Life is so good, it gets better every day

Everything But The Kitchen Sink

It’s been a busy couple of days as I start to prepare for my trip to India. I rang the VISA office today wondering where my application had got to, since I have less than a week before I go. They told me that since I had a non-NZ VISA, they had to get some sort of approval [presumably from Ireland somewhere]. They said they’d get back to me soon, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I really should get a second passport – it would have made things much easier, and I could have sent it away before I went to Adelaide. I’m still due to stay at the Windsor and Sheraton, despite its price, unless the Wipro folks get back that they’ve found another hotel. Seems there is a concert on in Bangalore making good accommodation scarce.

This week we found another local crag to climb on, providing a much lower set of grades which has been good for Maeve’s confidence. We spent one long evening blitzing the crag, with the hardest route being 19. It was short and sweet, and we’ll probably head back there again for another evenings entertainment.

There was a pretty excellent All Hands today in the US, with me watching over a slightly disjointed video stream. There seems to be lots of momentum inside Sun with lots of awesome deals and deployments happening. It’s all amazingly encouraging as a developer that Sun seems to be really focused for the first time in quite a while. I got a mail today from Curtis thanking me for doing a good job – it’s nice to know that a VP knows who you are and values the importance of saying ‘thanks’ just like in OSS. Sun is an incredibly frustrating place to work, and you doubt yourself into feeling that you can never make a difference. I guess it’s that frustration that’s really driving me to keep doing what I’m doing, so that someday it’ll be easy to look back and see what huge steps we’ve all made. What is it I do? Hrm, good question.

I’ve had a veritable feast of dreams this week. This Lariam is good stuff.

Love Is Blind

I got an email out of the blue that managed to get past my highly advanced ‘That looks like SPAM’ filters. The email refered back to my photojournal days, and in particular the June 17th entry. Since everyone else seems to be plugging their own Cafe Press adventures on Planet GNOME, I figure this guy/girl deserves a chance. I haven’t yet replied, or ordered anything, but I think I will. I do wonder what effect a heart tshirt will have on my tough climber guy street credibility though.

I guess it goes to show that directed marketing is the way to go. Know your target before you try to sell them stuff.

GNOME In The Year 2004

We had the first GNOME Foundation board call today – a 100 minute phone call for a mixture of the new and old boards. It seemed like everyone was suitable charged up and ready to kick arse for another year. I’m pretty sure with people like Malcolm to keep us in check, we can probably maintain this initial momentum. It was so amazing that the call was at 9:30am for me, although spent much of the time just listening, rather than actively participating. We all agreed that we need to make things more open, and start leveraging the community and getting people more involved.

One of the items we really need to focus on is the roadmap that was mentioned in Nat’s blog a while back, but really never officially announced. While this document was a useful idea of potential features, it never really give a good broad picture of where we wanted GNOME to be. Jeff, Nat and Malcolm volunteered to rethink the document and give it a more mission statement type of feel. We need to get away from the ‘What are we doing?’ types of questions and focus in on the ‘Why are we doing this?’, so it will be a better resource for the various marketing groups within the community, and the advisory board. Best of all, the guys are going to orient the document towards various areas of interest, like ‘Collaboration’ and ‘Universal Access’. The plan is to get a working draft by next week so that we can get other people on board to help out.

Because seemingly I’m not getting enough action, Jeff suggested that I tag-team on getting some sort of presentation and photo infrastructure online. We have heaps and heaps of presentations scattered around various people’s personal websites. We need to coordinate these, and get them online for people to see and reuse. There is also another plan to aggregate some of the international sites, so that finding a GNOME site for your country becomes a little easier.

We also talked about the idea of ‘Strike Teams’, a Jeff term to mean having people on the board responsible for specific tasks and being able to report back to the board and foundation list on their progress at regular intervals.

These are just a few items of the call and hopefully Malcolm’s minutes will be available soon – by the end of the call they had grown to 5+ pages. I’m going to try and regularly blog some of the crazy board action in the future so that we get some transparency – apparently it also makes Jeff do his Steve Ballmer impression.

