So, I am in the airplane flying back from Vancouver. It has been a long journey, but let me start from the beginning.
I have been flying to Montreal on May 7th, basically just after my return from RIPE-50 at Stockholm. Matt (msf) picked me up downtown, and Ryan arrived a few hours later, bringing Fernando Gont with him. We stayed at Matt's for a few days, doing some random hacking, and Ryan and me, siting in front of one screen, finally got started on the pf interface abstraction code cleanup, which was a prerequisite for making use of the interface groups stuff I hacked a year ago. I can't point out enough how important it was that we could sit down together, staring at one screen, to get started on that. I continued to work on that for the following days. We didn't miss out the city of Montreal either of course - we did have a lot of fun, no doubt. Reyk flew in on the 12th, we rented a car, picked him up at the airport and drove over to Ottawa for BSDCan. There was a (not so surprising) surprise waiting for me - a shiny new laptop, an IBM X40. Many thanks again to those who made that possible (and yes, I will finally handle donations.html for the donors when I am back, promised). Ryan spoke first, in fact he had the first possible slot at the conference (3 parallel tracks). He spoke on randomness in our network stack, that went very well. Bob spoke on spamd the next day, Reyk on wireless network support in OpenBSD (where, as you could already read from others, phk tried to spread FUD, which did not work out), Fernando gave his icmp attacks against tcp talk, and I spoke on OpenBGPD. All talks went well, unfortunately Fernando spoke in parallel to me so I could not see his. Bob and me had humppa as introduction to our talks tho, which the audience appreciated :) We did sell T-Shirts and CDs too, with quite some success. Overall, it was a nice and well organized conference, worth visiting. Of course we went out for food & beer in the evenings, be assured we had fun. On the 15th we slacked & hacked a bit in the student's residence where we were staying (the coference was at the U of Ottawa campus); in the evening Matt, Ryan, Reyk, Fernando and me flew to Vancouver, and Bob home to Edmonton. >From Vancouver we went on a fantastic trip to Tofino (on Vancouver Island), staying there for two nights, and then driving back to Vancouver, and over to Calgary in the following two days. There we were just two days early for our 2005 hackathon. We celebrated Theo's birthday, and on the 20th we set the hackrooms up. The hackathon itself got quite some coverage already - after I finished the interface abstraction cleanup stuff in pf I worked on integrating the interface groups to pf; I'll write a seperate mail on what that is and how it works and what is so cool about it :) Besides that I of course spent some time with claudio in bgpd and with various other developers on various other things in the networking area - last not least with camiel on vlan, so that bridging over vlans now finally works, and bridging vlan-encapsulated frames still does as well. We did go for a dayhike during the hackathon of course, forming two groups of 5 people each for a hard hike and one big group for an easier one. Theo, Ryan, Reyk, Uwe and me went up Mount St. Piran, starting at Lake Louise, after going over some other Mountain (forgot the name), elevation delta about 900m. It was fun. pval & me escaped for a (fantastic) mountain bike ride on the last day before we started tearing things down. Ryan, Uwe, Martin, jsg and claudio stayed to go on a hike with Theo, Peter, Ryan and me. We went to Turbine Canyon in Kananaskis (well, close to it), quite a bit of the way on snow shoes. Camping there a night, Ryan and me put our tent on top of a hill, with a fantastic view over the area, which we enjoyed very much and very long :) Next day we went back down to the forks (about halfway) where bob was camping; Ryan, Pval and me decided to extend the hike one more day, the others left. We slacked a bit there and then went up to the three isle lake. It was pretty hard, but more than worth it - a very cool trip. We returned the day after. Of course a day for recovery and catching up on email etc was in order, we stayed at peter's place in calgary. There was a Plaid Tongued Devils concert in the evening which we (and pascoe and dlg, who stayed in calgary longer too) enjoyed very much. Ryan and me left early the next morning, renting a car and driving back to Vancouver. We went very very relaxed and still made it in about 12 hours. There, at Ryan's place in Vancouver, I stayed until today. We enjoyed Vancouver, went for another 2.5-day hike to Emma Lake (and on), near Powell River, went up Grouse Grind near Vanouver (930m elevation delta on 3km :)) and used the time to talk about future openbsd work, designing cool stuff and of course hacking. Many Thanks to the people who made this trip possible, where Ryan is the first to name - we had a wonderful time. So now the airplane is about to reach Europe - I enjoyed this long trip very very much. I'll be back :)
