Life is so good, it gets better every day

Hanging out in Santa Cruz

Sara and I got into San Jose yesterday evening, and started the relatively short trip down to Santa Cruz. The short trip turned into a longer one with a downed power line, causing a tail up of miles. After sitting for nearly an hour, we were passed through once the fire brigade, police and utility services did their thing. We were pretty hungry, needing to pee, and coordinating the rest of the people heading down that night.

Made the hotel bar in time to get some vouchers, small amount of food, and start the fun task of meeting everyone. It’s so good to see so many people here, and match faces to names for the first time. It’s exactly like that experience I had attending my first GUADEC many years ago. I think it’ll be an awesome couple of days, and I’m hoping much productive stuff comes from it. Rock on!

Suffering in my Jocks

Niall made me pull over a Teamware workspace. Wait, I think I hear crying babies in the background.

We have a Webapp!

Woke up this morning and saw two mails from Alan about open sourcing the portal that runs opensolaris.org – that is so unbelievably rocking. Congrats Alan!

(Did anyone else notice the uncanny timing between when the sources were released and when Steve Lau left the building?)

A Night on the Plonk

Jayne had a pretty long (and awesome) day at her workshop, enough to warrant opening one of our Martinborough wines. One turned to two, obviously, and this evening’s selection has been a Vynfield Riesling 2006 and a Tulicher Chardonnay 2004. Nothing beats wine for relaxing on the couch, chilling your bones.

Slim Install Repo

I hadn’t picked up on this before, but if you’re interested in seeing Dave Miner’s (and others) work towards a Slim Install prototype for Indiana, here’s a link to the Mercurial repository –

  hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/caiman/slim_prototype

Stout Update

1 can of Black Rock Miner’s Stout, 1kg of Irish Stout #74 Converter, 1 bag of Golding hops and a vanilla pod – all mixed together with some yeast, and the fermentation has begun. Original gravity of 1041. Think I need to invest in some muslin because the sieve I used was probably not quite fine enough. Looking forward to trying this one out, should be a hoot.

Spal Bol Cook-off

We’re having a Spag Bol cook-off in the flat today. It’s a pretty heated competition and there is a huge amount of ability, ingredients and taste being talked up. We’re just over one hour into it, and my sauce is safely down to slowly simmer away for the next couple of hours. I went out on a huge limb by selecting some wild pork mince, which seems to be overpowering the rest of the flavours. I’ve also taken the punt not to spend the last couple of months practicing when the flat is empty. My ingredients in order of being added are – butter, celery, red onion, carrot, milk, wild pork mince, pancetta, tomato paste, garlic, bay leaf, nutmeg, de-skinned and seeded tomatoes, italian chianti, fresh basil, sun dried tomatoes, salt, pepper, fresh buffalo mozzarella and fresh basil garnish. Who knows who’ll win, but it’s been a fun time so far.

Bought ingredients to put down a batch of Irish stout this weekend. Looking forward to it already!

Fresh Meme Speed

Fresh from the NZ 2.0 list, Roger Dennis’ experiment to see how fast information travels online. 4 targets – Robert Scoble, Seth Golden, Sergey Brin and Stephen Fry (FMS = Find me S[coble, eth, ergey, tephen]). Check it out!.

I Was Wrong about Facebook

Scrabulous has stolen my life. I still stand by the rest of my comments that I don’t totally get Facebook, but it’s pretty good for Scrabble playing.

Protect our heritage

As much as I’m loving seeing Microsoft having to re-assess their business, documents like these are a little disappointing. This document was produced in quick time for a full page advert in the Dominion Post (a newspaper in Wellington, which conveniently happens to be the location for the NZ government) after a 2 day meeting with Standards NZ. NZOSS rallied around to get a couple of great people attending to keep things on an even keel and take notes. Good work guys! I am biased on this one, obviously.