Life is so good, it gets better every day

Thank You Sun

Today, after a long couple of weeks, I got my work visa and permit renewed to continue working in New Zealand for the next 2 years. It’s been an incredible relief and I’ve been drinking beer since noon. I guess sometimes you take the iWork program for granted a little bit. Today I have the best feeling in the world, knowing that I can continue to live in a country where I can see images like these on a daily basis. Thank you Sun. You rock. I feel special.

GNOME 2.10 Hack List

A long time ago, Jeff posted a list of things to improve in GNOME 2.8. If you’re looking for hacking projects, it’s a nice start for 2.10. Or you could help the captains, Alex and Dave, bug fixing on Nautilus. Either way, there’s lots to be done!

Zenity Applet

Jeff and Matthew ganged up on me to get me to implement a zenity applet, since apparently that’s the new fashionable name for them. Confusingly I called it a ‘notification icon’ in the commandline and user documentation.

  gman@slipstream:~> zenity --notification --window-icon=/home/gman/love.png --text="All you need is love\!"  

I also added save and directory-only selection in the file chooser, thanks to a patch by Lucas, and released a 2.9.0 tarball.

Musak

Finally got some time to catalog my CD collection. There’s a couple of skeletons in the cupboard there which are embarassing, but you grow older and wiser with every day.

Pathetic Excuse for a Blog

A few weekends ago, Carolyn and myself headed up to Arthur’s Pass for the weekend. It was a pretty cruisey weekend, all in all, with lots of food and drink, and a pretty awesome walk up Scott’s track toward Avalanche peak, with lots of snow and ice. It’s been nice escaping from Christchurch for the weekends, as nice as it is to have a lazy weekend. We recently just booked an extended weekend up in Wellington in early December which should bring us nicely up to Christmas time!

Work is going pretty well right now, although at times feeling a little bit sidelined from the rest of the team back in Ireland. I guess you’ll have good and bad days working remotely, but I have no regrets for wanting to stay in New Zealand for longer. Tearing my hair out trying to organize the visa in time, with the current one expiring on the 5th October. After getting official approval for the transfer, it’s now just a case of filling out some application forms and we’ve taken on an immigration consultant to make that process a little easier. Fingers crossed everything works out in time.

This week I’m in Sydney. It’s wonderful to be back here again, and I really love the place. I’m hanging out with Jeff and Pia for most of the week, although hoping to catch up with my Aunt, Uncle and cousins at the weekend. It was a pretty scary experience driving in Sydney traffic again. It was almost like the feeling I had in India. Gulp. Last night I got dragged along to a United Nations ‘Is it still relevant’ lecture/talk thing by Pia. She promised me a beer for every half hour I was bored. The first 2 speeches were actually quite interesting, but my levels waned as the evening progressed. Fortunately Pia’s pocket was saved by us not being able to drink at the talk. Was pretty glad to get away afterwards. Tonight we celebrate Craige’s b-day, somewhere that you can eat emus, kangaroos and crocodiles. Yum.

Mr.Picassohead

So rama pointed me to mrpicassohead.com which entertained me for a good half hour looking through some of the other heads. Much fun, thanks!

Told you I was a late starter

This IM technology is pretty remarkable stuff. I’ve always used IRC since I joined Sun with the excuse always being ‘But I don’t know people’s login names’ to use IM more [I have wanderingnzer@yahoo, aim and my usual email@msn ]. Okay, so the realization that everyone was using IM never really hit home. Today, after building some 0.81 JDS packages, I figured it was time to look at it a bit closer. Minutes later I was chatting to my sister in Barcelona. Hopefully it’ll prove easy to connect to other non-work friends and family. Gaim looks a lot more HIG friendly these days too.

More major milestones

After my last major milestone, I’ve reached another. I’ve started drinking coffee. I figured it was about time to figure out what the big deal was. I think I like the dark bitter ones the best so far, just how I like my beer

It’s kinda funny how your tastes change over time. I didn’t have my first real beer [by real, I mean more than 2 pints] until I was 17, when I discovered hangovers. I didn’t smoke a cigarette or a joint until I was about 23. Fortunately, Mum, that hasn’t developed into a regular habit. I guess I’m a late starter or something.

Open Source Summit

Pleased to see that Sun has finally organized an internal open source summit in Santa Clara in September. Very disappointed to see that it’s on at the same time as I’ll be visiting Jeff in Australia. Hopefully there’ll be a bunch of Sun open sourcies attending to knock some sense into the rest of the company.

Apple, I Love You

Okay, so you sold me an iBook with a dodgy logic board, but you admitted your mistake and you’re fixing my iBook for free, courtesy of the very nice people at MagnumMac. I love it when life ‘Just Works’.