Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Inspired by Seth’s christmas-y post, I went out and bought a Christmas tree.

A very tiny Christmas tree. The picture flatters it.

Otherwise, have bummed[1] around the house all day, harassing some people remotely about build breakages. Calum promptly fixed his; the nautilus-media one will take some more hashing out.

Had intended to be on IRC/IM, but restoring my laptop took more time/cycles than I’d intended. Might be around later tonight or tomorrow.

[1] For certain values of bummed- did more cleaning and organizing around the house than have occurred in several months.

Spent the last week mostly doing that. Other stuff too, I suppose- wine tastings at the vineyards, beach, lots of food, chilling with Krissa’s family, etc., but mostly reading:

• Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Interesting read on pseudo-rebels of a different time.
• first book of the Hyperion pair. Plowed through the whole thing on the flight back. Also, found the second one (on hp’s recommendation) at a great used bookstore in SLO. Will probably tackle that in the next day or two, possibly after my desk is clean.
• the bizarre Steampunk Trilogy. Conforms to all ‘steampunk’ I’ve ever read in that the ideas are great and the execution crap.
• Pattern Recognition, which was really enjoyable.

All in all, thoroughly enjoyed the week. More pictures in the gallery.

Am now fighting off a nasty cold- have pretty much spent all day non-functional. Hopefully will recover soon.

Sven, Rodrigo, many others: it would be great if you guys could write (collaborate on?) docs (maybe at live.gnome.org?) on ‘how to get a local gnome group started.’ I have a feeling lots of mistakes have been repeated here :)

Cool links of the day:

• javascript+css+XHTML presentation format that works in any modern browser. Would be cool to see OOo or criawips export to this for web presentation instead of the current mess OOo exports.
• I miss the old slide-rule in gnome-calc. Thankfully someone has implemented a new one.

Almost surrealy, neither Ubuntu nor FC3 will install on my laptop without reformatting the drive, because somehow the partition table NLD put on my drive is not readable by either of them. I’m hoping there is some sane, pleasant reason for this, but at the moment I really want to throw my laptop against the wall, since this means no music for me on the trip, since sound on my laptop has been inexplicably broken for some weeks now and I don’t have enough time to backup, reinstall from scratch, and recopy all the music to the drive before leaving for the airport. Yargh.

I tried to poke around with mail a bit on the tinderbox box; my very naive attempts at sending mail there failed, so my newly hatched plan to resurrect the gnome-build-status list seems like it will not come to fruition tonight. :)

In one of those ways in which the web is just pretty awesome, not one but two german planet readers emailed me to tell me that the word is not arschegeiger, but arschgeige. This would explain why I got like 10 google hits for arschegeiger and now 3720 for arschgeige. I think this is the best hit I’ve found for it so far, just in terms of both utility and pure bizareness, and because now arschgeige is in his logs.

I’m going to California tomorrow morning, to spend a week sitting on Krissa’s dad’s deck, and drinking wine. And having no laptop. And after that, I’m taking the rest of the calendar year off from work- I’m totally burnt and need to take a whole bunch of deep breaths.

I plan to stay active in GNOME while I’m away from work. Step one of that was to actually finally post my candidacy answers, in which I naively make my first campaign promise, and back it up with my second pledge to eat my boxers.

I’ll probably also install Ubuntu later tonight so I can get a fresh perspective on the ‘what can be done’ situation- I’m so deeply involved with suse right now that I feel like I need to come up for fresh air and figure out what other people are doing with GNOME and with distros in general. I expect NLD will measure up pretty decently, but I know there is a lot we haven’t done yet like hal/gnome-volume-manager that should be pretty awesome to see.

Other than that, have a nice, long reading list that I hope to pound through- Paul DiFilippo’s SteamPunk Trilogy, the latest Gibson (Pattern Recognition), Dan Simmon’s Hyperion, and if I feel more serious, The Cluetrain Manifesto and ‘Emotional Design.’ And that’s just the first week ;)

I have a new favorite word: arschegeiger.

That is all.

Anything that I may have said about oneness with any webapps was a lie. A total, utter, miserable lie.

Things that make me happy this evening:

• I had a moment of clarity about the miserable web app I’ve had to use at work and should be able to blow through my remaining work in it, now that I have reached oneness with the UI.
• after brief illness, Krissa appears much recovered. I’d worried about the fact that she was gone from the house when I got home, but it turns out that was because she felt so well she’d gone to Pilates.
• I discovered that Stro is doing planet summaries on footnotes. That’s very, very cool- I think we need in general more ‘metanews’ like kernel traffic that help summarize our various information streams for those who can’t/don’t spend all day browsing lists and planet and IRC.
• Not only is college basketball season on, but evo can happily suck down the only ics file that matters. Well, besides the All-knowing All-Powerful release schedule.

Zucchi’s vfolder changes have gotten my evo from typically 440-460MB memory usage down to 387M. Yay.

Good three-day weekend on a number of fronts:

• Went to Chicago; saw my brother, my dad, Trow, and a massive number of buildings, including several Frank Lloyd Wrights.
• Didn’t take my laptop. Felt great.
• Didn’t watch or read any news. Felt great.
• Duke football won a game. Against a Div. 1 team.
• Read Jeff Noon’s Nymphomation on the flight home. Great, fun read. Will have to read more of his.
• Got a few more sections into the thought provoking ‘Cyber Reader’ essay collection I’ve been poking at. Good clean fun.
• Didn’t get to watch any of it, but espn.com tells me college basketball season has started. Woot.

All in all, just felt great to get out/away and have very, very little hanging over my head on return.

Downsides so far: probable exhaustion tomorrow from late flight + mail reading.