Category: life

Tue 06 Apr 2004

  • life: It’s been almost a month since I last wrote something. In that time, I jumped from working frantically on GTK+ 2.4.0 to doing sysadmin work full time. I’m quite exhausted.

  • games: I found a great site dedicated to preserving underrated arcade and video games (http://www.the-underdogs.org/). Most excitingly, they have Douglas Adams’ “Bureaucracy” available. I spent a lot of time playing that as a kid, and never quite beat it. My copy of that game died years ago though I still have the disk. I also lost the excellent manual, and they have a high quality copy of that. I got it working with dosbox tonight, and have been playing again just in time for tax season.

Thu 21 Aug 2003

  • life: I got this nugget from Seth on irc today:

    seth> Jrb: but seriously, if you haven’t tried answering desktop-devel mail from a rowboat drifting through the night you have yet to live

  • life: I fear, by that definition, I’m living it up.

Sat 21 Jun 2003

  • Life (Passings): On a somber note, Steven Taylor has left this world after fatal complications from a sugery. He was one of my co-workers at Red Hat and I didn’t know him very well. I talked to him only occasionally, passing by him in the halls every few days. When things like this happen, I’m always left feeling like I should have made a larger effort to know that person, and wish I’d been a better person myself. There is no doubt that he died much, much too soon. He was a very energetic and courageous man and will leave a hole in many people’s lives.

    On a much happier note, Miguel got engaged! Congratulations Miguel.

  • GU4DEC: What a blast! It was an amazing conference this year. The biggest problem I had was getting everything possible out if it. There was always something interesting going on and I regretfully had to sleep occasionally. During almost every track there were two or more conferences I wanted to see. There was so much gossip to share, and news to relate! There were two monster board meetings, the each of which lasted seven or eight hours. It’s a really good thing we all get along pretty well.

    I met Noah Levitt, Ross Burton (briefly) and Arvind Samptur in person for the first time. It’s always really fascinating to see what people you talk to only on irc look like. Noah surprised me, as the only other person named Noah that I’ve ever known was really short. For some reason, I was expecting this Noah to be similarly sized. He apparently was in the same High School class as Shane Battier, so perhaps that rubbed off on him a little.

    I also met up with Christophe Fergeau to discuss the gnome-vfs mime stuff a bit more. I’m not sure I’m being as helpful as I could be but unfortunately we both have a good idea of where we want to go and are having trouble going there. It’s a messy, messy problem.

    One of the biggest bummers for me about GU4DEC was that Kristian wasn’t able to make it. I owe that guy a lot of beers, and need to start paying him back at some point. It would be great to have met him. Hopefully he can go next year.

  • GUADEC (continued): I also got to hang out with the Swedes again, which is always a lot of fun. I made great plans with Anders that we need to follow through with some day. I even managed to get a tiny bit of hacking done. I moved DrWright into the control-center in advance of the impending feature freeze. Hopefully Richard Hult won’t do the same thing before I can check in my code. I also did some more EggGConfWidget hacking, and somehow managed to avoid talking with Jody about the huge backlog of control-center bugs that we have.

    I also gave a talk on the control-center. It went fairly well for me, as I’m not normally a good speaker. It wasn’t a very technical talk and was more along the lines of a story. I went into a lot of detail (too much according to George) on its history and all the mistakes we made. I know I don’t do a great job maintaining this code, and could always use more help. However, I do have a good deal of faith in the shared vision we have for the future of GNOME, and hope I can keep moving the control-center in this direction. It’s always interesting, if nothing else.

    Zana was wonderful as always, putting up with all the GNOME-ness going on. She and Luis’s girlfriend, Krissa, went all over Dublin for a three days. Zana also managed to go to some Museums and Churches with Federico and Oralia, of which I’m pretty jealous.

  • Vacation: Zana and I decided to take three days off after GU4DEC and drive through Ireland. It’s not a big country, but there’s whole, heckuvalot to see. We are currently staying in a converted castle in the middle of the country. We had a pretty relaxing day driving through the country side, and it didn’t even rain much. I had a lovely dinner of Salmon, Duck, and Profiteroles. The bed is very comfortable too — much better than that awful hostel room I shared with the rest of the GNOME people.

