Life is so good, it gets better every day

Why Is Everything So Confusing?

I think we just might have scored on the car scene, having verbally agreed to buy an 87 Toyota Corona 2L estate. All for an amazing $1400, which really is beyond belief. Why doesn’t Ireland work like this.

Started working on the big list of user feedback from the beta versions of JDS – it’s really hard to know where to start, and trying to separate the good from the bad. Lots of ideas though, which is good, and patches are slowly being created. I kinda like being in this hacking mood. It’s also nice at the end of a long day to see news like this, it does actually give you a warm fuzzy about your work. I guess I’m in the hugely envious position of enjoying what I do. My housemate is constantly teasing me about giggling at the screen though.

Settling in nicely living with Patrick and Maeve – it’s always good having to live with other people. I guess in a way, we take our friendships to another level. All very deep I’m sure.

Car Wars

Today was a pretty productive day, although we really didn’t get anything out of it in the end. We all headed into town, down on to Moorehouse Ave to visit some of the car dealerships. The entire road is full of them, with masses and masses of cars – all a little out of reach with our budget. Which is kind of a funny thing, because our budget is about $1500, which by European standards is a bit of a joke. We thought that a car auction might work, but everything seemed to be in the $3000 region. It was all pretty disappointing.

After getting back home, we started to read through the Buy and Sell newspaper which we were kind of avoiding mainly due to laziness. A couple of calls later we were ready to look at 2 cars – almost all the others were either gone or not answering. Took 2 cars for a test drive – one a Toyota Corona, which seemed a bit rough around the edges, had a pretty annoying clicking sound from the dashboard and squeaky breaks, and the other, an 83′ Honda Shuttle which drove pretty well, but had a small boot size. The fact that it was 20 years old was another slight worry, since we had planned to put it through its paces in the Southern Alps. It was with a bit of hesitation that I rang up afterwards saying that we were going to look elsewhere. More searching to come I guess.

Patrick quit his labour job after 1 day. What a wuss.

Christchurch By Night

Went out on the piss last night. Some more than others. Started off investigating Oxford Terrace, known by ‘The Strip’ to most locals it seems. The first pub seemed a bit of a dead ringer so we ambled down to The Bog, where things were a bit livelier. Tried Guinness for the first time in about 2 months – mostly watery, and over priced. Still, the music was beaty and there was a good atmosphere from a packed house. From there, we wandered down to Micky Finns, another Irish bar for a couple of beers and more dancing. Pretty crazy night which made today a complete write off.

Bob The Builder

It’s been a pretty busy week, with Maeve and Patrick arriving. From a work productivity point of view, it hasn’t been wonderful, but it’s been fun to catch up with them. The two of them started to look for work, and within a day Patrick had decided that he was going to try his hand at being a labourer, given that there was no other jobs available in New Zealand. It will be interesting to see how he gets on, and it’s providing much source of amusement in the household.

Met quite a few people at the climbing wall recently, including a guy who had recently lost interest after having climbed for 10 years. He told me a bunch of places to visit, and recounted some tales of climbing in Australia for a week with Ben Moon. Hopefully we’ll visit a car auction at the weekend and pick up a cheap Japanese import so that we can see some of these places.

Had a pretty awesome conference call with the Norwegian GUADEC committee – the conference is really starting to rock, even during it’s early stages. Things are coming together really early, and the proper amount of forward planning is getting done. Is it just me or is the whole GNOME infrastructure getting heaps better? A long time ago when I first joined the GNOME project, I seem to remember things being a little bit random and chaotic. Now things seem to be running like clockwork. In a way it’s rather disconcerting.

Radio Smut

It’s 1am, and again I find myself working away on the laptop with the TV turned to Channel 4. After midnight the channel turns to showing continous chatline ads with semi naked men and women, complete with tasteful stars coving the naughty bits. In the background they play pretty good music, which is why I have it on. Staying up until 5am waiting for meetings isn’t fun, and it’s kinda nice to listen to a random collection of music. Anyway, I just thought I should justify myself or something. Radio Smut, it’s the future baby!

Patch For Bastien

Dear Bastien,
I noticed a bug with the Totem source code. Here is a patch to put that right.
Love,
Gman.

Index: totem.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/gnome/totem/src/totem.c,v retrieving revision 1.301
diff -u -r1.301 totem.c
--- totem.c 9 Nov 2003 01:04:44 -0001 1.301 
++ totem.c	9 Nov 2003 21:51:14 -0000
@@ -1813,7 +1813,7 @@  	
  GdkPixbuf *pixbuf = NULL;
  const gchar *authors[] =  	{ 
                       -		"Bastien Nocera ",
                       +		"Bastien '30 second Frenchman' Nocera ", 
                                         "Julien Moutte  (GStreamer backend)",
                                         "Guenter Bartsch ", 
                                         NULL

There Were No Prawns

I had my first experience of a Kiwi bbq. It’s a lot like a potential Irish one – in that you shoudn’t really arrive until at least 3 hours after the set date. Of course, not really knowing the territory, I arrived on time. At least that meant a steady start at the beer.

It was Doug’s bbq, and he only organized the bbq at the last minute. It seemed to go well though, and I stayed drinking beer for long enough. Tommorrow I meet Patrick and Maeve, who arrive in Christchurch. It will be good to see them again.

I am pissed.

The Travelling Pinball Machine

I went into town to see if I could get a flight to Bangalore, India to visit the Wipro guys early in December. It also would have coincided with the Bangalore Linux conference. The girl at the desk was extremely helpful, and started looking at the various options that she had. Seemingly November through January isn’t the best time to make your way to India as a lot of Asians are travelling home from NZ and Australia. At one stage I think I was routed through about 6 different places, which might have been fun for a rainy day. Finally we both gave up, after trying all possible combinations and put my name down on the waiting list. With needing to get a VISA [and perhaps shots?], I think I have a window of about 10 days, before there is no chance. Seems that I should book my flights to Sydney for Christmas as soon as possible though, otherwise I’m swimming across the pond. And probably the flights to Adelaide too!

Canterbury Showtime

The Canterbury Showtime festival is on for the next 2 weeks. From what I can figure, it seems to be a festival of the arts and other pretty random stuff. Still, it’s creating a good bit of life around Christchurch at the moment. Tonight was the Meridean fireworks show, out by the New Brighton pier. It was pretty cool to be sitting out on the beach watching the fireworks being launched from the end of the pier. The show was put to music, which seems to be the norm with most fireworks displays these days, with the local radio station there in full force. All in all, a pretty good show.

Body Tension

The New Zealand climbing scene intrigues me. I guess I really haven’t figured it out to any great degree. I’ve been going to the YMCA wall pretty regularly for the past 3 weeks [in fact, heading there for a few hours every Monday, Wednesday and Friday]. There’s been very few indication of ‘regulars’. Even though New Zealand holds some of the best bouldering in the world, the indoor bouldering wall is always pretty quiet. I guess this suits me in many ways – it’s nice to have the whole wall to yourself, but I really lack having a training partner. The exciting part of the wall is here but I haven’t totally figured out how to get my body moving gracefully over it yet.