HAR2009: day 2
Long day yesterday. After upgrading wordpress because the old one was hacked to pieces and non-functional, read some mail, idly waiting for KPN to show up and dig a hole. Surprisingly, they do not show up before lunch. As I would learn later, they would not show up at all.
Decided to go for a little drive, hunting for food. Pass by the KPN shack at the edge of the terrain, where a greenwheels peugeot 107 is parked next to a non-descript black car (i dont usually pay much attention to brand and/or type of cars). The sun is already blazing.
I knock on the door of the little shack. A somewhat busy Arien answers, talking on the phone. He says to me in a hushed voice: ‘it is not going well’. So I decide not to further bother him and the engineer from KPN, and sit myself down in my trusty 850 checking some more email. Oddly enough, even directly under the gsm antenna protruding from the little shack, the speed is abominable.
The phone is constantly ringing, but reception (t-mobile) is so poor that my calls keep being terminated. I head off to Harderwijk, to score a fresh KPN sim (KPN/Vodafone have acceptable reception over here). Pop that in, and decide to change the voicemail message on my t-mobile number to notify callers of the new number (but fail to do so as I would learn later on).
I spend the afternoon calling KPN, asking where they are, whether we will get our analog lines before the event starts, repeatedly being promised to be called back. As I learn later, Arien has had more luck with KPN and by the end of the afternoon we have 10gbit coming out of the KPN shack.
Day 2 ends with some driving: off to The Hague to grab some clothes, electronics and a quick bite, then to Leusden to pick up the first of 9 pinball machines that will be in the HARcade. Totally forget to have dinner, which is compensated with a midnight pizza from The Triangle in Nunspeet (open till 1 AM thank the spaghetti monster!, and with a complementary Juliana mint). After some more email and hooking up the printer, i finally close my eyes at the end of a chapter in Stross’ Atrocity Archives.
Day 3 begins with breakfast, as I had the foresight to get some milk, bread and chocolate spread. Sitting in front of the reception desk again, waiting for the gravediggers from KPN. We’ll see. My fellow board-members will also arrive today, and who knows maybe even Jan (the buildup coordinator) will peek his head around a tree for a bit today. As I write this, the boys from the tent rental are arriving on site with more hardware; if their zest of last monday is forebidding of today, we might have quite a lot of tents erected at the end of this day! (yes BugBlue, _erected_, can’t make it more explicit for you….)
