Category Archives: Life

Fresh Start

A lot of things have made me happy lately.

  • I hung up a bird feeder for the first time in a long time, and never get tired of watching cardinals out the front window.
  • Joanne has been involved in Powderhorn 365, a community photography project for the Minneapolis neighborhood where we live. The idea is to take a picture every day for a full year to give a feel of the neighborhood, the people that live here, etc.  Not all of the photos are fantastic (and it’s probably not nearly as interesting for somebody that doesn’t live in the neighborhood), but it’s again reminding me why I love the neighborhood I live in.
  • I wasn’t sure that the Obama inauguration would have much of an effect on me, but it has been making me smile when I think about it.  It seriously feels like a cloud has lifted and things are beginning to make sense again.  It remains to be seen if he’ll be a great president, of course, but for now it feels good to have a fresh start.
  • A lot of cool things happening at Collabora, and I’m really enjoying my work.  I’ve been hacking on telepathy-related stuff lately as well and have really enjoyed it so far.
  • Watching my little girl grow never ceases to bring me joy.  She’s jabbering on about everything, learning new words every day.  Who knew that pronouns were so difficult?  She’s constantly mixing up ‘me’ and ‘you’ (e.g. asking me to “pick you up”, etc).
  • I’ve been on a roll with cooking lately.  Joanne is doing a costume design for a local theater, and the show goes up in february, so I’ve been making lots of big meals and freezing the leftovers so that when things get busy and we don’t have a lot of time to make meals, we can still eat relatively well.  There are times when I don’t enjoy cooking all that much, but I’ve really been feeling it lately.
  • Tom Waits ‘Anywhere I Lay My Head’ is possibly the most perfect song ever written.

Travel and Work

It’s been quite a few years since we’ve visited J’s parents, and since R is now 1.5 years old, we finally felt that we were ready to make the trek (though not without considerable trepidation about how she’d react to the 13-hour flight to Korea).  As it turns out, she did very well on the plane and only had one small spell of whininess before dropping off from exhaustion and sleeping the last 6 hours of the flight. Phew.

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On the other hand, it turns out that toddlers take a little while to adjust to jetlag. We’ve now been in Korea for about 5 days, and this is the first day that she hasn’t woken up around 1AM and run around the apartment playing for 3 hours in a row before falling back asleep. Instead she just woke up at 5AM. It could be worse, of course. She could be up crying for 3 hours a night instead of laughing and jumping and reading books.

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So for approximately the next 3 weeks we’ll be hanging out in Korea, visiting family, and eating lots of really good food. And working. It’s nice to have a job where I can take longer trips to see family without needing to burn 3 weeks of vacation.

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Pools, Toy Dogs, Turkey, and WebKit

Summer is coming on full force.  R has discovered a new obsession, this time with the pool.  This goes along with her existing obsessions with fish, ducks, and geese.  I’m noticing a pattern here.  She also enjoys non-aquatic things, particularly books — mostly books about animals.  J got an old picture book about Dogs from a garage sale down the block recently.  It’s obviously from another time, as it contains the following hilariously inappropriate line:

Toy DogsThe Toy Dogs today are bred solely as pets. They have no other purpose in life except to give pleasure, especially to ladies.

Also, I’ll be attending GUADEC for the first time this year, and I’m looking forward to a good time in Istanbul and finally meeting a lot of people in person that I’ve known online for a while.

WebKit work is going quite well. I’ve mostly been focusing on bug fixing so far, though I’ve added some new features as well (CSS text shadows are now supported in the Qt port, for instance). Overall I’ve been really impressed with how clean and well-organized WebKit is for such a large and complex project. I’ve also started playing around with ‘webkitmm’ in my spare time as well. Nothing much to show at the moment, I’m afraid, but I don’t expect it to take too much effort before it’s relatively usable.