I am sitting in a converted train car, drinking Pepsi. There are mosquitoes on the walls and ceiling, and a bag of yerba mate on the table, together with an OLPC XO laptop. Underneath the table is a box of OLPC XOs. It's 2 AM, and I expect I'll probably be awake for another 6 hours, at least.
Outside the car, a dog is barking sporadically at noises in the night. Periodically, a truck or car comes down the highway near this hotel, its motor noise gradually getting louder and louder, then dropping in pitch and slowly fading away. Through the windows of the train car, I can see the headlights pass by in the distance. The train car is full of the smell of the mosquito-repellent spirals that were burned in here earlier. They seem to have worked in a way: although the car is full of mosquitoes, none of them have tried to bite me in hours. The inside the car is filled with the sound of the drinks refrigerator and of my fingers tapping on the keyboard. Outside the car, in between the trucks and the dog, the silence is profound, with only a cricket audible somewhere in the distance. Monday is my fourth day here in Junín. Friday and Saturday were PyCon Argentina, and Sunday and Monday are Sugar Day Argentina, where we are hacking on the Sugar graphical environment that the OLPC XOs use, creating and fixing various things. My talk on Saturday (on "Using PyGame in interactive art installations", which I am not an expert on) was surprisingly well received, by which I mean about 30 people showed up at 9:30 in the morning, none of them left in the middle of the talk, and they even applauded me at the end. I stuck the demo materials for the talk up at <https://github.com/kragen/pyconar-talk>. I've spent much of the day hanging out with 14 Python programmers, including some novices, who are hacking one thing and another for the XO. The big thing most of them have been working on is a simplified Python programming environment called "Pilas", which they've been modifying to work on the XO. I'm reading the FLOSSManuals book about how to construct a Sugar Activity <http://en.flossmanuals.net/make-your-own-sugar-activities/>, which is the Sugar equivalent of an "app", and looking at the HelloWorld activity that ships as an example on the XOs, along with the Saludame activity developed in CeibalJAM earlier this year, which has an example of how to use PyGame in an Activity. Everyone else has either gone to bed or left Junín. So my nocturnal schedule is perhaps not optimal for providing me with the human interaction and mentoring I came here for! Last night I hung out with people from the conference, going home to my CouchSurfing host from a boliche ("nightclub") at about 4 AM; then I slept until 15:00, which suggests that I needed some extra sleep. I'm going to take the train back to Buenos Aires on Tuesday morning at 4 AM, which means I'm going to the train station Monday during the day to buy a ticket, just in case. My CouchSurfing host was a bit far from downtown, as is this hotel, so one of the SugarDay/PyConAr organizers has promised to find me a place to stay Monday night until it's time to go to the train station. -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-hacks
