Life is so good, it gets better every day

And For My Next Trick

And to finish off a pretty awful week, I got shat on by a bird. No doubt this will amuse many people out there. Thank you very much.

On The Slippery Slope

It’s been a pretty unpleasant week in work, and letting your hair down at the weekends has been good. Yesterday we all had a pretty surreal experience at the Christmas party in the park. Hagley park is a pretty huge place, with a golf course, tennis courts, various ponds, and lots of playing fields. I guess I didn’t know what to expect, but seeing tens of thousands of people sitting around a stage in deck chairs sipping back wine was a strange sight. It was a kids oriented show, with lots of Christmas songs intersperced with random commentary. As the light faded, the fireworks lit up the sky and everyone boogied down. Afterwards we headed to Micky Finns for a while before ending up in the Bog, talking to these air force guys who were flying to Antarctica. Today I am hungover. I guess you can’t escape drink by flying half way around the world.

Jeff And His Adventures in Duracell Land

Jeff is totally overwhelming me at the moment. I don’t think anyone can possibly keep up with him while he’s in this groove. It’s really refreshing to see and it really makes you want to help out as much as you possibly can. I think Jeff is going to use up the rest of my 2003 beer quota when I head over to Sydney in December. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

GNOME Foundation [cont]

I voted for the following people for GNOME Foundation 2004 –

• Jonathan Blandford
• Dave Camp
• Glynn Foster
• Nat Friedman
• Jody Goldberg
• Leslie Proctor
• Sri Ramkrishna
• Owen Taylor
• Malcolm Tredinnick
• Luis Villa
• Jeff Waugh

The others didn’t really give me the confidence that they had enough time to be on the board – it was also hard since many people didn’t reply to the 10 questions. I think it is the right mix of new and old board members and should do very well indeed.

GNOME Foundation

So I realized today that dealing with stuff on the board is every bit as frustrating as dealing with stuff within Sun. The plain and simple fact is that you can not have your way all the time. It’s very much team work and having as much reliance on someone else as they do on you.

So is the GNOME Foundation still a relevant body? Yes, I believe so…now more than ever. If it was so relevant, why didn’t more people want to get involved? And this is the crux of the issue. From my perspective, although I’m heavily speculating, it’s because the board isn’t exactly very good at communicating what it does. For such a successful open source project, we’ve rather failed at the first hurdle.

So, what do you want the GNOME Foundation to be?

I came on to IRC today, saying that the GNOME Foundation is going to seriously kick arse next year. Now is the time to shine – no more fuckups about missing conferences, missing potential press release opportunities, beating about the bush on real and important issues. We’ve had 3 years to get this right and although there has been a certain amount of churn among the board members, we really haven’t set down concrete foundations. Sure, we have a good idea of where we’re going and where we need to be, but *so* many things should just be second nature by now.

So, next year I’m going to try my damndest to make this ‘Just Work’. We need to make foundation-list@gnome a useful mailing list, and not just a mailing list that receives traffic once or twice a year. We have 336 people registered to vote in the 2003 elections. I want to grow that number. I want to reply to the posted minutes and explain what we’re doing, so everyone is on the same page. I want to ensure that we come up with a list of 10 big goals for the Foundation. I want Jeff’s marketing-list initiative to succeed – not just succeed but be one of the most active arse kicking teams in GNOME. I want to see an organized plan for the year and to stop all this reactive work, and transform it into pro-active work. I want to make sure that the board meets at the end of this year for a wrap-up before the new board kicks in, to make us aware of all the fuckups during the year, but also aware of the successes. I want to make sure that we don’t have candidacy statements like ‘Not as much as we wanted to’ next year.

Quite simply, I want us to rock next year and I hope that we’re open enough for someone outside to call us on any shortcomings and willing to listen.

Just A Puppet On A String

Hrm, sometimes, just sometimes, I think I am turning into a Jeff. It’s all very worrying. I guess I’m an impressionable type of guy, but I’m definitely picking up his various different mannerisms. Just as well I’ve managed to draw a line at the purple laces. I wonder if anyone else feels like this – I’d like to think it was some rare infectious Aussie disease or something.

Smile

I got this random note, from a random person –

Plain and simple, this is fan mail. We all deal with an incredible amount of crap and insanity during the day, but literally every time I see one of your messages, it's insightful, to the point, and helpful. I really appreciate your analysis of issues, and how you deal with people and problems.

It made me smile. Thank you.

Tickety Boo For The Big Yin

Maeve came home to inform us that most of the dates were already sold out, before we even knew that they had started selling the tickets. With some gentle persuasion from Patrick, we booked 2 tickets for Auckland in March. I’m pretty psyched about it all.

Spend Your Points Wisely

Nice to see that Nat announced the GNOME Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt, although his costume really didn’t match his slides. FWIW, it’s a Novell sponsored GNOME initiative. It’s amazing to see how much Slashdot readers are so wrong. Hopefully these comments won’t hinder the competition and we get some rocking patches integrated at the end of it.

Itchy Feet

We finally decided to take our changes with the Toyota Corona and I’m back on the road again. We headed out to one of the best bouldering places in the world – Castle Hill, which is just an hour outside Christchurch. We were not disappointed with the first view of the boulder field. There is so much to do here, it’s hard to know where to start. It’s even more slopey than Fontainbleau – is that possible? I’m going to have fun being here though and working on buying a bouldering mat for some of the highball problems. Mary and Steve, whom we met through a Davey family association, gave us a copy of South Island Rock, so now there’s no stopping us. I’m a little worried about a grinding noise on the car when you shift gears. So, okay, the car might be the only reason.

Canterbury has this weird series of micro-climates, making it hard to predict the weather. While it was a pretty miserable day in Christchuch, we experiences some beautiful weather in Castle Hill. It’s all a bit strange. Perhaps the Dahlai Lama was right, when he said it was the energy source of the universe. Today we’re going to hit the Port Hills and do a bit of bolt clipping.

Watched the England/Australia final last night, and rather sorry to see pretty unattractive rugby win out – sure, they played pretty well in the final but their journey was ugly. Most of the Kiwis wanted England to win though, so I was in poor company.

Work has been amazingly slow this week, mostly trawling through emails, with lots of pretty useful conversations, but little else. Slighly disappointed to see the interview with the ‘Sun Java Desktop Team’ on OSNews being a basic marketing reply of very little interest. Pretty horrified to discover the JDS easter egg broken and rushed to fix it – I wonder if I can get a re-spin. No, I think perhaps not. From a GNOME Foundation point of view, things are hotting up – I’ve decided that more or less all of the previous board deserve to keep their place, and now have to figure out who else to vote in. I think we’re progressively kicking ass, but it’s slow and not as collective as I’d like. That’s certainly one of the shortfalls of the board and hopefully we can organize a few more face-to-face meetings next year to make this better. Sucks to miss out on the summit though.