Life is so good, it gets better every day

GUADEC – Ramping Up For June

Had the misfortune of having to give guadec-planning@gnome.org a bit of a kick in the arse this week. It wasn’t a pleasant experience but I felt that things were slipping slightly and we all needed a reality check. If there’s one thing I learned from last year, is that you never have enough lead time. Fortunately the Norwegian guys have done awesome work up to this, so hopefully things will start to rock once again. If you are Norwegian, maybe you might consider helping the team out – email them at guadec-planning@gnome.org.

From Behind The Lines

It’s been a busy week, and as per usual everything seems to happen at the last minute. Spent much of the last few weeks porting JDS to GNOME 2.5.x, in the hope that we might be able to push a few patches upstream in time for the feature freeze. This week is patch pushing week and it’s been quite productive. A lot of the pretty big patches are still in the process of being ported, so I’m not entirely confident that they will all make it. GNOME 2.5.x is looking pretty good, and feel bad that I didn’t have any time to work on new stuff for either gnome-utils or zenity. Got pointed to an interesting article here, which seems fairly much on the ball. I’m rather curious to see if Sun can maintain its momentum, given various recent set backs – it’s been a disappointing and frustrating time of late and I feel there is little I can do to change that.

Heading off to Adelaide for LCA on Sunday. Very much looking forward to the conference, although beginning to feel that my JDS talk is a little too corporate for the target audience. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with some interesting insights from behind the lines, otherwise it’ll be a case of ‘here’s what you already know’. Haven’t begun to think about the other talk I offered to co-present – reckon that might be a last minute talk thrown together.

Had a good conversation with Arvind over my trip to India in February. Getting more excited about it and I think there could be a lot of benefit from it, especially if I can get the folks there to open up so that we can work through all the various hurdles that Sun has thrown into the partnership. The topic of planet GNOME came up on an internal mailing list this week, and I think it could be interesting trying to get the GNOME teams from Sun and Wipro to blog – it seems like an excellent way of keeping each other in touch with what is happening.

Climbing is going well. Climbed an overhanging 22 the other day [French 6c, 6c+?] which was heaps of fun. Bought a new rope, and a bouldering mat. It’s proving to be the perfect escape route for me right now, although sad that I’m constantly hopping in and out of the country to have a regular training schedule.

How The Days Are Flying

Found a small amount of time to take the limited number of photos off my camera of Sydney. It was a wonderful trip, but the photos don’t really do that justice. Hard to believe that I’ll be back over in Oz in 8 days time. Huge amounts of work to get through before that.

Hacker Face

Hrm, I think my hacker face on planet GNOME looks like the sun dude out of the Teletubbies. While that might be slightly appropriate to some, I think I probably need to investigate a new head or something.

How Cool Is That

My parents are now using JDS on their home computer. Tim scoped it all out and installed it during the Christmas break. I guess this will be a good test of where we’re at.

2004

I listened to some Counting Crows this morning, and I couldn’t stop smiling. I think I want to tell something so amazingly meaningful, but I think my smile is enough.

Post Mortem

Christmas was a blast, if a little odd at times – I guess there’s no good substitution for snow. Santa came for the kids, and managed to find me too. Lots of presents mixed up with beach, oysters, lobster, prawns and washed down with a few cold beers and some chardonnay. The weather was a rather unpleasant 32+ degrees. Nice to see how the other side lives though.

Christmas

Go wild.

I Come From A Land Down Under

In a word, Sydney is awesome. I like it here, and could really see myself staying on for a year or two. It’s so incredibly chilled out, much like New Zealand – if a little bit more cosmopolitan. I’m staying with my Aunt, Uncle and kids about 20 minutes ferry ride north in Neutral bay. This whole ferry thing is rocking. Go into town, have a few drinks, get the ferry home. Only in Sydney.

Spent part of the day at Balmoral beach, swimming in the beautiful blue water, and playing amongst the sandstone boulders. We haven’t really done the sea in New Zealand, so it’s been a nice change. Finding being woken up by the kids at 7am pretty difficult, and they’ve totally walked all over me, in terms of finding my Christmas presents and sneaking looks through the now giant sized holes in the wrapping paper.

Hopefully heading back to the indoor climbing wall tomorrow – I visited about 2 years ago, and seem to remember this huge overhung bouldering wall. It’s been a while since I’ve climbed, and looking forward to cranking some plastic.

Met up with Jeff tonight for a few beers and some food. For all the intelligence that he seems to portray, he is really just a geek wannabie who plays Xbox and can’t figure out how to sms with any amount of proficiency. He still wears purple laces.

Half Breed 20

Hard pulling to get through the roof, and up the arete at the left end of The Alcove. Climb the easy face to a steepening exit beside the bush, with surprisingly tricky moves on the slopers to top out. Five bolts and anchor rings.

Pretty psyched about climbing at the moment. Britten crag is really an awesome place, with good friction on overhanging basalt rock. It’s a bit like Muckross in some ways, with lots of pretty good flat holds, and with enough muscle the overhangs are pretty enjoyable. Climbed 2 19s and a 20 today, and felt slightly disappointed to have to leave the crag as the sun went down. I’m totally going to give the 23 in the cave a go next time, it looks like a cracker of a route.

This entry was specifically for the climbers who complain about having to wade through dull work stuff to get to the juicy climbing bits.