Camping everywhere

The reason for my abscence from this blog was that it was the time of the year when I finally managed to get away from computers and spend most of my time outdoors. The first of the two trips was a ~300km tour with a couple of like-minded crazy friends on the shore of the Danube and then around lake Balaton -- on tiny folding camping bikes, something like this:

The good thing about riding such a bike -- besides the memories it brings back from holidays in my childhood and the smile it brought to the face of everyone who saw us -- is that it really makes it a bike tour: you cannot go too fast to see everything you pass by and as it's a standardized bike with a fixed gear ratio everyone goes exactly the same speed and nobody feels left behind or being slowed down.

The other tour was a longer, but not a tiny bit less adventurous one: a trip around the northern part of Italy with a minivan. We did something similar 5 years ago when we visited all the famous cities (Venice, Bologna, Florence, Pisa etc.) so now we choose to see more of the rural parts of Italy. We slept in tents on small clearings in the Tuscanian hills, on ski slopes abandoned for the summer, in a parking lot with a beautiful view of Cinque Terre, in sleeping bags on jettys over the Adriatic See, ate the best pizzas and drank the best espressos in the world -- it was definately a memorable experience, and yet another reminder of the fact that it's not always the best way to see the world to sleep in fancy hotels and see the trivial tourist traps in paid-for guided tours.

Anyway, it's time to get back to work and see how our team managed to rewrite our automated testing system to make it more usable for our XCB-based projects (maybe I'll post about this if could be of any interest for outsiders) and put the last finishing touches and kill the last segfaults in the proof-of-concept syslog-ng destination driver I wrote a month ago (I'll definately write a post about it).