Life is so good, it gets better every day

Bin 333

We had a pretty good St.Patrick’s day, going out to The Bog where there was live music out back. After a few rather sorry looking attempts at Guinness and a bit of craic it was over for another year.

I went climbing with Steve, a US dude from Colorado. Currently he’s climbing at more or less the same grade which rocks. Did some nice routes in the 18-22 range – even redpointed a 22 cleanly, which I was pretty pleased about. Perhaps I’m not completely out of touch as I thought. We’re planning a pretty huge boulder session on Sunday, if I can manage to survive a pretty big party on Friday night, and some Saturday flat hunting.

Auckland And The Needle Of Death

Patrick and I headed up to Auckland at the weekend to see Billy Connolly and his ‘Too young to die old’ tour. It was a pretty relaxing weekend all in all, with a nice meal of mussels and frites in a Belgian pub and a couple of Leff Brun. There’s not a huge amount to do in Auckland except throw yourself off random buildings, but we decided to pass on the norm and opted to see Kelly Tarlton’s underworld adventure. It was pretty good, although not quite on the same scale as the Sydney aquarium. In between some crazy golf [Kiwis seem to have this thing about crazy golf] and some frames of pool, we headed up to the Skytower, for a bird’s eye view of the city, before another typical chill out afternoon in New Zealand. For an incredible $175, you can plummet down the side of the building at 75kmh in a gaudy costume of blue and yellow. I think I’d like them to pay me for doing that.

I’m slowly starting to catch up on things at work – things were totally swamped when I got back to India, and while I’ve been pretty busy, I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. JDS seems to be going pretty well, despite various dubious decisions being made along the way. I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to desperately get all the localized documentation back upstream before the 2.6.0 tarballs are released. That’s seems to be mostly successful so far. Another interesting turn of events is our increasing desire to work against community HEAD wherever possible and maintain as few patches as possible locally – hopefully it’ll just be a few branding and translation patches. This is a pretty huge direction to what we’ve currently done, having maintained 100’s of patches previously. I’m definitely getting the feel good factor about doing this work, despite how tedious it is becoming.

XORG Foundation

I’ve been following the arch and foundation mailing lists for the past few weeks, and it’s very reassuring to see progress being made on that front. It’s even more encouraging to see Jim plugging the GNOME Foundation and membership structure. A while back when there was a heated discussion on the foundation about the membership policy, I initally didn’t agree with Nat’s proposal to open things up. I definitely think it’s a good idea now, and has worked out well in the last couple of months, having monitored the membership committee mailing list as a board rep. Sure, we’ll still probably result in low turn outs in the various elections [we were getting them before the policy as well], but it seems to give people a good sense of being, and community spirit by being a GNOME Foundation Member. We are definitely one of the top free software projects in this field.

The iPod Is Filling Nicely

Recently bought quite a few New Zealand based artists and some closer to home to fill my iPod – it’s almost getting usable now with ‘Eight – Moving’, ‘Paddy Casey – Living’, ‘Ryan Adams – Love is Hell pt 1’ and ‘Steriogram – Schmack!’. Radiohorse are definitely the favourite at the moment though – really liking their melodies.

GNOME 2.6 Preview

Sayamindu did an absolutely awesome job of the GNOME 2.6 Preview. Thank you dude, you rock.

SUNW – Like Hello?

So Jody pointed me to this article about Sun’s recent junk status. In the 3 years of working for Sun, I guess I’ve seen the very worst of times – I more or less completely missed out on the dotCOM boom. But things seem to be on the up. Sun is really, really rocking at the moment, at least in the desktop space – we’re rarely out of the news at the moment, with per citizen pricing, the possibility of opening up Java even more, Looking Glass, let alone the string of customer wins we’re getting with Staroffice and now JDS. Okay, so these are all desktop space, where there is little impact on the share price it seems. But in terms of investor confidence, I can’t see how this doesn’t give you a warm fuzzy. It sure gives me one.

Where Did The Time Go?

‘Did you have a happy birthday son?’ – Uh, no, I had a hangover from hell for the entire day. It was a pretty wild night, and cancelled all plans for the day and evening – beer, bourbon and coke, long island iced tea, tequila and some slightly greenish shot which almost had me down. There’s not often times in your life where you can’t remember things of the previous night. I left town to walk home at about 3am or 4am. I reached home just before 8am. Have pretty vague memories of walking, okay staggering, around Hagley park and leaping between the sleepers of some railway tracks. Quite what I did with the rest of the time, I have no clue.

When I Wake Up, Please Come Around Again

A pretty quiet weekend, all in all. It feels like it was the weekend from Thursday night, when Patrick cooked a nice lamb roast dinner for us. Coupled with some brie, camembert, a bottle of pinot noir and some baileys it turned into a very pleasant evening indeed.

So, there was nothing left to do but head out with Maeve up to the Port Hills on a remarkably windy day, and head out towards Godley head towards Sumner. It’s a really pretty place, with a bunch of mountain bike trails. I’m totally going to spend at least 1 day up there with the bike next weekend. Sounds like a bunch of fun. Then a large chance of having a big session on Saturday.

Having a bunch of fun playing with the new camera. I still haven’t quite figured out all the various settings, but I’m learning much more than I ever did with any of my previous cameras. I’m also finding Capture One a rocking piece of software, after 5 days of a 30 day trial. It would be awesome if I could use it under Linux, but for now I guess I’ll have to consider getting the Mac version, even though they provide a cheaper Windows version for the Rebel [sigh].