    There was a wedding on the Castle lawn out front, and the festivities have been going on all day. Weddings are so much fun even when you don’t know the people getting married. We’ve been watching people have a blast all night. Hopefully Miguel will invite all of GNOME to his wedding.

    Tomorrow, we’re hoping to make it all the way to the Dingle peninsula and back half-way to Cork. Unfortunately a concert Killarny has thrown a kink in our plans by making all the Bed and Breakfasts in the area full.

  • Vacation (reading): The castle has a pretty cool bar set in a library. I was enjoying reading through the titles of the books. Most of them were published pre-1935, and a good chunk were even 19th century books. After browsing for half an hour, I found a book titled “The Life of Father Thomas Burke (Volume 1)” Since I knew nothing about the good man, I thought I’d borrow it to read. It’s very well written and quite entertaining. Unfortunately, I really don’t know who the man is and it’s told in a style where it’s expected that most of the readers either knew him, or at least what his works were. It would be like reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln in chronological order without knowing how that particular story would finish.

    I don’t know if Father Burke is an important Irish figure or just another 19th century priest, and I won’t know until I get internet access again. My Californian education certainly didn’t cover him. However, I do know that no matter how his life plays out, his biographer has done a good job of making me want to read about it more. I’m going to have to go looking for that book when I get back to the United States.

  • toilets: Why does it seem like I need to flush every toilet in this country two or three times in order for it to work? There’s some cultural design issue going on here.

  • Name commentary: Between Havoc Pennington and Stormy Peters, GNOME has the coolest sounding advisory board around.

  • Musical commentary: Here are is a small subset of the songs heard in the dining room and from the wedding party outside: “Living La Vida Loca”, “Survive”, “New York, New York”, “YMCA”, “Beautiful”, “In the Mood”, “I’ll Be Loving You Forever”, “Eternal Flame”, “It’s Not Unusual”, “Wake Me Up, Before You Go-Go”, “Dancing Queen”, “Uptown Girl”, “Material Girl”, “I Feel Like A Woman”, “La Bamba”, “Can’t Get You Outta My Head”, “Red, Red Wine”, “Cecilia”, and of course, “Brown Eyed Girl”.

    I think I was expecting more Irish jigs. Or at least a dancing leprechaun or two.

  • Jealousy: Gosh, I really like Alex’s digital camera.

Tue 03 Jun 2003

  • Life: We now tentatively have a house in Massachusetts. We’ll be moving up there after GU4DEC. It should be a lot of fun to be there, though the moving will be rough.

  • TV: I think my current favorite show on TV is Boomtown. It may be just because I grew up in LA and thus is more familiar to me than Law and Order is, but it is a much fresher show to me.

  • GNOME: I’m getting back into the swing of things after a little down time. I committed a pretty good set of changes today. And more importantly, I didn’t commit another change which would have broken sorting in the GtkTreeModelSort.

Mon 03 Mar 2003

  • GTK+: Spent a couple days this week getting the GtkTreeView to work in a RTL locale. It was the last major widget in need of support added – though it showed some RTL bugs in other widgets. As an added bonus, I also got column expanding working, which should make Seth very happy. I’m pretty excited at how well it worked, though we need to do a bit more work to be fully RTL compliant. It would be a good target for 2.4.

  • Mime: I’m now tasked with fixing the mime-system in GNOME. fun.

  • Life: Had a very pleasant day with Rosanna. We went on a walk with the dog down the Bolin Creek trail. It was a wonderful 60 degrees outside, and though it kept threatening to rain, it never quite did. It was a good change from ice storms. We also saw some bird houses painted Carolina blue. Zana correctly guessed they were Eastern Bluebird houses. Two points to her. We ended up walking to Cafe Driade along the way. They have simply the best Cappucino in the Chapel Hill area.

Fri 14 Feb 2003

  • Life: I’m going to ask for a transfer to the Red Hat office in Massachussetts. There are a lot of little reasons for asking for this change. None of them are quite big enough to push the move by itself, but as a whole, they add up to being quite compelling. I’m going to miss a lot about living down here (mostly people), but I’m not going to miss the Commute. Simply put, I was spending eight to ten hours a week in my car. My waking hours are too precious for that. Once I’d decided to move, asking for the transfer became a lot easier.