Sometimes, the week just start strangely and you get suck into something totally unexpected. Monday as I came into my workplace ( which I still need to write about in here ), I was told to get my passport as I was leaving in the next 48h to Jordan. After some rushed preparations and getting some partial information about the work I needed to complete once there and a uneventful flight, I arrived in Amman, Jordan.

My company, Easter-Eggs, made a custom debian install CD for our client the Maison de Science de l’Homme which is part of the STRABON project. This project entails the installation of Debian servers running tomcat applications in all country around the mediteranen sea. Anyway they had a conference going on in Amman, and they needed me there ASAP.

During the first few days, I managed to setup a small LAN with a gateway doing transparent web proxying/caching, dhcp and stuff which was more difficult than it should have been as the technicians I was supposed to work with had only a very basic grasping of english ( that was surprising consediring most people here speak a decent english ).

Then I had to make a demonstration of the installation during the conference, in French with simultaneous transtlation in English and Arabic. Of course I learned that I needed to do this just the morning before and I was completly unprepared and I wasn’t even sure the CD I just remasterized was working. Fortunatly it turned out well in the end.

One of the reason for my presence there was to select and train if needed a local linux system administrator and that started my adventure with open source in jordan which is going to be described in his own post later on.

Anyway, I managed to visit a little bit of Amman during the last few days, it was my first time in the middle east and the experience was great, I’m going to post some photos very soon.

Stay tuned.