Krissa, Nelson, and I
Law and policy nerdery ahoy: I saw the site of the traditional courts of the Common Law, the Temple Inn, and Chatham House. Soooo nerdy am I. Krissa loves me anyway, for some reason.
personal
18
Sep 09
contacting me in the next two and a half months
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…
15
Sep 09
today was a good day
Today was a good day, except for wordpress and gallery3 seemingly disliking me greatly:
- confirmed some plans for the Greek leg of the honeymoon
- got marriage license
- had my first phone call with my little sister since she left for college. Sounds like she’s having a great time, which is good since I’ll always feel partially responsible for her choice of schools :)
- discovered I’m having dinner at Yoshi’s later this week
- had a nice swim. In the Neptune Pool at Hearst Castle. Sort of surreal:
So yeah… today was a good day.
27
Aug 09
making our rings
Krissa and I have mostly tried to make our upcoming wedding fairly low key. The groom will probably wear sandals; there will be very little ceremony; traditional decisions like who is taking whose name (if at all) have not been made; so on, so forth. But we’re not completely dispensing with the traditional bits, and one of them is the rings.
Luckily, through some friends, we stumbled into a pretty awesome way of doing the rings too. Sam at New York Wedding Rings is a former sysadmin who got into ring making as a hobby. During some time off from work, ring-making became the work, and now he helps people make their own rings as the bulk of his business (though he also sells rings of his own design). What Sam does is basically help people make their own wedding rings, from start to finish. He works with people to design their rings, gets the materials, and then walks them through the process from cutting to shaping to polishing. If you’re not artistically inclined (like yours truly) he will also help to make sure that the result is something that looks professional even though it was made in part by amateurs, so you get both the side of pride and ownership that come from making it yourself and the good looks that come from actually having experience and skill. :)
BEHOLD THE POWER OF SCIENCE and also oxy-propane. I solder Krissa's ring while Sam, our guide, looks on. The ring is glowing because it is at roughly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
I spent yesterday in the studio with Sam, working mostly on Krissa’s ring and a little on my own as well. It was a really great experience- I suppose I’m a fan of craftsmanship in general, and to put your own labor1 into the ring your partner is going to wear for the rest of their lives is a fairly powerful experience.
More details below the fold (lots of pictures so I don’t want it on planets, but do come by and say hi ;)
- not much sweat, it was air-conditioned [↩]
10
Aug 09
thanks, friends
A few days before the bar I got a ‘wish you were here’ postcard from Gran Canaria. I promise I only choked up a little bit. :) It meant a lot to me.
Thanks to everyone who signed it- I miss you guys (and gals) too :)
23
Jun 09
10th bugiversary
Some part of me will always be a QA guy, so it is nice to note that today is the tenth anniversary of my first formal bug filing (and first formal participation in Mozilla, I believe): mozilla bugzilla bug 8749, nested <DL> tags don’t display properly. Happy bugday to me, happy bugday to me… :)
3
Jun 09
internet FAIL
I moved this weekend, and as a result of some miscommunication, my sublet place has no internet. Worse, the internet provider to the place has no record of the building’s existence. So I’m pretty much AWOL from the net for probably a couple of weeks. Hope everyone will survive without me…
31
May 09
two other people capture what I’m thinking perfectly
Read two posts this morning that I wanted to note because they capture what I’m thinking pretty perfectly.
Julian Sanchez on the reaction from some quarters to Sonia Sotomayor. Sanchez is a lot like me- sort of libertarian-leaning, not terribly comfortable with lefty identity politics, and not very close to his Hispanic heritage. And still, apparently, pretty damned angry over the reception Sonia Sotomayor has gotten. The whole thing is really worth reading, but the money graph is:
Look, it’s not racist to oppose a Latina judicial nominee, or to oppose affirmative action, or to point out genuine evidence of ethnic bias on the part of minorities. What we’re seeing here, though, is people clinging to the belief that Sotomayor has to be some mediocrity who struck the ethnic jackpot, that whatever benefit she got from affirmative action must be vastly more significant than her own qualities, that she’s got to be a harpy boiling with hatred for whitey, however overwhelming the evidence against all these propositions is. This is really profoundly ugly.
