For those that haven't followed things too closely, there was a Mentor Summit for Google's "Summer of Code" last saturday in Mountain View, California. Google invited two mentors/admins from every participating GSoC project, and for NetBSD, Alistair Crooks (agc) and I (hubertf) were there to chat with people, listen to talks and share our experiences.

I've posted my session notes and references to the summit's wiki to the netbsd-users list, so have a look there if you're interested of what may come up in case there's another "Summer of Code" next year, and what experiences students, mentors and admins made in the past years and what they may learn from for the future.

Now given that this is *my* (hubertf's) weblog, I thought I'd put some of the (more or less) funny but off-topic things in here, in case anyone cares what else happened on the trip to Mountain View and back.

Friday, Oct 13th: Travel & arrival

• Security checks at Munich airport (MUC) suck: they want my hand lotion (two small tubes) in a plastic bag. Both my deodorant and my tooth paste (which was almost empty!) were confiscated as they're security threats. Yeah, right - I'll bring you down with my toothpaste.

  On a related note and in retrospect, I find it interesting that the security checks in Munich were by far the most strict ones. None of the checks in San Francisco and Chicago could compare to those.

• After many hours of flight, taking BART and Caltrain to Mountain View from SFO was ok, even if I had to discover that the schedule on the web isn't upto date. Walking from the train station to the hotel was a lesser fun - I just remembered that you were expected to have a car in this country. (No cabs at ~midnite there, either... doh!)

• I've posted my session notes etc. to the netbsd-users list for further discussing.
• In the evening, a group of NetBSD people had food & drinks in the 21st Amendment brewery club/restaurant in San Francisco, including Alistair Crooks, Darren Reed, Jef Rizzo, Jan Schauman, Jan's wife and me.

• Find a hotel to spend the night from sunday to monday. While I have a very nice offer to use mrg@'s couch, I realized that doing the commute to SFO in the morning would be too time consuming. Also, as I wanted to do some sightseeing in San Francisco today, not having to go back all the way back to Mountain View in the evening was a good decision. (Remember for next time: rent a car!!!)
• I've walked around Market Street and the area surrounding it most of the day, freshing up memories from my last stay there 13 years ago
• Surfing the web back in my hotel room, which had wireless network access, I found that MoinMoin Wiki (which was used for documenting some of the GSoC Mentor Summit's activities) can export as DocBook/XML. Maybe NetBSD make use of that, at least for htdocs/Documentation. (sure not for htdocs/guide, no idea for htdocs/Ports and I don't know what else we have in htdocs... probably ways too much!)

• Not much to say, 4+9 hours of flight (via Chicago) in economy class sucked. Home tuesday Oct 17th at ~2pm, and first thing to do at home is get a new cell phone as my old Siemens A55 kicked the bucket on the flight to the US. Doh!