Life is so good, it gets better every day

La Bella Vita

Until it is gone. Ettore, you will be missed. The Ximan guys have been through tough times, and no one should have to deal with this.

On The Move Again

I felt sorry for the travel agent girl. She had been out on the piss the previous night and was feeling a little delicate when in I walked asking about flights to Bangaore, again. 2 hours later we finally managed to come up with the right combination of flights and I think the farsical nature of the whole process had cured her hangover. I will soon be on the move again, heading over on 5th February to see my Wipro friends for 10 days. I’ve never been to India before, so very much looking forward to it, and taking my first stop over in Singapore as well. If it wasn’t immediately obvious, I love my job and my motivation and enthusiasm soars with these kinds of rewards.

With trips to Sydney, Adelaide, Bangalore and Auckland, it is going to be a busy start for the year and that doesn’t include a possible trip over to Malaysia. Rock on!

I Am Going Mental

I think I just had one of those days when I went completely mental and talked to myself a hell of a lot more than usual, which probably isn’t saying much. JDS seems to be rocking along these days, but I still get the willies wondering how the fuck we’re going to be able to handle all these huge deployments. I’m sure it will all come clear a few months down the line.

Just when I thought I was making good progress on the VPN thing, I seem to have run into issues with g_spawn_async_with_pipes and trying to read and write to the vpn client connetion commandline. The fun of developing against proprietary software.

Met up with an Israeli guy at the climbing wall last night. He climbs more or less the same grade as me, although not a self confessed boulderer. I’m getting tired of pushing myself on the overhangs, and look forward to seeing what problems he comes up with. Thinking about a trip up to Kaikoura this weekend. Unbelievable to think that I’ll be in Sydney the week after that for possibly the strangest Christmas so far.

This Is Why I Am Here

Wanaka has a slight Aspen feel to it – amazingly chilled out with stunning scenery all around you, without the superiority complex. Plain and simple, this place is just cool, and I felt bad leaving it at the end of the weekend. It’s about a 5 or 6 hour journey from Christchuch, sitting just north of Queenstown by about 100km. The weather was pretty ugly heading down with strong winds and driving rain trying its best to squander us, but stubborness gave way to incredible weather for the rest of the weekend, and a good share of climbing.

Having bought the Wanaka guidebook, we headed to the Roadside crag for some warm up routes – all bolt clipping on schist. I’ve never climbed on schist before, and it involves a large deal of thought, with a number of thin moves of small crimps and slopers. We started off working up from about 14 – Wanaka 14, there seems to be a large difference, and eventually worked out way up to 16, which felt about French 6a. Most of the routes were relatively short, requiring anything between 3 and 6 bolts, with the first bolt being quite high – there were some routes I wanted to try, but didn’t have the balls to start due to a pretty highball start. The following day, after a good night of Thai, beer and wine, we hit the Hospital Flat boulders. Lots and lots of potential problems, including an awesome arete/overhang traverse with heelhooking. Started my project to have a short bouldering/climbing film by the end of my year here. Will almost certainly have to take a lot more footage than I did last weekend.

So with some regret we left Wanaka vowing to ourselves that we’d all be back soon, and left the mountains behind to head towards the Canterbury plains again. It was a small taste of the adventures to come, with the constant fear in the back of our minds that there is so much to see, and so little time to see it.

Those are hardcore vibes.

Wanaka Weekend

We’re planning on heading down to Wanaka to climb on the rock there. Being in a new country, and free to see all these new places is really awesome, and it’s a good motivator to try and get a hard week’s work done before it. Haven’t been climbing enough outdoors though, and need to convince the others a little – while monkeying around in the indoor wall is good for building up strength, it’s no use if you don’t have balls.

I got so frustrated with work in general that I decided to ignore it. For the most part, it seems to be working, and I’m currently hacking away at a frontend to the Cisco VPN 5000 client. At least it will take my mind off things even if I don’t get the chance to finish it. It’ll also be a nice [if at times frustrating] opportunity of learning some of the newer GTK+ widgets.

And For My Next Trick

And to finish off a pretty awful week, I got shat on by a bird. No doubt this will amuse many people out there. Thank you very much.

On The Slippery Slope

It’s been a pretty unpleasant week in work, and letting your hair down at the weekends has been good. Yesterday we all had a pretty surreal experience at the Christmas party in the park. Hagley park is a pretty huge place, with a golf course, tennis courts, various ponds, and lots of playing fields. I guess I didn’t know what to expect, but seeing tens of thousands of people sitting around a stage in deck chairs sipping back wine was a strange sight. It was a kids oriented show, with lots of Christmas songs intersperced with random commentary. As the light faded, the fireworks lit up the sky and everyone boogied down. Afterwards we headed to Micky Finns for a while before ending up in the Bog, talking to these air force guys who were flying to Antarctica. Today I am hungover. I guess you can’t escape drink by flying half way around the world.

Jeff And His Adventures in Duracell Land

Jeff is totally overwhelming me at the moment. I don’t think anyone can possibly keep up with him while he’s in this groove. It’s really refreshing to see and it really makes you want to help out as much as you possibly can. I think Jeff is going to use up the rest of my 2003 beer quota when I head over to Sydney in December. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

GNOME Foundation [cont]

I voted for the following people for GNOME Foundation 2004 –

• Jonathan Blandford
• Dave Camp
• Glynn Foster
• Nat Friedman
• Jody Goldberg
• Leslie Proctor
• Sri Ramkrishna
• Owen Taylor
• Malcolm Tredinnick
• Luis Villa
• Jeff Waugh

The others didn’t really give me the confidence that they had enough time to be on the board – it was also hard since many people didn’t reply to the 10 questions. I think it is the right mix of new and old board members and should do very well indeed.

GNOME Foundation

So I realized today that dealing with stuff on the board is every bit as frustrating as dealing with stuff within Sun. The plain and simple fact is that you can not have your way all the time. It’s very much team work and having as much reliance on someone else as they do on you.

So is the GNOME Foundation still a relevant body? Yes, I believe so…now more than ever. If it was so relevant, why didn’t more people want to get involved? And this is the crux of the issue. From my perspective, although I’m heavily speculating, it’s because the board isn’t exactly very good at communicating what it does. For such a successful open source project, we’ve rather failed at the first hurdle.

So, what do you want the GNOME Foundation to be?

I came on to IRC today, saying that the GNOME Foundation is going to seriously kick arse next year. Now is the time to shine – no more fuckups about missing conferences, missing potential press release opportunities, beating about the bush on real and important issues. We’ve had 3 years to get this right and although there has been a certain amount of churn among the board members, we really haven’t set down concrete foundations. Sure, we have a good idea of where we’re going and where we need to be, but *so* many things should just be second nature by now.

So, next year I’m going to try my damndest to make this ‘Just Work’. We need to make foundation-list@gnome a useful mailing list, and not just a mailing list that receives traffic once or twice a year. We have 336 people registered to vote in the 2003 elections. I want to grow that number. I want to reply to the posted minutes and explain what we’re doing, so everyone is on the same page. I want to ensure that we come up with a list of 10 big goals for the Foundation. I want Jeff’s marketing-list initiative to succeed – not just succeed but be one of the most active arse kicking teams in GNOME. I want to see an organized plan for the year and to stop all this reactive work, and transform it into pro-active work. I want to make sure that the board meets at the end of this year for a wrap-up before the new board kicks in, to make us aware of all the fuckups during the year, but also aware of the successes. I want to make sure that we don’t have candidacy statements like ‘Not as much as we wanted to’ next year.

Quite simply, I want us to rock next year and I hope that we’re open enough for someone outside to call us on any shortcomings and willing to listen.