So I went camping again this weekend. And it bloody rained all Saturday night, again. I think I’ve given up on this camping thing for good.
Less venting, more details and photos to come.
As soon as I got back from the Cerka’l Festival (well, after a shower) I hopped on a train again and headed out to meet Tim and Angela to go camping for a night in Andorra. We had high hopes to try out mountain biking (since they’ve got season lift passes), but once you add 40 for a half day bike hire and 23 for a day lift pass for the bike (whether or not you’ve got a pass for yourself already) the whole exercise became a little expensive.
So in the end we stuck to camping out and that would have all been fine, except there was an almighty storm the night we were there and neither Tim and Angela’s new tent, nor the small one I was using were exactly waterproof. Which is to say I woke up in the middle of the night to thunder, lighting, high winds, and water on the inside of my tent.
Even so it was all good fun and Angela got to go horse riding while Tim and I went and had a look at the slopes without snow. There are even photos.
Okay, so the sites been running for a bit over seven months without any photos, but the truth is that I don’t actually have many photos of those seven months, let me explain. I’m bad at taking photos, not bad as in I take bad photos (although I’m not ruling that out), but bad as in I forget to take a camera or or forget I’d brought my camera when I did have it.
So, starting with the festival I went to last weekend I’m going to do my best to actually take some more photos. To prove it I’ve spent the last three days putting together a photo section on the site.
First up, photos of the Cerka’l Festival.
Yesterday my favourite thongs (that’s flip-flops for all you people thinking dirty thoughts) broke, again. These are my Nagore thongs that I bought shortly after moving to Barcelona. They were made out of completely recycled material, the soul / base is an old car tyre, unfortunately the way the leather straps were attached to the car tyre don’t seem as sturdy as the tyre (which hasn’t worn since the day I bought them), it broke once in Australia and I had them repaired and now that’s broken. As soon as I can afford a new pair I’ll buy some, until then I’m left with a green pair from springfield that I’ve inherited.
Last Friday night I went along to the Cerka’l Festival, a free music festival out in what seemed to be more or less the suburbs of Barcelona in Piera. I went along with Joe (my English flatmate) and some of his friends, Jamie, Joolie, Rusty (who’s actual name is James) as well as his girlfriend Amanda (who helped me feel less insecure about the lack of Js in my name).
The general idea was, head over on the FGC (which takes a while) after having a bite to eat and organising drinks. Stay all night listening to music, dancing or whatever and then catch the first train back in the morning. Which is pretty much what happened. When the sun came up and we could see that we’d actually spent the whole night in a car park surrounded by what appeared to be factories we figured it was safe to call it a night. I then went home, had a shower and jumped on a train to Mataró to meet Tim and Angela to go camping in Andorra, not really having slept, but that’s another story.
Believe it or not there are photos to be had. In fact the whole reason that I’m only posting this now is that I’ve spent the last couple of evenings adding photos to my site (and sub-classing half of django in the processes). So hopefully tomorrow we’ll have some photos up.
Since when did google replace links to sites on their search pages with links to one of their pages that then redirects to the actual site? Isn’t this the sort of norm we’re trying to avoid so that people actually notice bogus URLs on phishing emails and web sites? Of course all those tinyurl.com clones are going to break this anyway, but all the same.
So every other week Andy bugs me about using something new and shiny that he’s found. This week it was Lamson – actually this week it was Lamson again, but back to the point. It’s a mail server written entirely in python. I’m generally a bit sceptical of new mail servers, I like my mail servers like my crypto, old and battle tested rather than new and shiny. However Lamson has bounce detection built in, and since I’m currently trying to work out how to do that I figured I’d give it a go on the merit of at the very least being able to use the bounce detection module.
The point of this, is to handle emails coming in to a mailing list address. Not the sort of communal mailing list that I could be using Mailman for, but rather the corporate sort where we’re sending newsletters to people who’ve signed up sort. So we get bounces and unsubscribe requests and such in return. I want all of this handled inside our django web app where I’m going to be keeping our lists and sending our newsletters from. The problem is I need a way to get to these emails at my own pace (or rather the pace of some script that has django + database access overhead) without choking up the mail server.
So, the idea is this. We collect our mail as per usual with the main mail server (it’s going there regardless, can’t change that) then mail for the mailing list address gets forwarded to the Lamson mail server. Here’s the fun part, using Lamson’s neat bounce module I look for bounce like messages and if one is found I stuff a whole bunch of extra headers on the message detailing who it was about, what the diagnosis is, etc. All messages, bounces or no are then put into a Maildir mailbox, from there a django management command can periodically look for new messages in the mailbox and process them at whatever speed it’s capable of, keeping completely clear of the mail server itself.
The last trick is using a Variable Message Envelope Return Path (VERP) so that every message is returned to a unique variant of the mail list address based on the user it was sent to and the campaign that the email was part of. This should work even in those situations where people send unsubscribe messages from an address other than the one they receive the mail.
I was in the supermarket today and remembered I needed to buy shampoo. So I went to find it and came across the brand I normally buy (it’s just easier that way). Of course then you have to choose which type you need. There seems to be shampoo for just about every type of hair and flavoured to taste like just about all summer fruits, there were no less than 10 options to choose from. Then way over on the left hand side there’s a bottle marked ‘for men’.
I didn’t actually buy that one.
You know what it feels like when you’re in a dentists chair and they’ve got your mouth open and some sort of contraption stuck in there so you can’t close your mouth or move your tongue, saliva starts to fill the back of your throat and even though you know you won’t, you sort of feel like you’re going to suffocate, or possibly just drown?
It’s been like that for two days now, I’m getting tired of it.
I was away in London last week, I spent five days in the office doing everything from setting up an intrusion detection system to presenting the iPhone app I’ve been working on to our directors (who were really happy with it). While I was there I caught up with Mike & Katherine who are just starting their big stint over here in Europe living on the road and working when they feel like it, seems like a fantastic plan to me.
On Saturday I headed up to Edinburgh to visit Anna, who’s up there with a friend hanging out, practising English and generally having a good time. I’ve never been to Scotland before and Edinburgh is a really beautiful city, although it was going from raining to sunshine every five minutes and the way the locals reacted to this (e.g. they didn’t) indicated that this is pretty normal. I saw the castle (from the outside, it’s expensive), the botanic gardens, pretty much all of the old city along with a couple of museums and did the walk up to Arthur’s Seat (where Anna and I got caught in a very heavy but mercifully short rainstorm only to receive a message from Neus laughing at us for being up there in it).
The hostel where the girls are staying (and where I stayed while I was there) is basically occupied by two nationalities – Catalans and Australians. I was weird being around so many Australians, especially the rowdy sort that inhabit hostels, it’s been a fair while since I’ve been in that sort of situation. Of course I spent a lot of my time there speaking Spanish (albeit listening to Catalan). After living among people who speak at least two languages for so long I’d got used to the idea and was a little surprised at how impressed a lot of people were that, as an Australian, I could speak Spanish – that was nice.
So now it’s back to Barcelona and a few more uni things before the end of the month, then it’s really summer.