And So It Begins

Finally got around to picking up my Malaria tablet prescription today. I couldn’t sleep last night – lots of thoughts racing around my head, and having a 3 hour nap in the afternoon probably didn’t help matters. So I’m curious to see how the tablets will work out. I don’t really like taking tablets so I opted for Lariam, given that I only had to take one once a week. Things like these scare the shit of me, even though it’s a WHO recommended drug. The fun begins.

Flashback

5 blog entries all within one day. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you Planet John Fleck. Seriously, thanks John for fixing up the RSS feeds.

Yesterday we went out climbing at the local crag. Climbed the same 22 I had tried the last time. It came much easier, and was only put off it by slapping up to a hold covered in bird shit. The friction wasn’t too good at that stage, and it was a hefty amount of shit. I came off. I tried another 22 beside it, and it seemed remarkably harder. Having met a few of the Bivouac [a local climbing shop] guys there, they indicated the first climb was actually closer to 21. Seems I have a little way to go to reach 7a enlightenment.

The Busker festival continued on Friday night, with another comedy night in the Loaded Hog – a reasonable brew pub with a lively atmosphere. It was a good night all in all, although the comedy was a bit dubious at times. We headed out with Maeve’s boss and her friends, while Patrick had gone up north to Kaikoura. It was a pretty fun, drunken evening with beer, vodka, bourbon and a bit of a cattle market called Shooters. Eventually ended up with a take away [which I mistakingly thought was a McDonald’s and wondered why we were eating chicken burgers half way through the park] and a long meandering stumble home, coupled with a few embarassing text messages on the phone. Still, rocked on to the Darkness the morning after with little or no effects of the previous night. I guess I was still slightly drunk.

River Crossing

Today we did a river crossing course. In short, it was an awesome experience and really puts down the message that you’re only as strong as your weakest link. Seemingly, river crossing in New Zealand is pretty frequent. I haven’t been tramping in this country yet and today’s course was a nice introduction of what to expect. We started off binding ourselves together by placing your arms round between the back and the rucksack, grabbing on to the arm strap. So long as you place the line in parallel with the current, with the first person taking the full force of the water, and follow the direction while crossing you manage to stay safe. We also practised running with the current, floating on your packs and lots of other stuff. It was all a lot of fun, combined with a lot of learning and team work.

Bic Runga

I bought my housemate the CD for Christmas and imported it on to my iPod. Out of all the music that I’ve heard coming out of New Zealand so far while I’ve been staying here, she’s the one that is going to make it and probably already has. I see she is playing in the Village in Dublin on 6th March – any Irish guys reading this should totally make an effort to get there. She has an excellent voice.

Learning Day

I spent the whole of yesterday reading heaps of documents and learning a lot about various open source processes. Sun hasn’t really embraced open source right through the company, but it’s getting hugely more clueful lately, and lots of interesting discussions being spawned off. I’d like to think the GNOME involvement has helped this happen. Exciting days.

After a steady week of blustery wind, and clouds, the sun has finally hit Christchurch again. I hope this weekend will be an action packed one, with planned trips to the local crag and a river crossing course.

Linux Conf Australia Wrap Up

I finally got around to putting a few photos online of the conference. Even though I arrived home only last week, it seems like it was ages ago. Time to prepare for my next jaunt I guess, which started by applying for the VISA application yesterday.

Patrick’s birthday was yesterday, so we headed out to see some comedy in the Art’s Center. This week [and last] is a Busker’s festival, where top acts flock to Christchurch, by invitation only, from right around the world. We headed on to the Lone Star afterwards for some serious meat eating, with some of the biggest portions I’ve seen. Finished things off with a Margarita. Very enjoyable evening.

CD Collection

Recent additions include ‘Turn on the Bright Lights’ – Interpol, ‘Life for Rent’ – Dido, ‘Love is Hell, pt2’ – Ryan Adams and ‘Life on Display’ – Puddle of Mudd. The iPod is filling nicely.