low tech: As part of preparing the appartment for sale I was to replace the lamp in the bathroom with a nicer looking one (first impressions are important to get those bids flowing :). Anyway after removing the old lamp it turned out I needed to drill new holes for the new lamp, which meant I had to delay it since I don’t have a drill. Later in the evening I go to brush my teeth before going to sleep and by habit flip the light switch on. zzzZZZappf and a bad short circuited system. Turns out the cables from the removed lamp where touching eachother. Not only that but I was unable to turn of the light switch again. Being the techie I am I started dismantling the light switch to figure out why. It turns out that the small metalic swiches had something which to me looked like tin on the tip to provide better contact or something. The shortcicuit has caused this tin to melt and graft the switch into ‘on’ position. I was able to break it apart manually, but getting the light switch back toghether turned out to be not so easy :)

travel: Sent my official letter to Oracle today about taking a couple of years off. Probably will never return, but it never hurts to keep my options open. My current plan is to do a small world trip in July and August. Currently planned stops include Berlin, Singapore, Sydney (and Melbourne?) and Namibia (visiting wingo). Got a bit worried about price during the weekend, but after discussing it with my family they basically said ‘go for it, who knows what will happen, maybe you will not have the opportunity later’. So know I need to put together a list of more concrete dates, mail people, contact a travel agent to see if they can help me with getting the trip a bit cheaper and call the Australian Embassy to see if we can either cut out the Berlin stop or at least make it a little shorter.

GNOME: Spent a lot of time this weekend building and testing stuff in GStreamer. A lot of bug fixing from a lot of people, but at some point mp3 and ogg playback stopped working for me. Hopefully that be resolved before 0.8 ;)

cinamod and donscarlettit is also doing a lot of librsvg hacking these days. We know have all filters implemented, a SVG backend for gnome-print, almost complete Mozilla plugin, much improved SVG gtk-engine and some other SVG spec implementation work. Cool stuff. Now I only need to get my act together and clean up my SVG article :). Chris Lahey is also working hard together with Dom to get the issue with using SVG images as desktop backgrounds working properly. I smell some big victories for the millitant SVG league in the weeks ahead.