Perfectly encapsulates one of the prime reasons why I can’t touch the modern Republican party with a ten foot pole, even if I’m in several ways far to the ‘right’ of the center of the Democratic party.
(Tangentially, I’ve been meaning to write a post on ‘activist’ judging, and why the core accusation rings true for most people but those pushing it as a political accusation are mostly just fearmongering and quite often blatantly lying about the legal realities they are purportedly discussing. Sadly, I will not have time to do that any time soon; if you’re curious, in the meantime, I highly recommend reading the section on judges in Audacity of Hope- a fair, nuanced, intelligent discussion of the issue that doesn’t get too into the weeds of judicial interpretation but does explain the problems with the situation in pretty plain English.)
The other thing is a piece by John Scalzi on ‘being a closet introvert.’ Apparently he tells people all the time that he’s an introvert, and they don’t believe him. I’ve had the exact same experience, for reasons he lays out well. I’ll keep this bookmarked to send to people next time I have the experience. ;)
12
May 09
LWN interview on Stormy and other subjects
This weekend Linux Weekly News interviewed me on a variety of topics, but primarily on Stormy and GNOME’s finances. It has now been posted. It is behind the LWN paywall for now, but will be available more generally in the future. (I urge everyone to subscribe to LWN; it is an excellent publication.)
In the meantime, perhaps the best summary of the important part can be extracted from the comments, lightly edited for coherency (commenter in bold/italic, me in blockquote):
Why don’t you take a look at how KDE e.V. is run? AFAIK, they don’t pay in 6 figures to anyone and still manage to get the job done in terms of sponsorships and are not looking for a bailout.
We’ve been operating in a manner similar to KDE e.V. since our last Executive Director left, so we’re familiar with the part-time administrative assistant model of doing things. Some things work fairly well when you’re organized that way; others do not.
Goes to show the mindset of the upper echelons of the GNOME project.
I agree completely. It shows that our mindset is that we were unwilling to sit still and tread water. Our mindset was that we wanted to move aggressively forward and change how GNOME related to the outside world. I hope I was clear in the interview of all the various ways in which Stormy helps us do that.
Now, you can certainly question and say bad things about the timing and judgment of those steps. We did expect this to be financially challenging, but we misjudged how badly it would challenge us.
But I think if you want to question the mindset either I didn’t explain our proactive mindset very well in the interview (possible) or you have a very limited vision of what something like the Foundation can do for our community. Certainly I’m very proud of standing for that active, aggressive view of what the Foundation can achieve, and I think most GNOME Foundation members agree with that (though I completely understand if they are chagrined at the financial situation.)
3
May 09
The Plan, for now
Lots and lots of friends gave me good feedback on my ‘free time’ post of a couple months ago, so I thought it would make sense to say something now that I actually have some semblance of a plan :) Specifically, among other options, Orrick oferred me a stipend to work on legal issues at a non-profit from Jan. ’10 to Jan. ’11, and then return to Orrick at the end of that period1.
I’ve decided to take Orrick up on that offer, and I’m very excited that the non-profit I’m going to work with is Mozilla. I’ll be working with Moz’s general counsel, Harvey Anderson, on a variety of issues; some of them of broad interest (which I’ll discuss more here once appropriate) but some (hopefully) of the nitty-gritty unpleasant type that all lawyers are expected to handle, and which I’d like to get some experience doing. Hopefully it’ll leave me some time on the side to write and publish a bit, and maybe even read some fiction for fun, which I’ve done damnably little of since August 2006.
Since I won’t start until December, there will still be some time to travel and get married in there- plans for that are still up in the air but will probably involve some hiking and camping in Canada pre-wedding and (maybe?) Asia post-wedding.
Thanks again to all of my friends who gave suggestions and advice on what to do next; it was all very appreciated and considered at great length.
- assuming Orrick is still functional, economy on rebound by then, etc., etc. I see no reason to believe otherwise, but then again the economy is unusual. [↩]