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

Sort of lousy Christmas break- step-father had a very mild heart attack on the 22nd, and then my grandfather fell and bruised himself very badly on the 24th. All things considered, this hasn’t been nearly as bad as it sounds- Brother (my step-father, don’t ask) has had a very routine angioplasty with a balloon and stint, and no muscle/tissue damage, so he’ll be home today and would have been home a lot earlier if the hospital didn’t have a virtual blackout between the 24th and 26th. My grandfather has been x-rayed and has not broken anything, nthankfully, so he just has to wait for the soreness and bruising to pass. That goes much more slowly at his age, of course, but that ‘just’ takes time. Needless to say, all this has crimped the holidays a bit around here- lots less time relaxing, lots more time helping mom and grandma cope with all their new headaches. On the bright side, there has been lots of family togetherness :)

Some cool gifts given and received:

• Gave a Phillipe Starck juicer to Krissa. Not very useful but lots of fun. Answer to ‘where will you put it in your kitchen?’ is ‘in the living room.’ Despite it not being given to me, it probably makes me the happiest of anything I gave or got this year.
• I was inspired to get the juicer because it is on the cover of Don Norman’s Emotional Design, which I got for my brother, the architect-y type. I just finished it myself, after I bought it for him. It was thought provoking, but not as great as I’d expected- feels like an essay’s worth of ideas stretched to book length.
• Got the utterly cool Complete Far Side from my stepmom. Something it should say in bold print at the top of the amazon entry: ‘This book is 20 pounds and two volumes. Odds are this will be the most substantial book in your house/apartment. If that embarasses you, don’t buy.’
• My little brother got me Moneyball. I burned through it. Great, great book. The new paperback has a very interesting postscript on the baseball world’s response to the book- in a nutshell, the book basically said ‘you guys are getting killed by people doing this smarter than you are’, and instead of trying to learn from it, the baseball ‘clan’ bragged about not having even read it. It’s a great read- I’ll probably end up recommending it to at least a few friends who don’t care at all about baseball.
• For those who thought I was physically incomplete without a fleece vest Krissa bought me a new one. I’m psyched, though I’m going to return it to get a different size. I am now looking forward to spring even more, as if that was possible :)

NB: I’m going to play a little bit with routing books/etc. that I post on the blog through my Amazon Associates account. I usually link to Amazon anyway, so I’m curious if I’m actually bringing them any revenue or not. We’ll see, I guess :) Might create a gnome.org account and route things through there if it is moderately successful. Likely to keep it myself if madly successful ;)

Things not to spend a holiday evening doing: staring at a laptop, wondering whether or not your girlfriend’s flight will get into Philadelphia before her connecting flight to Florida departs. So far her flight from Boston to Philadelphia is three hours late. Half of that was a delay in taking off, and the other half has been spent in a holding pattern over Philly, and sitting on the tarmac waiting for a gate. Luckily, so far the connecting flight is at least two hours late talking off. It’s a snails-paced race.

Update: after more than an hour on the ground, Krissa’s flight finally got in, missing her departing flight by no more than five minutes. It’s quite possible that her flight came in to the gate that her connecting flight left, even. And all other flights in the Miami direction are full. Blah. Hope she gets here in time for presents ;)

Sigh. I hereby officially resign from anything that requires proof of my capacities as a sentient being. My sound ‘broke’ during the summit, and has been broken since then, because I accidentally hit the HW mute button.

Awesome weekend in NYC. Saw old friends again, watched Duke beat Oklahoma, saw Rent, made it to the new MOMA, attended a friend’s christmas party, ate well… and got to sleep in twice. Pretty swank.

On return home, excitement at Seth’s usability article (which I hope some day we see in developer.gnome.org/gup/ doc form) was surpassed only by receipt of an email from my little sister telling me about this ‘cool browser’. Neat to see Free Software spreading even to diehard Windows users.

All I want for Christmas is my TV (which still hasn’t arrived!) and a Giblets is My Co-pilot bumpersticker.

sr. garrett is my hero.

Put up pics for my family from my weekend in DC. Favorite one is of a sliver of sr71.

