A picture from last weekend, spent in the not-quite-high Sierras:
Krissa and Luis on the very, very, very narrow and twisty road to Edison Lake
A kind blog reader suggested a gross hack which rescued my vows. (Cat, strings, and grep should never be a part of the process of the vows, though admittedly in my case it might seem appropriate.) Krissa may marry me (and continue to deal with my operating system) yet.
My system failed to functionally come back from suspend yesterday, which appears to have cost me a substantial part of what was the final draft of my wedding vows and ceremony. This is the second time in the past few months I’ve lost big chunks of important work because of a system crash.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, from Wikipedia, by factoryjoe, used under CC-BY-SA
I’m reminded of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Self-actualization (freedom of choice, of action) is pretty nice to have but it turns out it doesn’t do you much good when you fear for your safety or lack the ability to feed yourself. Software freedom feels fairly similar- at this point tonight, admittedly sick, angry, and stressed, I’d be pretty happy to pay for a shiny pair of handcuffs if I knew it would do c. late-90s basics like ‘work reliably,’ ‘resume and suspend’, etc.
Best wedding present GNOME (not to mention X and the kernel)1 could give me: dedicate a release cycle (or three) to implementing test-driven development. No features, no ‘regular’ bug fixes, just writing tests and implementing the necessary build tools so that those tests are run on every commit. End the stability regressions and get us on the right track to compete with modern user-centric OSes. We used to be more stable than they are; we can be and should be again.
Battery life of my HP mini with WinXP: 3-5 hours, depending on use. (I hear Win7 is better.)
Battery life of my HP mini with Fedora 11: struggling to get one hour.
Pathetic.
[Ed. later: should have mentioned that this is having done everything powertop suggests. Top culprit seems to be hrtimer_start_range_ns, which is much discussed but has no solution that I can find.]
As many of you know, Krissa and I moved out of New York early this month, and we will not have a permanent home again until some time in early December. This will make contacting us before then a bit tricky. Here is everything we can tell you should you want to say hi, scream at us, etc. :)
the itinerary:
We are in California right now and will be here all month, though often traveling/camping and so out of email range. We’ll get married next weekend, and then we’ll be out of the country on honeymoon from October 1st to November 22nd. I will start work at Mozilla Dec. 1st, and resume normal email/phone habits somewhere around then.
Overflowing Mailbox (Postal Loathing, by Justin, used under CC-BY-SA)
email:
I will check my email as often as possible, but we generally won’t be staying in hotels with wifi and I will not use my phone to check email like I normally do, so ‘as often as possible’ may be ‘not very often’. I also reserve the right to remember that I’m on honeymoon and go, say, seven weeks without checking ;)
Note that I will check *only* email addressed directly to my primary email addresses (at gmail and at tieguy). Email to other addresses (such as foo@tieguy.org), to mailing lists, or that is bcc’d to me will get filtered and I will almost certainly never read it, even on my return. So if you think that when I return I need to see an email that went to a list, forward it to me off-list.
phone:
We will generally not have our phones turned on for most of the trip, but our voicemail will redirect to Google Voice, and so it will be automatically transcribed, and then emailed and texted to us. We’ll try to check those texts and emails as regularly as possible.
hotel phone numbers:
In case of emergency, our parents will have copies of our full itineraries including phone numbers for our hotels. Please contact our parents to get those phone numbers if you absolutely must get in touch with us on a specific day or time.
snail mail:
During these three months, mail or packages can be sent to us care of Krissa’s father and step-mother. We probably will not see these until late November, and Bob and Janna are being very generous to put up with this mail, so try to avoid using this address unless definitely necessary. You can get that address by emailing me; it’ll be in the auto-response.
Look forward to seeing you on the other side…
Today was a good day, except for wordpress and gallery3 seemingly disliking me greatly:
So yeah… today was a good day.
Some friends have admitted to some confusion as to where I am living right now. More details in later posts, but the nutshell version:
1) Krissa and I no longer live in New York.
2) tomorrow night, we sleep in our fifth bed in seven nights.
It does get a little more normal from here on out, sort of. Tomorrow night’s bed is at Krissa’s dad’s place in California, which we will call home for the rest of September while we prepare for the wedding and honeymoon. October and November we will be out of the country on honeymoon. Best bet for contacting us during this whole period is direct email; twitter, facebook, phone, etc., just aren’t going to cut it, and messages which are sent over mailing lists or other email which does not have my email address in the ‘to’ or ‘cc’ field is likely never going to be read.
