it dry for more than a day but it didn't help) and am not sure about what to get now. I'll probably wait for the GPhone, which' existence I don't have to deny anymore. :-)

Anyway, it's almost twenty degrees (Celsius, obviously, Fahrenheits are just too confusing and illogical :-P) outside so what am I doing in the living room? Time to check out this "sun" thing while I still can!

Yep, another birthday passed, and I celebrated it with my father and grandparents, here in Dublin. My grandparents never travelled by airplane so far, so it was quite an adventure. Unfortunately they had to get to know the great Irish weather here. But then again, it isn't all that different from the Dutch weather...

So a little while after my complaint about NTL blocking traffic to some sites, they now block access to all sites ... they cut me off. :-) Still waiting for my ADSL. This is Ireland, so if they say it'll take two weeks to ocnnect you, you do have to add two more. (That's how it works with appointments at least, I'm told. If you have an appointment at x, make sure you don't actually show up before x+15 min!) Oh heck, fortunately most bigger cities know these things called "security-unconscious neighbours" and "open access point"... ;-)

Still want to do some BitlBee snapshot release, maybe tomorrow. The new Jabber groupchat support works very well, it's working perfectly at work for over two months already, and I'm actually not even the only one who uses it. :-) And who knows when this will become a stable release... Clearly I've been too ambitious with adding new stuff, and too lazy to finish all the details to make it worth releasing. :-(

Oh yeah, and the new website rocks! But I suppose most people saw it already by now.

It's a week ago already since I moved into my new apartment. I managed to find one very close to work. I can pretty much walk from my desk at home to the one at work in five minutes. :-) It's not that I'm lazy, I was actually looking for a place a bit further away, but this apartment is pretty big and I like that. Might make some pics later.

Also working on BitlBee Jabber MUC support again, and it works pretty well already. Actually I use it all the time at work by now. No more need for crappy GUI Jabber clients. :-D