Updated Krissa’s box to gnome 2.8 today, and plopped a link for her website on her desktop. Will be very nice for her to just be able to click, drag, whatever to edit the website. Certainly better than raw (s)ftp for her use case. Thanks to everyone who has pushed that dialog forward over the past two releases. Hopefully I’ll get user-share on there next- interested in playing with it in my local network.

Besides that, got lots of little things done today, mostly Christmas shopping. Also got my HD cable box and picked up a shipping box to send my mom my old TV when the new one comes in- unexpected Christmas gift for her. Installed a DVD burner in the desktop box; big thanks to the several folks who wrote in after my post about needing one. Seems to work nicely so far, though I have yet to burn anything. Soooon.

Predictably for anyone who knows me, the google-library deals announced this morning have me fairly excited. They’ll of course be significantly crippled by the Disney Copyright Act, but still… an incredible first step towards the digital library of alexandria Brewster Kahle has been pushing. Can’t wait to see what comes out of it in the long term. (Kahle will be speaking tomorrow at MIT, but I missed the registration date for the conference. Oops.)

Had a great weekend in DC, split about evenly between spending Quality Time with my grandparents and spending time with old friend Eily.

My grandfather turned 90 on saturday, which is pretty cool. His alzheimer’s meds seemed to have stabilized that progression- he’s pretty flaky at the moment, and interesting conversations are likely to take place 3-4 times (‘where are we going’ in a car with him becomes sort of like ‘are we there yet’ in a car with a five year old), but he has been in roughly the same place since he started the meds nearly two years ago, so that’s good. We took him out to some of his old airplane haunts, and to the new national air and space museum annex. Because of rain, he didn’t get to fly (which was the big surprised we’d had planned for him), but otherwise he was in heaven- it was really great to see him so happy.

Robert and Joe have assaulted New York; I’m next- go down on Thursday night to crash the party of Eily’s firm, then relax Friday, with MOMA and basketball on Saturday and then Rent on Sunday. Maybe I’ll squeeze in The Life Aquatic somewhere too :) Oh, and somewhere in there the best burritos on earth will get eaten.

Was irritated to note today that the behavior of ‘delete’ is still broken in Debian/Ubuntu emacs. I’m pretty sure I complained about that on debian-user and possibly the BTS in 1998. Blah.

Random thoughts from the day:

• My christmas tree now has flamingo lights, courtesy of Peter and Lizzie.
• Apparently Sean Egan’s robotics course is using my book as a textbook. Pretty cool, to me, at least. Sadly, they aren’t using my old OS. C’est la vie, I get royalties either way ;)
• I spent some time poking around art.gnome.org- some nice stuff there. The new ‘Office’ theme bits are really nice, and I like WatercolorMOD1 too. I’d love to ship gartoon some day too- it’s just fun. Unfortunately, this bumped me into some theme-manager bugs, including 102216 (which has a patch!), and made me poke d-d-l in the hope of sparking some interest in performance issues.
• I’ve been flatteringly elected to the board with the second-highest vote count, despite my erratic participation in GNOME over the past year. I hope this year we can remain more focused and energized- I personally want to focus on the issues I highlighted in my responses to candidate question #2. If I can do that, it will have been a successful board year for me.

Had a yummi-licious dinner of a leek and mushroom risotto, with a bottle of the yummilicious Tablas Creek Esprit ’02 which we picked up during our Thanksgiving wine tasting swing. Fine ending to an otherwise sort of ho-hum day- I did some of the shopping for dinner, some paperwork for work (the best kind of paperwork), bought a warm hat (which I needed, it finally got cold today) and otherwise lazed around.

And I emailed- lots of noise to marketing list about potential content for a liveCD, and some content to d-d-l and others about build failures. The tinderbox emails are working basically as intended. It would be nice to take the next step and finger people semi-automatically (he who committed last, and after the last successful build, did it), but where we are now is pretty useful. Thankfully, took nearly 72 hours before there was an actual use for it (though we keep getting semi-spammed with nautilus-media breakage, and will until a decision is made.)