I've been back from Barcelona for about a week now, but between getting used to the routine of working every day and overcoming some tropical disease or other that I picked up whilst I was over there (I keep telling people it was the Coughing Pig Death and there's a moment where they actually believe me, which is fun) I've not had time to blog much about it.
And then I came to actually blog about it and I realised that if you're a Planet Ubuntu or Planet Ubuntu UK reader you'll have read most of what I've got to say on the subject of UDS and AllHands already (Empathy and Banshee by default (maybe), Android on Ubuntu, Scott James Remnant is insane and wants your machine to have booted before you even switch it on, etc.), and if you aren't a reader of either of those planets then you probably don't really care about any of that anyway, so I decided to not actually bother saying it. You can always go and find it if you want to, because you're smart and savvy people.
So suffice it to say that Barcelona was an interestingly manic place, though not somewhere that I think I'd want to spend oodleplexes of time once I'd done all the touristy bits. You can see some of the photos I took on the one day that I did any serious tourism - with the camera and one lense and nothing else, because nothing says "hey, I've got some expensive gear here" than lugging around a Stealth Reporter 650 bag as you wander, your spine crooked from the weight, down La Rambla - on my Flickr stream.
The week before UDS, that of Canonical AllHands and, before that, SomeHands (which I didn't attend) was spent out in the back of the Spanish beyond at the La Mola conference centre, which is slap dab in the middle of an area that is half forest, half golf course, and which has buildings with turfed-over roofs, a swimming pool that was empty apart from some scummy water and a couple of pissed-off-looking frogs, and a three-hundred-year-old chapel-cum-hall-cum-terracey-thing in which the assembled cognoscenti sweltered for plenary sessions every morning and afternoon. I later appropriated the terrace for a very brief and rather rushed portrait shoot with my good and at-a-slight-angle-to-the-universe friend Michelle, the results of which will appear once I've got round to finishing the editing (having a tropical plague plays merry hob with your sense of contrast, I've discovered).
And that about covers What I Did on My Holidays. Except it doesn't really tell you anything at all because I can't fit into one blog post - or even into several - just how much I enjoyed AllHands. UDS is something that I've grown used to, I suppose - the people are always astounding and scarily smart (or in some cases just scary) - but AllHands is something really special, because when you're at one you realise that every single person that you work alongside is awesome at what they do and at the top of their game to boot, and that's something that I think's bloody hard to find in any other company on the planet (though I confess I'm biased).
And now it's twenty-to-two in the morning and I'm not sleeping again (which makes this the fourth time this week that I've seen two AM when I didn't want to and which might end up making it the third time this week that I've watched the sun rise), so I'm going to go and find a warm drink and hope that tiredness will drop on me in a sort of fluffy lump. On the other hand, I could suddenly get a second wind and start writing the story that's knocking about in my skull, which as usual is the result of two or more things smacking into each other when some neuron or other in the thing that I tentatively call a brain misfired.
Sleep tight, folks. May the morning bring you happy things.
