I’ve had a very good day today. I don’t stop and think and say that to myself very often.

Despite all the driving, sitting, bad spicy food and me voluntarily suffering while pretending I can be a vegetarian, I feel that it was a day worth to live.

In the morning we had to drive over 90 miles to Linuxfest Northwest 2007 and despite long distance and apparent unimportance of the conference it was just the right kind of American experience I like to have.

People were coming there with their kids to listen to talks about Zope and Python and find out more about basics of the General Public License. Presenters whose profile seemed to be too high for this conference, like BrianA and BradFitz seemed to be at home and at ease. Seeing these two kinds together is part of the American society I’ve always been pleased with.

Nothing particularly special about the talks, so I was just sitting there and trying to kill time coding a native C++ connector for MySQL. Another piece of software that will likely go nowhere.

Then we drove back, had a nice walk around Capitol Hill and a dinner.

C. from Subversion project with his friend, and C. from Amazon joined us for dinner. Who joined whom, that I don’t know.

C. turned out to be very passionate about software patents and copyright law, and we spent the evening chatting about the topic. This was so unusual. My general feeling is that in the US an intelligent conversation about any matter not directly related to business can take place only on a very rare occasion.

Tonight we had a very nice walk and conversation.

A couple of phrases of the day, a hypocritical one that I heard very often and thus regard as language clutter - “pretty awesome” - and an interesting one that I heard just once - “a pure matter of contemporary fact”.