It's been so long since I last blogged that I don't know what to include and what to leave out. In case anyone noticed my absence from IRC or mailing lists, I should say that my disappearance was, like so many others', due to exams. Not having a computer in my room really makes revision go a lot better :-).

I bought my plane tickets for akademy a couple of days ago. I had to resort to phone booking, since bmibaby's website seems to be so broken that it didn't even work in IE. Still, it's done now, so I'll be there in Malaga for the duration of the conference. It should be a lot of fun, and with the experience I gained from last year's conference, I should be able to get a lot done too.

Among the people I hope to meet at akademy is Evangelia Berdou, who, as Thomas Zander wrote, is doing research into aspects of co-operation in open-source, with KDE and GNOME as case studies. I had a telephone interview with Evangelia on Monday, which I was slightly hesitant about, since it was intended to deal mainly with the Quality Teams, and I haven't really been that deeply involved with the Quality Teams. (I follow the mailing list, and try to help where I can, but I haven't done much of the wider co-ordination work). As it turned out, I babbled on for an hour and enjoyed myself a lot more than I was expecting. I think I drifted off the topic a little at times, but I hope some of what I said will be useful for Evangelia's work, and, in the long run, KDE too.

In the world of documentation, I'm trying to make some inroads into our todo list. Rainer Endres' excellent new docs.kde.org front- and back-end for docs.kde.org will help with one item (linking between docs), and I've just started discussions with the author of dblatex, a tool which we plan to use for the creation of PDFs of the documentation. Using an actively maintained system should mean we avoid hitting the brick wall that was eventually going to come our way with db2latex, the system I was experimenting with a few months ago.

And of course, I haven't gone the last few months without a little frisbee: I managed to get onto the university first team, thanks to the loss of a few key players, and played the annual Oxford vs Cambridge varsity match, this year held in Cambridge. In sweltering temperatures, we managed to take the match 14-7, and I even made some nice defensive blocks. I also found out that Sander Koning, of kde.nl fame, is a fellow ultimate frisbee player, so much throwing of discs should take place at akademy :-)

De gustibus non est disputandum

So it doesn't really have much to do with anything, but I completed the Times crossword yesterday - first time I've finished one of the daily ones. Worth a blog entry, I think.

And exams will be over in 2 and a half weeks, after which time I won't feel guilty about spending several hours doing crosswords instead of learning...