Life is so good, it gets better every day

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.

New CEO

Pretty excited to see that Jonathan has taken on the CEO role at Sun. I remember being disappointed when Jonathan moved up the chain away from Software a couple of years ago – it was at a time when software *really* needed some direction in Sun, and Jonathan was helping to provide that. I thought he would get into the executive ladder and we’d probably never hear from him again and we’d fall back into another rut. Fortunately that proved not the case. I really rate Jonathan. He cares about the things that I’m also interested in, believe best for Sun and the things that keep me working for this company – among which, open development of open standards in open communities. Not only that, he understands those principles and openly communicates both internally and externally – how often do you see a CEO take part in an open public discussion or have comments enabled on his blog? Jonathan sent a pretty excellent internal memo around of his thoughts about accepting the job – I sure hope he copies that mail to his blog, it’s a great motivating message.

Still, also nice to see Scott hanging around as well as chairman of the board, and Sun Fed – it’ll be important to have someone up there with years of contacts, level headed experience of running the company, and well, someone with a decent handycap.

Doing Well

Fantastic news! Congratulations Jonathan and Rosanna!

Project What?

Jonathan pointed out this article, where apparently Project Portland gave a technology preview at LinuxWorld in Boston. While I can appreciate the effort, I still don’t get why people are doing this until the current specs on freedesktop.org are anything other than ‘pretty good de facto’, ‘new and not widely used’ and ‘draft’. Some very senior engineers at Sun [4 digit ID’s, compared to my 6 digit one] recently remarked that most of the specs are full of ambiguities, that the recent icon theme cache discussions seem to highlight. I suspect someone needs to take their head out of their ass – although perhaps ‘shot in the arm’ is the correct phrase.

Jim’s Solaris 10 Experience

It’s interesting to know what sorts of experiences that pretty senior sys admins have seeing Solaris 10 for the first time, having used earlier versions previously. Jim Cheetham’s Solaris 10 experience is food for thought, even though I don’t quite agree with him on a few points. I did note that they were running Solaris 10 3/05 s10_74L2a SPARC though, which is a little bit behind times.

Surfin’ NZ Eh?

Last week was pretty busy one. Indoor soccer on Monday. Tuesday involved some climbing at the Roxx. Patrick was climbing strongly, while Dave and me were flailing badly. On Wednesday, Dave, Emma and myself took a quick spin around Bottle Lake on the bikes – lots of fun single, winding tracks along by the beach. With the clocks turned back, we got caught out by the time, and soon it got really dark. Managed to stumble around enough to find our way back, before a charge over to catch Fistful of Dynamite at the local film festival.

Thursday had Dave and me out at the QEII for another roll session. Was a little bit tired and failed miserably to get a bomb proof roll, although did get the T rescues more sorted out. Friday had us out at the YMCA for a quick session, and met up with a few spacey Californians – I’ve never been hugely impressed with the quality of routes there, so I don’t think I’ll make it a regular occurance.

Saturday had Patrick, Dave and me out in Sumner to surf some waves in the kayaks. I’ve been learning in Dave’s playboat and he’s keen to keep me in it for as long as possible. It’s a slightly intimidating experience going out for the first time, trying to make sure you’re watching the waves all the time, and lifting your rail but really got into it towards the end and had an absolutely super ride on a big wave towards the end. Afterwards we headed out on the bikes up Dyer’s Pass road, and along the tracks of Victoria park. I’m not much of a biker, and found some of the switch backs a little steep – the trials half way down were rather fun though. Raced back home and out to the Weedon’s cricket club for the cricket afters – a thoroughly drunken affair out in the middle of nowhere, with some strippers, court sessions and some naked initiation tests which become much easier the drunker you are.

Dave pulled me out of losing my entire Sunday with a hangover and took me out to Castle Hill for some bouldering with Hilary and Aila – was good fun but didn’t feel particularly strong, or balanced. Watched Lord of War with Phil, Mark and Patrick that evening, and had a lovely Thai veggie curry over at Patricks, and some yummy caramel slices.

This week has more indoor soccer, more kayaking up at the Brunner weekend, more climbing and more drinking. As Dave would say, ‘play play play!’