oslo

I'm wrapping up my trip to Oslo for the skolelinux developer's meeting. This has been a short but good trip; KLM/Northwest managed to redeem themsevles from the last, disasterous trip; I got some of my snow ration for the winter and got to see what Norway is like in winter, at least in the big city; I had a good time with old and new friends.

And the actual purpose of the trip has also gone well, I think; some useful work was accomplished and we had some good discussions about future plans. I finally met my other co-workers at SLX, and I got to see debian-edu in action in a very nice classroom setup. Sometimes it's been easy for me to loose sight of what we're working on in debian-edu, since most of my work is infrastructural and has little to do with the actual classroom, so getting grounded like this helps, and will certianly let me do a better job. It was also good to get confirmation that the work I have managed to do on this job has been appreciated.

So I've really enjoyed this trip and I especially like returning to this place, which I now feel I know much better than after the DebConf here. Oh yes, I also got out and about some on the last day of the trip, and managed to get slightly lost and go geocaching in the snow at a nice bird sanctuary with a lake. The conference environment can be such a cocoon -- we even had kind locals to lend us a place to stay and others who drove us to the school most days, and so getting out on my own was good at the end, and I need to remember to budget time to do this before or after every conference.

Oh also, a word about sleep.. I know that I have a low point in my natural circadian cycle around 5 or 6 pm, and then it peaks back up around 11 or midnight, with me often going strong until 3 or 4 am if I don't watch myself. Apparently my body has finally managed to fit this into the CET timezone, so when I'm over here, I manage to get to bed by 11 pm CET (6 pm EDT), sleep until 5 or 6 am (midnight EDT) and then am up for the day. That's much better than sleeping during the other low point of my cycle that I normally use at home, especially when you need to be up by 9 am and not, say, 4 pm, due to being in a coference with teachers and other morning people. Only real problem with it is that I only get about half the sleep I need, but it works for short trips at least. If I had arrived a day earlier I could have been completly over the jetlag by the beginning of the conference.

Speaking of sleep, I'm following a weblog of a sleep researcher, which amoung other things has some interesing thoughts on how society treats sleep. In particular, see this post. And after mentioning that, I have to link to this post.