Life is so good, it gets better every day

Work Update

It’s been mostly uneventful at work over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been helping to make sure that GNOME 2.14 goes through ARC ok, along along with great help from Brian and Irene. It went pretty smoothly, and apart from having to ARC a few bits separately, we’re still on track.

So on track, that in fact the next Solaris Express release you’ll install [if that’s your thing], you’ll see a new 2.14 based desktop. Packages have been built, and they’re somewhere on a server in Sun just itching to get into the Solaris Nevada WOS [wads of stuff]. It’ll almost certainly give you the willies though – the quality is pretty good, though we didn’t do as much QA as I would have hoped for a first integration build, but there’s a lot of change – it’s 2 years of community development, and we’ve got a pretty attractive non purple theme. We haven’t moved much from vanilla GNOME, by design, and hopefully people will be pleased with the result [if you can suffer the occasional bug].

Course, if you have a spare T2000, you could try running Ubuntu on it.

Otherwise, really looking forward to my trip to GUADEC this year – apart from having to present, it’ll be a good opportunity to catch up with my GNOME friends, and spend a couple of days with my sister who’s living in Barcelona. Then a short stop home to Ireland for a week, back to NZ for a couple weeks boarding, over to OSCON, and then down to HQ for a couple of days. Nothing that I could ever consider ‘work’.

Choice Bro

Last month I received an OPG People’s Choice Award in recognition of community building excellence [OPG being Operating Platform Group]. Today the award, a piece of welded metal in the shape of a snowboarder getting some air in a half pipe, arrived. Strangely enough it didn’t contain a Sun logo or anything indicating it was an award, but I’m pretty chuffed in any case.

The award nicely leads into the start of a new season – winter, and there will be lots of snowboarding, skiing, alpine ascents and ice climbing. I’m really looking forward to it all, and have bought a 10 day Chill Pass. I’ll probably miss bits and pieces with trips to GUADEC and OSCON, but I’ve been quietly optimistic that it’ll be a cracker of a season.

Had a pretty good weekend all in all. The Banff film festival was in town for Friday and Saturday nights. While Friday was dedicated to Alpine and Rock, Saturday was the classic night of extreme sports. The selection was mildly disappointing this year. While we had some really excellent films like Parallelojams, a film about jamming in Indian Creek, Utah, Sur le fil des 4000, Patrick Berhault and Philippe Magnin epic attempt to climb the 82 4000+ meter summits in the Alps, and Balancing Point, a short film about balancing rocks, there was a lot of ‘seen it all before, not interested’ films that the selection committee chose.

Went out on Saturday afternoon out to Birdlings Flat with Jayne for some fishing, but came back disappointed. Sunday had a couple of hours of rolling a kayak, mostly drowning, up in the QEII, before a quick green curry and a trip down to Hoyts to see Da Vinci Code which was also disappointing.

Charleston Climbing

More weekends, and no blogging. A few weekends ago, Dave, Matt and myself headed over to the west coast to Charleston, a magnificent set of sea cliffs in a wonderful setting. Unfortunately, Dave and myself had a rather large night on the juice the previous night, so were in no shape when Matt dropped by at 6am the next morning to head over there. After several queezy moments, bananas and a couple of pies, we made it and were greeted with 5m swells. It was an incredible situation, and made for some seriously exposed climbs although many of the routes were unclimbable with the spray reaching most of the height of the cliffs. Florian, Neil and Mark were over with the Uni teaching a few punters the ropes, so it was a really great crowd to hang out with. I was in no fit state to climb, but managed to pick off a nice route during the weekend in between getting stomped by some rogue waves. Didn’t manage to get near the rocks to take the rod out, and got a nice reminder of a lost bet from Jayne that evening.

THE Mark Cantan

One of my friends from back home recently just launched his new website, markcantan.com. Mark’s been writing for pretty much all the time I’ve known him, and had a few almosts with RTE, BBC and Channel 4. This is my blogging attempt at getting him the international fame he deserves.

JDS Survey

Any JDS dudes out there, please fill in a survey – there’s no cash prizes, but at least it’ll give us a better idea of what we should be working on. Thanks!

Can’t Keep Up

Don’t feel like I can keep up with blogging right now on top of all the other things that are happening in my life. Been a seriously busy couple of weeks here, both with work and play time. Lots of good times out climbing, kayaking, biking, fishing, and the occasional sun salutation. I’ve even started route setting at the local wall, The Roxx, and enjoying it immensely – it’s been a few years. Paynes was ace, the Tekapo release was wet, exciting and testing, and the Hokitika was breath taking. It’s wonderful to share all those great experiences with some amazing friends, both old and new.

Struggling with migrating my mail and addressbooks over to Thunderbird. It’s just not Evolution, even though I wouldn’t classify Evolution as a best of breed application either – lots of learning, frustration and slow mail reading ahead. I hate IMAP.