Life is so good, it gets better every day

What Weekend?

Another weekend over, and again I’m finding myself asking ‘What happened to it?’. This time I think I probably know the solution – 3 nights of drinking since St.Patrick’s Day. I wake up this morning just a bit stupider than I did on Thursday. Sigh.

Mick arrives today for a week. It’ll be nice seeing him again, and hope to have a good time touring around the south island for the next week.

As some people have noticed, the GUADEC schedule is online. It’s been really hard designing a schedule this year that fits in with everyone’s thoughts and plans for the conference. Like previous years, I think we’ve ultimately taken on too much again – this year has an exciting brainstorming day, a multimedia track, and all the usual talks/BOF’s and User/Business day panels. We need to try and learn from our mistakes otherwise we’re just going to keep having the same heartache over and over again, especially trying to fit in as yet unschedule talks and BOFs due to pressure from our sponsors. We’ll get there – we always invariably do.

Our Day

It’s that time of the year again. Hooray. Happy St.Patrick’s day. The crowd is already gathering outside our Irish local. It’s the only day where the Guinness tastes almost as good as one back home – although I suspect it’ll get a bit messy later on, when the demand peaks. Met up with Patrick for a liquid lunch, but managed to make a quick exit after a couple.

Patrick tells me we get to drive around the south island in a BMW while Mick is over here. Sweet.

After months of ignoring all Gmail invites, I created a Gmail account today. It’s not like I need another mail account, but curiousity got the better of me.

On The Move

For the past couple of months I’ve been living with Patrick. It has been lots of fun [especially the networked Half Life frag sessions], but now with winter approaching it’s time to move on again. I came across a small one bedroom apartment on Montreal street, which is right in the middle of town. There is a slightly higher rent [$275 a week], but it looks much easier to heat, and seems to have a nice kitchen. I plan to move out just after Easter.

Tim and Barbara arrived into Christchurch on Monday afternoon. It was really great to see them again. We spent Tuesday afternoon down in the French village Akaroa, just south along the Banks penninsula which was fun. They spend the next two weeks travelling around the south island before finally coming back to Christchurch for a night.

Mick arrives for a week next Monday. I think the plan is to head down south, maybe hit the Keplar track, and spend some nights around Wanaka and Queenstown. Looking forward to seeing him again.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I just recently finished Aron Ralston’s book ‘Between a rock and a hard place’ – remember the guy who cut off his arm after it got trapped by a large boulder in Utah. Throughout the book it was hard not to constantly think ‘What a jerk’, with danger seemingly following him right throughout his life. I’d like to say that most climbers aren’t like that, but I’ve met my fair share of people who push themselves too much and get themselves into trouble. After finishing it, I didn’t feel much sympathy. An interesting read nonetheless.

Directory Hell

Interesting that Tim has come across ‘Directory Hell’ on his latest notes with moving from Linux to Solaris. What some might call amazingly confusing, seems to be a feature for most Solaris engineers, and ARC members. Lots of other interesting notes – I think python was only recently added to Solaris by the GNOME team [although could have been in /opt/sfw for a while].

Random Musing on Photos

so I was talking to Suzanna on IM today, and like most conversations we ended up talking about the weather, and me complaining that it was going to get really cold in my current room. So I took some photos to explain, here, here, and here. Then she asked me to zoom into the photos, here, here, here, and here. Then we began discussing photos and our inability to organize them into albums. Wouldn’t it be eery to put together someone’s life history based on a selection of their photos, even though you have never met them, or shared only a small part of their life.

The Stuff You Can’t See

I too saw this webcast. It was a joy to listen to, and look forward to future webcasts like this. It’s nice to see Sun execs who can be open and honest about where they think the industry and Sun is going, communicate their beliefs well, and be inspiring at the same time. Ace.

GNOME Templates

So, since Luis was successful about asking for artwork for the Live CD he’s creating, I thought I might try the blogging approach. I’m starting to write my GUADEC talk [101 Things to Know about GNOME], and I’m really struggling with Staroffice and it’s templates. Traditionally I’ve pinched the Sun corporate templates and modified them, but I’m slightly tired of this approach. Anyone keen on creating a generic GNOME Staroffice template? We badly need one for GNOME – and you could help! Email glynn[dot]foster[at]sun.com with your submissions!

Illusionary Lines

Having spent a large part of last week organizing some itinerary for linux.conf.au, raising an expense request and email exchange with a local travel agent, I find out that there’s a newly introduced travel ban in our group. Suck. Now to decide whether to fund my own way, or save just in case I need to fund myself to GUADEC in May.

Really pleased to see the GNOME contributors map.

Had a pretty good weekend. Headed out with a whole bunch of people on Friday night for a cheap chinese, and a couple of frames of pool at the local. Saturday was another cricket match between Weedons and Southbridge, which we won by 8 wickets – wahoo! Sunday was recovering from the pain of my muscles ceasing up. I badly need to get a bit more flexible and fitter.

Other notable milestones within the last few weeks – finished Half Life 2, started Doom 3 and joined the Skype hype. Looking forward to Tim & Bob [my brother and sister-in-law] and Mick [ex-flatmate and long time lord] visiting Christchurch in March.

Another Community

And so Sun launches another community. I hope this one does well, and goodness knows we should have learnt from the previous experiences. Nice to see a GUADEC link in the events page – grin.

Congrats guys.