On the downside:
Note the ‘feels like.’ That is -29C for the rest of the world.
On the upside: I posted that picture from the screenshooter applet by selecting ‘tieguy.org’ from the folder list dropdown and entering my keyring password. Pretty slick- no CLI involved at all.
I’m sitting here locked out of my apartment (forgot my keys when I left yesterday morning) so I finally had time to sit down and read Seth’s Experimental Culture piece. Seth’s topic isn’t particularly ‘news’- Nat talked about the same issues of stagnation and boredom during his ‘pendulum’ talk, and the mono/gtk-sharp community seems to have picked up some of the crazy cool toys (tomboy, muine) that we’ve discouraged in core GNOME. But Seth writes it pretty well, and it has nice formatting ;) If you haven’t read it, go to it, and then “Hug an inventor near you, especially if its yourself”, to steal a line from Seth.
Long day today. Was at the airport at 5am for my 6am flight to Miami. Got in, went straight to doctor’s appointment. Nothing critical, as far as I can tell; mostly stuff that could affect me in the far far future but appears to be panicing my family now. Well, that and slightly reduced liver functionality ;) But who knows about that one- test results tomorrow, I guess. They didn’t get to run enough tests today- before I head to the airport tomorrow morning (7:50am flight), I’ll get more blood drawn (6:45am). Yay for having a very skilled, very paranoid doctor for a father.
Otherwise, an OK day- struggled to sift through too much mail in broken-up sessions throughout the day, only to find out that my sendmail is hosed so my outgoing mail is horked yet again. Had good conversations with my mom and dad. Got to see Duke play at Miami, which included seeing an old friend and talking with him for a half. TODO list got longer, not shorter :/
Did get a nice note from lulu.com about their scheduling and pricing- hopefully I can plunge ahead with the liveCD project soon. Watch your inboxes and this space ;)
Anyway, sleep… airport again in six hours, hopefully for the last time in a while.
I know I am traveling too much because I will not have the time or energy to unpack tonight before I start packing again to leave in the morning, and because I have redeemed two frequent buyer cards at the travel book store this month. There are worse problems to have.
Read Cluetrain Manifesto on the flight- some very interesting stuff in there, particularly the implications for open communication and ‘flat’ structures, much of which I take for granted. I’ll probably re-read it on the flight tomorrow and do some more note-taking and pondering. I also finished Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell- sort of a bizarre Baroque Cycle/Harry Potter hybrid. Was fun- if you have space in your life for an 800 page light read that could use 100-200 pages of editing I recommend it.
Got started on a set of GNOME 2.10/’what is GNOME’/'why GNOME’ slides that I hope at some point will get dropped in the skel directory on a gnoppix CD along with some of the other cool media bits Ian McIntosh [Ed: boy do I suck.] has been assembling. They need a lot of love, though, both content and presentation-wise, and Cluetrain has made me rethink some bits (thankfully not many) so I probably won’t post them for at least a few more days. I’m not afraid of them being wrong, but I don’t want them to be ugly ;)
Have had a blast bumming around Paris with Krissa and Guy this weekend. Am making up for losing tomorrow to the plane by working on MLK day. Hopefully pictures up soon, but currently I’m borrowing Guy’s sister’s network connection and I don’t want to swamp it :)
Biggest pleasure so far today, after some big hugs from Krissa, is that I appear to have finally trained spamassassin to recognize r**ex as spam. Yay.
Still very much catching up on mail. Favorite line so far is Havoc talking about an ideal CD player and an ideal CD ripper:
The two distinct UIs are both incredibly simple and don’t even look like computer programs; they barely need menus. The combined UI suddenly looks like software.
It looks like I’ll be spending two months in Germany, from Jan. 31st to very late March. Nothing permanent, but it is about time one of us took the plunge and immersed ourselves. Hopefully it’ll give me enough German to be dangerous at GUADEC ;) I’ll continue to wrangle desktop stuff, but be closer to Bangalore and to all the folks we have to integrate with here in Nuremberg.
The big thing for me in Apple’s announcements yesterday- the new box is nice, and the new ipod is fun, but to me the significant and interesting announcement is that Apple is continuing to replace Office.
I find it fairly hard to be jealous of proprietary software developers. By and large, I love what I do and I particularly love hacking around with a big, fun group of community folks. But I have to say that right ATM I’m jealous of the Apple people. Specifically, I’m jealous of their very ballsy approach to MS. They currently have the confidence (arrogance?) to not just attack microsoft’s lock-in jewels (IE and Office) but to do it by going simple and offering a radically different experience. (Seth’s mention of Office hints in this direction in an MS context, without mentioning that Apple is effectively doing this.) Firefox is headed in that direction (without the good OS integration, so… exactly how far it is going is debatable :) but OpenOffice is not, and it seems like while Abi and Gnumeric are going lighter, they aren’t really doing anything terribly different yet. Sadly, even if they did, it seems unlikely most of the distros would have the guts to seriously push it- note what the distros have all done with Epiphany. Apple is afforded this arrogance, of course, by making lots of cash and having Office standing by. We have no such luck. So, yeah, I’m jealous of this.
WRT the GUADEC CFP… after the success of the micro-talks and BOFs at the Summit, I’ve decided I’m not going to submit any full talks. I will however submit three BOFs, two with associated 10-20 minute introductory talks. I think we need a GUADEC that is more interactive and more fun, and less ‘I’m sharing my expertise from on high’, so I’m going to submit stuff that follows that personal guideline.
While digesting lunch, a link: A few weeks ago I briefly pondered my feelings about the morality of Free Software. Ted Leung had an interesting, potentially related post about a completely alternative interpretation of ‘why I do what I do’. Money quote:
So, the next time you hear “open source development”, think “the most economically efficient method for matching resources to construct information products”. The next time you see “XXX Software Foundation”, think “people constructing a software commons (protected by intellectual property laws) that the rest of use can use and extend”.
There is a lot more in the post. It is an interesting perspective- it is certainly the most effective tack for free software in the US to take. I fear, though, that in choosing this rhetorical path[1] we risk losing some momentum in Europe. Anyway, have to run- more later.
[1] not to suggest that it is purely rhetorical for Ted, but I think some others who push the ‘FLOSS is more efficient’ line are doing it more because they want FLOSS to win.
I may just be totally wasted from lack of sleep[1], but I think I’m actually quite fond of downtown Nuremberg.
picture from the last trip.
Ran into Sandino and Bob downtown; it’s a small world :) We’re staying way outside of downtown this trip, unfortunately- I don’t want that to happen next time I come back.
Had the embarassing sensation of arriving to the office at 3pm and being told that the meetings we thought had been postponed until tomorrow had only been postponed until noon. That left me in a meeting much later than our tired bodies have been able to deal with. So probably tonight I crash. Hopefully tomorrow night I can go out with some of the hackers and buy lots of people well-deserved NLD beers.
[1] On the Boston-Paris leg I wrote a review of the acrobat beta, read about 1/4 of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, and watched the very touching Very Long Engagement. Action-packed flight. ;)
Things that rule today:
So, yeah, a good weekend so far- hope next week (in Nuremberg) can measure up.