It didn't take me two-fifths of lead-free gasoline, but I was off for a week riding my bike for a family vacation. It was very restful, most of the time. Amiel is six, so he got to ride his own cycle. This naturally limits our range to about 35km a day at the very most. Since Mira had a bruised ankle, she got to ride in the kiddy seat on the back.

[[ A follow-me is a gizmo that attaches to the rear axle of a big bicycle; a smaller bicycle with special front axle extenders can then be parked in the gizmo and have the front wheel fixed and lifted off the ground, effectively creating an in-line tricycle with the two rear wheels still powered. Really useful when the kids can bike for part of the day but not the whole long haul. ]]

We managed to have a head wind all week, as we departed from Nijmegen towards Eindhoven when the wind was out of the south-west and one the wind wheeled round to the north-east, we headed back. When you're only doing 25-35km a day that's not that bad -- it still takes about 4 hours on the bike, because Amiel's cruising speed on his 20" is 10km/h.

The keyboards at home have gotten dusty in the meantime.

It's not just the vacation, though. I've been very quiet on the KDE front. Six hours hacking at an office desk, I find, does take up most of my desire to stare at a screen. Occasional bursts of Solaris packaging notwithstanding, my desktop machines have been largely idle for the past month or more.

On the road, my n900 gets a lot of use. So much so that the battery life (it just gets though the day) is an issue.

While away from the desktop, I've been a lot more active on identi.ca. I mostly like HeyBuddy, although it has its share of UI blemishes. The author is quite responsive to grumblings (explaining why my grumblings are unjustified), which I appreciate. The !kde group is good to follow, but I'm not sure I'm cut out for following people. It's like listening to a conversation across a crowded bar; full of missing bits (that's what the context button is for) or hilarity that doesn't make sense to outsiders.

During my all-idle week, the Randa sprints (three-and-a-half of them?) and webworld started, were in-progress, or ended. It looks like a whirlwind from here. Good thing that wasn't the wind I had to fight en-route.