Hello!

Most of you who know me know that I applied one month ago for an excavation in Spain, in Monte Bernorio. It is a 2x2 weeks university dig. I was badly disappointed of not hearing from them anymore after their first confirmation that I could go, and nearly resigned myself to staying here - well, here we are, they finally replied to my desperate emails :). First thing I did was to check for flight prices - which, lucky me, were still quite low: 25£ + taxes, 70£ for a single flight - that's quite good for booking less than a week in advance...

So, I am leaving next sunday, and will be digging for the next month, which is a really exciting experience for someone who had rafa draw a "trowel" to be able to understand what he meant! I've been working in IT for OA for a good 16 months now, so I'm really pleased to have the opportunity to learn more what archaeology is all about. I will be coming back after that (in october), even with a new job description if all works out well :).

Is there anything I should not forget to take with me when going on site? Rafa told me I may have to buy gloves? What type of gloves, any chance they will be provided? Any other stuff I need to know / take with me? I am a bit scared, my Spanish is as good as yours, so the more I know before going the better...

This could have been entitled "how to get a new operating system running in less than 2 minutes". Right, this post is intended for Linux Users only, but I know there are a couple out there... Virtualisation is a technology that is used to run several operating systems on one physical machine. In other words, on one server, I can run 2 windows XP, 3 windows 2000, and 10 linux - all running at the same time. There are many different ways to do this, ranging from XEN, KVM, Vmware to virtualbox and solaris containers... I made a small screencast (like a video) to show how easy and fast it is to create VMs using a script called ubuntu-vm-builder. To see the screencast, you must run Linux, download uvb.session and uvb.timing here: http://waste.mandragor.org/uvb/ , and run scriptreplay uvb.timing uvb.session . It is about 2 minutes long :) .