Life is so good, it gets better every day

Mr.Picassohead

So rama pointed me to mrpicassohead.com which entertained me for a good half hour looking through some of the other heads. Much fun, thanks!

Told you I was a late starter

This IM technology is pretty remarkable stuff. I’ve always used IRC since I joined Sun with the excuse always being ‘But I don’t know people’s login names’ to use IM more [I have wanderingnzer@yahoo, aim and my usual email@msn ]. Okay, so the realization that everyone was using IM never really hit home. Today, after building some 0.81 JDS packages, I figured it was time to look at it a bit closer. Minutes later I was chatting to my sister in Barcelona. Hopefully it’ll prove easy to connect to other non-work friends and family. Gaim looks a lot more HIG friendly these days too.

More major milestones

After my last major milestone, I’ve reached another. I’ve started drinking coffee. I figured it was about time to figure out what the big deal was. I think I like the dark bitter ones the best so far, just how I like my beer

It’s kinda funny how your tastes change over time. I didn’t have my first real beer [by real, I mean more than 2 pints] until I was 17, when I discovered hangovers. I didn’t smoke a cigarette or a joint until I was about 23. Fortunately, Mum, that hasn’t developed into a regular habit. I guess I’m a late starter or something.

Open Source Summit

Pleased to see that Sun has finally organized an internal open source summit in Santa Clara in September. Very disappointed to see that it’s on at the same time as I’ll be visiting Jeff in Australia. Hopefully there’ll be a bunch of Sun open sourcies attending to knock some sense into the rest of the company.

Apple, I Love You

Okay, so you sold me an iBook with a dodgy logic board, but you admitted your mistake and you’re fixing my iBook for free, courtesy of the very nice people at MagnumMac. I love it when life ‘Just Works’.

Coffee & Cigarettes

Sam had a spare ticket to go see Coffee and Cigarettes at the film festival being held here in Christchurch. I guess the blurb on IMDB says it all really, and I enjoyed it immensely. Definitely worth a look if it comes to a local cinema near you.

Vacation Time

I’ve been pretty bad about taking holidays. Ok, so my life seems to be a permanent holiday while working at Sun – I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m loving working on GNOME and JDS, and it feels like a pleasure to be sitting down Monday to Friday during ‘normal’ office hours. The holiday tool seems to suggest that I have 21 days to take before Christmas, which seems like an infinitely long time. I can’t for the life of me figure out how I have that much – I guess it’s a case of travelling a lot this year and building up various weekends in liu while I’ve been away, or perhaps I’ve been bad about logging them! Today I went ahead and booked a week in Sydney, flying over there on Thursday 9th September until Friday 17th September. It will be nice to catch up with Jeff, Pia, Daniel and gang. I’ll even have the chance to sneak into the back of Jeff’s talk and heckle some. Looking forward to it.

Reminds me, I must put in a paper for LCA.

In November I’m heading up to the north island with Carolyn for a short week of traveling around a few places [Taupo, Waitomo, Rotorua, Whakatane and Tauranga] before heading into Hamilton for a friend’s wedding. It’ll be a nice time to get away before figuring out a plan for Christmas.

iLife

It’s been a busy couple of weeks since getting back from Europe. While the trip home was great and it was wonderful to see friends and family again, it did concrete a few thoughts I’ve had in my mind for quite some time. Firstly, I have no strong urge to return to Europe for a while yet. Dublin was the same place I left 11 months ago and all the reasons I had for leaving were still there. The office was as quiet as ever, with more and more people either working remotely on a permanent basis, or working half the week at home. This hasn’t really adversely effected the team to any great extent, although there is a much stronger emphasis on communication, that we all seem to be coping with pretty well. Secondly, is that my feelings for Carolyn haven’t changed, and I’m anxious to spend more time with her. Both of which, combinate in a desire to extend my VISA. Fortunately Sun, and in particular my boss, have been ultra supportive which has been awesome so it’s now just a matter of shifting some paperwork around. New Zealand definitely feels like home and Sun continues to feel like my family [nothing to do with having 2 brothers also working for the family].

Pleased to hear that Patrick is planning on extending his VISA too.

Since returning from Europe, the skiing season has been in full swing. A couple of months ago we all bought boards, bindings and boots, and got a season pass for Mount Hutt, just over an hour by car from Christchurch. I’ve been up there 3 times now and have had a heap of fun. Last Tuesday I had a pretty off day, wiping and eating snow every couple of minutes. It’s an amazingly frustrating sport, and without fresh snow it becomes immeasurably harder. After a few hours of making zero progress, I packed up early, convincing myself that this sport wasn’t for me. It’s pretty amazing how a few falls completely shatters your confidence and you forget what technique you’ve previously learned. Today, I still hurt.

My iBook suddenly decided to die. I brought it down to MagnumMac in the hope that it might be covered by logic board repair extension program. Fingers crossed – otherwise it’s looking like a 800 or 900 dollar repair bill, and I’ll have to seriously think about buying a new Mac instead and running the iBook through an external monitor [although that might prove problematic trying to run the Debian partition].

Back to School

So it seems my primary school and secondary school are on the net – both sites lacking on the navigation front a little. Still, pretty awesome to see them online, considering there was no internet connection when I was at school there.

Two Cool Things

As Jonathan mentioned, Sun is putting some machines onto eBay. As Brian mentioned, there’s a nice little mosaic generator for OSX which I’m going to totally have a look into. I wish I was that cool.