gregoa's blog

a short description of my experiences on entering the U.S. – disclaimer: austrian passport, VWP, EWR airport, yesterday evening.

immigration

I spent roughly two minutes at the immigration counter. the dialog with the polite, tired, & probably bored guy was like:

he: what are you doing in the US?
me: going to a computer conference at columbia university.
he: how long are you staying?
me: until the 14^th of august.
/he looks at passport
he: you are here for the first time?
me: yup.
he: (instructions for fingerprint scanning & photo)
he: do you work at home? what are you doing there?
/me explains
/he probably doesn't really listen
/he stamps passport

customs

I had ticked "I bring food" on the customs declaration form, & entered "cheese, 0.5 kg, $9" in the "goods to declare" box. the guy handling the queue sent all people without any "yes" ticks straight to the exit, & me to the counter. dialog with the friendly lady:

she: what food are you bringing?
me: two small pieces of cheese.
she: anything else? meat? fruits?
me: no.
she: ok, put your bags here. (belt for the luggage scanner)

that was all, no more questions, no inspections, or whatever. – & noone actually looked at the customs declaration form except for the one "yes".

I spent the last two days at the BSP in Munich – thanks to everyone for inviting & feeding me, & especially to Stefan for hosting me again!

Unfortunately the weather was not good enough for an excursion to a Biergarten but the local chefs at the LiMux office delighted us with self-made spaghetti salmone & self-rolled sushi, & we spent quite some time behind our laptops.

The main results can be seen on the wiki page; my personal conclusion is that the list of remaining RC bugs contains mostly "hard stuff" (e.g. architecture-, hardware-, or desktop-specific bugs). Probably some packages will need to be kicked out of squeeze & some bugs might get a squeeze-ignore tag ... – To put it positively: I have a gut feeling that the freeze is getting closer :)

finally I bought my airplane tickets. at cheaptickets.com & for the first time in my life in USD :)

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Leave Sunday, July 25, 2010

British Airways 951 Economy  |  Airbus Industrie A320 (320) |  2hr 5min |  575 miles
Depart: 12:55pm Munich, Germany  Munich Franz Josef Strauss (MUC)
Arrive: 2:00pm London, United Kingdom  London Heathrow (LHR)

British Airways 189 Economy  |  Boeing 777 (777) |  7hr 45min |  3458 miles
Depart: 3:35pm London, United Kingdom  London Heathrow (LHR)
Arrive: 6:20pm Newark, NJ  Newark Liberty Int'l (EWR)

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Return Saturday, August 14, 2010

British Airways 186 Economy  |  Boeing 767 Passenger (767) |  7hr 15min |  3458 miles
Depart: 10:55pm Newark, NJ  Newark Liberty Int'l (EWR)
Arrive: 11:10am London, United Kingdom  London Heathrow (LHR)

British Airways 952 Economy  |  Airbus Industrie A319 (319) |  1hr 55min |  575 miles
Depart: 12:45pm London, United Kingdom  London Heathrow (LHR)
Arrive: 3:40pm Munich, Germany  Munich Franz Josef Strauss (MUC)

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some of the things I did on saturday & sunday:

• reduced the amount of dust in my rooms
• increased the amount of air in my bike's tyres
• created an armel cross-building chroot (with pdebuild-cross, multistrap, & some patching & swearing & beating)
• switched from xterm to urxvt
• filled in the ESTA/VWP form to be allowed to enter the u.s.
• upgraded colleen (which doesn't have any devices for hard disks under /dev anymore since then)
• cleaned the toilet & the corridor
• uploaded some packages
• played with some of the meego stuff; not very successful
• saturated 2GB of RAM + 1GB of swap by having ~40 tabs with airline websites open in chromium; still no ticket
• wrote two blog entries (what's recursion again?)

some successes, some failuresroom for improvement.

to start with the good news: christine has joined the RCBW initiative – yeah! let's see who joins next ...

as usual, a short overview about my own attempts in the RC bugs department:

• #580106 – libclutter-1.0-0: "empathy: fails to start on armel"
  grab patch from BTS and upload to DELAYED/2
• #583465 – src:clutter-1.0: "clutter-1.0: FTBFS: ERROR in annotation: can't find parameter n_properies referenced by parameter values of 'animatev'"
  test, add a comment to the BTS, grab patch from BTS and upload to DELAYED/2
• #583648 – zoneminder: "package removed, processes still running"
  apply patch for debian/postinst from BTS and upload to DELAYED/2
• #585410 – nagios3-cgi: "nagios3-cgi: Missing conflict with nagios3 v3.0.6-4~lenny2 (/usr/lib/cgi-bin/nagios3/extinfo.cgi_"
  add Replaces/Breaks and upload to DELAYED/2, later cancelled on maintainer's request; later fixed by a maintainer upload based on my patch
• #587830 – libnet-sftp-foreign-perl: "libnet-sftp-foreign-perl: causes script to fail silently with exit code 0"
  add missing dependencies (pkg-perl)