Life is so good, it gets better every day

JFDI Principle in 10 Easy Steps

Got frustrated at the general lack of momentum on the board list so sent a bunch of nag mails. Soon Jeff joined in and it was tag team time. And then I remembered the old JFDI principle that is so sadly lacking, and started hacking on foundation.gnome.org. Ported the foundation-web module to use the gnomeweb-wml build structure, and it seems to have worked well. Jeff has done a great job cleaning it up, so it was a pretty easy task. Hopefully we can get the new site online early next week.

Nice to see the gst-mixer being imported into the gnome-media module, and it will be interesting to see what it looks like, and where it will go. In fact one of the comments from an as yet to be published usability study was –

Had a nice few beers with Laca on Thursday night, who is down with his family scoping out the south island. It was good to see him again.

This Revolution Will Not Be Televised

So it seems I’m going to be working on fixing some of the usability problems with the current Java Desktop System, which for all intents and purpose is the GNOME desktop. We had a pretty successful beta program, with a large amount of interest in what we’ve produced. As a result, we’ve had a lot of feedback to chew and digest, and coupled wth a recent usability study based on the desktop, there’s a lot of small projects coming out of the woodwork.

It’s actually pretty humbling to see what issues have cropped up in the study, which hopefully the guys can soon release. From obvious problems of a poor help system, and a poor file selector to less obvious [or at least, harder to fix] problems with windows from launched applications hiding pretty important desktop objects.

Now it’s just a case of putting all these comments together, and trying to tackle them one by one.

When 11 Just Isn’t Good Enough

I too have found Tim Tams.

The Lifecycle of Junk Mail

Never before have I seen so much junk mail in my entire life. Okay, I’ve only ever lived in Ireland, and that probably isn’t a very good representation of a normal country. I think I’m getting, on average, one free newspaper and about 4 or 5 newspaper style ads. From ‘Christchurch Star’, to ‘Christchurch Mail’ and from ‘Christchurch Herald’ to ‘Community Times’. Do people actually read these things? They seem to consist of 80% advertisements, 10% random community stories, 5% gardening tips and 5% lonely heart messages. Still, at least they have some use – filling up 70% of the recycling bin. Seems like a monumental waste of resources for a perceived ‘green’ country like New Zealand.

On a semi related note, I seem to be getting less spam in my email these days. Very curious.

Welcome To A Whole New World

Dealing with Telecom has been less than inspiring. All I wanted from the start was a phone connection and ADSL dial up that worked. Is it too much to ask? All the utility companies in New Zealand seem to act like ISPs, in that you can chop and change as much as you like. What happened to monopolism? Confused by it all, I decided to go with the most convenient option and avoid the confusion of multiple bills coming in each month.

Spoke to a nice girl, after randomly being thrown around their phone queue system, who set me up with Xtra Jetstream Starter – a 128kb/s connection with a limit of 5Gb per month. I didn’t need broadband speed. I mean, who really does? After waiting for an engineer to come and connect me for a few days, I decided to ring them up again. Oh, I need 2 forms of identification before you can connect me? Didn’t you get our email sir? Um, no. That’s what I need an internet connection for.

So the big day arrives. I get connected. They hand me a USB modem. Wonderful. I guess I should have learned to second guess these guys by now. I distinctly remember them telling me that the modem had 1 ethernet port. Maybe it’s that language barrier thing happening again. They don’t understand me, I don’t understand them. Wanting so desperately to be like the Jetsons on that incredibly annoying ad they have on TV, I raced into town to buy a 4 port modem/router. Got all set up, to find that they didn’t submit a service order for my account. I had to wait another day.

Today I got a delivery of another starter pack, complete with USB modem. I’m still waiting on a courier to take by the first one. Stop this crazy thing!

Life is so good

I’ve been travelling for the best part of 5 weeks, and now, with a little bit of reluctance it is time to settle down again. But the best part of that has to be settling down in an entirely new place. New Zealand has been a pretty awesome experience so far, starting with a flight over the snow covered peaks of the south island alps down to Christchurch. The people seem friendly and outgoing here. They seem to want to ‘live life’, something that for me was lacking back at home. There is so many new things to see, so many new experiences to feel. I just hope that I can cram them all into the one year that I am here.

I’ve been reading a lot more since I left, and it has felt refreshing to have the free time to do this. Whether this is because I alone here or because I have moved away from the repetitiveness of every day life, I do not know. But it feels good. I started with ‘The Art of Travel’ by Alain De Botton, a rather philosophical look at travelling, and why we really go travelling in the first place. It seemed to conclude that, more often than not, we travel just so that we have a good feeling when we return to that place of comfort, home. I found it a hard book to read though, in huge contrast to the next book, ‘Life is so good’, an account of the life of George Dawson, a black man from Texas who started to read at the age of 98. A pretty remarkable story, full of hope. And now I’m part of the way through ‘Sophie’s World’. What makes it all so wonderful, is being able to sit out in the clean, fresh air and feel alive.

I went climbing last night and met up with 2 Kiwis, Nick and Doug. It was the first time I got a chance to climb on the routes at the YMCA, and was pretty impressed by the standard of the route setting. I think I’m going to enjoy climbing here. Monday is Labour Day, which means a long weekend here. Hopefully I can get out and get to see around the place some more, which a small chance of a trip to Castle Hill, about an hours drive away. By all accounts it has some of the best bouldering in the world.

Finally got around to putting together some camera footage of my time in Sweden, for Mikael’s wedding, and EOL’ing my photojournal. It is so good to have time.