It's only a small story: I was one of the group sent to Iceland for the Need for Speed Sprint on Python back in ~2006. Among the other participants was, of course, tim. I mostly worked on benchmarking to determine how much of a speedup we had achieved.
tim gave me some really eye-opening tips, one that's really stuck with me is that you want to take the best of many short runs of the benchmark rather than running it a long time, because longer runs are going to guarantee interference from other parts of the OS (scheduling, etc).
tim is an insanely smart guy, kind, and funny.
One day for lunch we were ordering takeout from this little joint, I forget the name, it might have been Hamborgarabulla Tomasar, and I picked up the check for everyone (maybe 15 people). tim described it as "shockingly good", which was absolutely accurate. For how expensive Iceland was for food, it wasn't too terribly bad price-wise either.
