Life is so good, it gets better every day

Linux.conf.au

This is a nice list of speakers. Kinda makes you want to come, huh? Only 12 more days for early-bird registration. There looks like a good handful of GNOME people coming too.

John Butler Trio

Carolyn bought me tickets for the John Butler Trio concert on Friday evening. I’ve got the ‘Sunrise Over Sea’ album, and most of his set of 15 songs was from that. There was a lot of really excellent intrumentals, with a very new age/hippy vibe – some of which started to drag after standing around for 2 hours. Definitely worth checking out if he’s in your area, or buying the album. Great present though!

Been climbing with John a bit since he arrived. With the summer finally showing us a few hot days, we’ve got out to the local crag and done some sport routes. Don’t feel hugely unfit, but my stamina could sure do with improvement. Touch also started up after the Christmas break, which I’m still hugely enjoying – a good run around on a Friday evening, followed by beers, is definitely a nice end to the week. Next weekend, we got tickets to the International One dayer between New Zealand and the Rest of the World – just hope the weather continues for a good day of cricket and beers.

Spyware.

Joe reminds me of the pure misery I endured a week or two ago, when I mis-clicked one window using Internet Explorer [I know, I’m dumb]. Suddenly my desktop turned into a disaster zone – everything grinding to a halt, desktops icons showing various XXX related icons, desktop blacking out with a “Your desktop has been affected by Spyware. Here’s how you fix your desktop, click here!” screen. I spent ages and ages trying to find various processes to kill before my machine stopped swapping like crazy, enough to download Ad-aware. Ran that a couple of times, but to little effect – various nasties would recreate themselves on a reboot, eventually causing a bluescreen everytime I tried to run Ad-aware. Hosed. You have no idea how incredibly frustrating it is as a somewhat technical user not being able to find the root causes [believe me, I checked hundreds of directories, files and entries in the registry that day].

Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Well, yes. It’s here, and here.

Although in the 2nd case, I really wish our marketing and executives would acknowledge that it is GNOME under the hood and be proud to advertise that fact. Maybe that’s a failing of the GNOME project [or foundation board] that we haven’t pressed that enough.

Phew

After 7 months of bouncing back between Sun and Dell’s financial departments, my PC is finally ordered. Wahey. I got so giddy at that thought, that I decided to also invest in a new Dell Dimension desktop for shits and giggles, and games like Half Life 2.

Very Important Bug

Caleb pointed a very important bug on #nzlinux, of which I’ve logged.

GUADEC Talk

I submitted my ‘101 Things to Know about GNOME’ talk to the GUADEC organizing committee. With almost 150 days to go until GUADEC, I should have enough time to come up with such a list, but input is welcome.

JDS Shirt

Okay, so I still haven’t seen a JDS shirt. Hell, it’s been a while since I saw a GNOME shirt. Mary, what gives? Do we have to do *another* release?

Rosetta

I see the folks at Canonical have announced and released their Rosetta project. I seriously hope this suceeds. Rock on.

The Lost Odd Sock

With Yahoo! doing desktop search, and Apple giving previews of Spotlight with the catchy phrase ‘Find Anything, Anywhere. Fast’, I see that Microsoft’s markedroids have come up with a ‘Find anything, anywhere fast’ slogan with their latest desktop search beta preview. Nice work, what’s the bets Apple have already trademarked it? Have yet to see a differentiating killer feature out of all the desktop search products out there – perhaps there won’t be one.

Why I Love New Zealand, #48

Apart from their women and other very pretty scenery, their fish and chips are utterly fantastic. Slightly disturbingly, most fish and chip shops double up as a chinese takeaway. I still haven’t grown in love with the battered sausage, which will make Mark cry, and I will never grow up being a Watties kid but I’ll happily accept a crumbed Hoki and a scoop of chips.