End of the trip in Jamaica for me. Back in jeans + hiking boots in preparation for freezing weather in London and Amsterdam. The crowd has thinned but the overall feeling of togetherness remains. The Pardus dudes are still hacking away and their CD is tucked away safely in my luggage for later use.

My hacking this week was impeded by a whole day of “the laptop is broken” and similar isuses; a combination of overheating and multiple reboots and a full HDD did that to me, but I managed to recover from that and: bump KDE packages to 4.1.4; port Amarok 2.0.1.1; bump kdesupport packages to 4.2. That’s actually a lot of compiling and waiting and fiddling around. The Amarok dudes were quite kind in importing my Solaris patches and full of enthusiasm to see it running on yet another platform (and they said “dude, that’s old” about last week’s code).

In terms of community building, kurtas and cookies do the job admirably. I’m very happy to have met more North American folk, and have the feeling I know the Bug Squad and it’s hidden agenda most intimately now. Props to Davide for being in the water the most and publishing foto collections on his blog that reflect really well the mix of sun and hacking that happened here. A huge thank you to Jeff, Wade and the local team Roger and Dmitri for putting the event together. Even on the last night there were plenty of revelations and new projects discovered; I will write about NEET when I get back home.

Home is where the heart – and mother of my kids and the kids too – is.