Life is so good, it gets better every day

Have Wheels, Will Travel

I finally got around to buying a car – a 1995 Nissan Primera Camino sedan. It’s silver, clean looking and expect it to get me from A to B. As part of the process, I also applied for an NZ drivers license. Since I already have an Irish drivers license, it was pretty much just a case of answering 35 easy multiple choice questions. However, the eye check was a bit more challenging. Either I’m getting blind, or the machine they used to test it was really not configured right. Had real difficulty seeing 3 columns of letters, and my left eye is definitely weaker than it was previously – must really get that checked.

But at least I have wheels now, which gives me an entirely new level of freedom over here.

Off to Beijing

Still banging away at the various GNOME/JDS/OpenSolaris bits for a release soon enough – making progress, just slow as hell. Hopefully we won’t have to go through this process again.

Had a really interesting roadmap discussion within our team yesterday, to try and solve our current number one goal – how to increase the numbers of developers on Solaris/OpenSolaris. John and I brainstormed a whole heap of cool stuff on the phone late last night, and it’s clear we have a lot of work to do and a good deal of stream-lining to do. Think I might start a discussion on desktop-discuss@opensolaris.org, and see if we can collectively brainstorm there too.

In other news, I’m off to Beijing on the 17th September for a week to meet up with the JDS dudes in the Sun offices there. Should be a good week, and starting to look forward to it now.

A New Haka

We headed down to Dunedin for the weekend in time to watch the boys pull off a new haka. The game was pretty close, with South Africa making the best of some pretty loose play by the All Blacks. I suspect they’re going to dominate their northern hemisphere tour – the difference in level seems to be getting wider and wider.

Another Arrival

Hooray, Leo [my boss] has just given birth to a baby boy. Damien’s been running stakes on gender, weight and day – I was a day late, a couple of pounds too heavy and the wrong sex. Story of my life! Best wishes to Leo and Michael.

Off on his Travels

So Patrick left New Zealand on Saturday for 5 months of travelling – it’ll certainly be a bit strange not having him around the place, and I’ll miss him in very man-ly way. Happy travels dude!

The Otherside

I’ve been listening to a lot of Kiwi music recently, and one band in particular, Breaks Co-op. They’re playing this week with another of my favorites Goldenhorse, but the tickets are a little over priced for my liking. Their latest album, The Sound Inside, is well worth checking out.

We Stand At The Intersection

So I started off writing a blog about how I hadn’t blogged for a while, hadn’t been hugely motivated at work, how life had gone through a real ‘turn your world upside down’ rollercoaster over the last couple of weeks. But no one wants to read those types of blogs.

Tomorrow is a brand new day, a day where we stand at the edge of the participation age. And suddenly, you know, things don’t look so bad afterall. Not just the digital divide, but the future….

OpenSolaris GDM Themes

So Chandan is my new hero – he created a set of OpenSolaris GDM Themes. And they look excellent too.

Ewwww – One Growing Community

There’s a pretty good interview, entitled ‘One Growing Community, where Claire talks about OpenSolaris – all really cool stuff. Well, until they started showing a screenshot of the source code browser…on MacOSX. [Okay, it could have been Mozilla with an OSX theme, but I doubt it]. Shame!

Other nitpicks is that they showed 6 people instead of 5 from the CAB [Hey Jonathan!], and directed people to contact the CAB at cab-discuss@opensolaris.org, which I think is only a read-only alias. Nevermind, all good.

Update: So it seems cab-discuss@opensolaris.org is actually open now. Rocking!

Look at the Lights Mum!

Look at the pretty lights appearing all around the world – another open source family slowly starting to gain momentum all using and contributing to OpenSolaris.

Nice work everybody!