Echoes of the underwater world

My motorbike has been available friday afternoon, i was awaiting the insurance confirmation to go and catch it but it never came. It’s really hard to get an insurance here in Spain when you just had your driving license and when you are younger than 40 years old. I tried getting an emergency solution from a friend but i ended up receiving a 1200 euros proposal for the whole year. That was a high price to pay! Finally i have been very lucky and the motorbike sales guy told me they can do an insurance for me at 570 euros per year.. Wow that’s a good drop of the price ! So i have been able to take the motorbike away with me on friday evening and i tried bringing it back home safely…

I ve spent a lot of time doing motorbike that week end and i must admit it has been one of the most pleasant sensation i had in my life. Only one word comes to mind : Freedom… Finally enjoying the road and getting pleasure driving on it.

I am eagerly waiting for the next week end to come so that i can just ride away some more

BTW some pictures of me on the bike are available here.

Concerning GStreamer stuff i recenlty got back to hacking a lilttle and assigned some bugs to myself mostly for x(v)imagesink. Fixed some of them already and the list is narrowing. I m having problems getting framebuffer support with my radeon chip and that prevents me from hacking on directfbsink. I hope i will be able to solve that quite fast…

I usually try to avoid doing comments on that kind of hot topics, but today’s events are pushing me to do so.

Today Noelle had a car crash. I hardly understand how you can have a car crash 200 m far from our house but she did it ! Luckily the shock was very small and it seems the pregnant lady and her baby are doing just fine (already laughing about photos and borrowing my mobile phone to call some french friends during hours…). The worst thing is that in my opinion the mistake and responsabilities were just shared across the 2 girls (yeah sure she didn’t crash alone, it had to be with another girl), but the other shouted louder so Noelle finally convinced herself that she was guilty and signed papers telling so. The insurance folks are very happy with that and we (I) have to pay the cost of fixing our (her) car (more than 600 euros) directly from our pocket. Well she is safe nothing else matters right… ?

Got back to hacking on x(v)imagesink (GStreamer elements) this morning because people are commiting random fixes to those elements that i m supposed to maintain. I have already sent mails explaining that i prefer receiving patches and handle the fixes myself but what can you do when people just ignore it and commit their stuff. I managed to do some optimization to save some video memory so that thomasvs can do some tests of his pixel aspect ratio patches that generates very big images. We should normally be able to commit the aspect ratio handling very soon and i will then immediatly fix Totem with the GStreamer backend so that it can do automatic aspect ratio handling and user override.

Yesterday morning i ordered my motorbike and bought a black and gray leather jacket to start riding this week end. Indeed i will get the motorbike on friday afternoon ! You can see it here. Can’t wait for that moment ! If only we could already be friday afternoon

Tomorrow i will go the dentist again … yeeepee Let’s hack on directfbsink for a moment then, that’ll get my teeth sharper