During the mini PiTiVi hackfest a Coruña, René and I fought valiantly to get our beloved video editor working through GObject introspection.
It was much to my delight that Vivia Nikolaidou kindly lent me her beloved debugging duck (much better than debugging symbols!) to facilitate our efforts. She let it sit by my Thinkpad and quack around at deadlocks for a bit, while she went to a tea shop with Sebastian.
After a few hours of intense debugging, I invited the duck to an excellent jamoneria (if you have to ask how much the dinner cost that night, you can’t afford it), where we had some lively discussions:
Tragedy ensued. While no harm came upon the birdie upon my watch, I never saw Vivia again that fateful night. When I got back at the hotel, Vivia wasn’t there. As I knew all too well that I was flying out of la Coruña the morning, I jokingly issued a warning on IRC at midnight:
One hour later, there was still no life signs from its owner. I needed to ensure that my broadcast would be heard even if she had passed out on the beach (from drinking too much tea), so I told Olivier (ocrete) to alert her if he saw her on the beach. I went to bed afterwards, but couldn’t sleep until 2:30 in the morning.
As I awoke, still no news. Nobody in the hotel lobby either. “Oh, I suppose we’re all leaving at the same time today, so I’ll see her at the boarding gate”, thought I.
At the airport, I ran into Emmanuelle Bassi and some Canonical guys. It’s all a blur now, it happened too fast. As I was boarding, I suddenly realized that the bird had vanished. Had it flown away on its own?
I was really looking forward to allow it to fly with me in my private fighter jet, the one that I had neatly parked on the Coruña airport tarmac upon my arrival last week (after all, what’s a little détour to Greece on the way back to Montréal?):
As you can imagine, I am quite distressed about this. I can’t help but have the feeling that some terrible turn of events has befallen our feathery friend.
I know that Jono Bacon loves ducks “in a professional way“, but I don’t think he was behind this (well, not this time). Has anyone seen the duck?