Hrm, sometimes, just sometimes, I think I am turning into a Jeff. It’s all very worrying. I guess I’m an impressionable type of guy, but I’m definitely picking up his various different mannerisms. Just as well I’ve managed to draw a line at the purple laces. I wonder if anyone else feels like this – I’d like to think it was some rare infectious Aussie disease or something.
I got this random note, from a random person –
Plain and simple, this is fan mail. We all deal with an incredible amount of crap and insanity during the day, but literally every time I see one of your messages, it's insightful, to the point, and helpful. I really appreciate your analysis of issues, and how you deal with people and problems.
It made me smile. Thank you.
Maeve came home to inform us that most of the dates were already sold out, before we even knew that they had started selling the tickets. With some gentle persuasion from Patrick, we booked 2 tickets for Auckland in March. I’m pretty psyched about it all.
Nice to see that Nat announced the GNOME Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt, although his costume really didn’t match his slides. FWIW, it’s a Novell sponsored GNOME initiative. It’s amazing to see how much Slashdot readers are so wrong. Hopefully these comments won’t hinder the competition and we get some rocking patches integrated at the end of it.
We finally decided to take our changes with the Toyota Corona and I’m back on the road again. We headed out to one of the best bouldering places in the world – Castle Hill, which is just an hour outside Christchurch. We were not disappointed with the first view of the boulder field. There is so much to do here, it’s hard to know where to start. It’s even more slopey than Fontainbleau – is that possible? I’m going to have fun being here though and working on buying a bouldering mat for some of the highball problems. Mary and Steve, whom we met through a Davey family association, gave us a copy of South Island Rock, so now there’s no stopping us. I’m a little worried about a grinding noise on the car when you shift gears. So, okay, the car might be the only reason.
Canterbury has this weird series of micro-climates, making it hard to predict the weather. While it was a pretty miserable day in Christchuch, we experiences some beautiful weather in Castle Hill. It’s all a bit strange. Perhaps the Dahlai Lama was right, when he said it was the energy source of the universe. Today we’re going to hit the Port Hills and do a bit of bolt clipping.
Watched the England/Australia final last night, and rather sorry to see pretty unattractive rugby win out – sure, they played pretty well in the final but their journey was ugly. Most of the Kiwis wanted England to win though, so I was in poor company.
Work has been amazingly slow this week, mostly trawling through emails, with lots of pretty useful conversations, but little else. Slighly disappointed to see the interview with the ‘Sun Java Desktop Team’ on OSNews being a basic marketing reply of very little interest. Pretty horrified to discover the JDS easter egg broken and rushed to fix it – I wonder if I can get a re-spin. No, I think perhaps not. From a GNOME Foundation point of view, things are hotting up – I’ve decided that more or less all of the previous board deserve to keep their place, and now have to figure out who else to vote in. I think we’re progressively kicking ass, but it’s slow and not as collective as I’d like. That’s certainly one of the shortfalls of the board and hopefully we can organize a few more face-to-face meetings next year to make this better. Sucks to miss out on the summit though.
I think we just might have scored on the car scene, having verbally agreed to buy an 87 Toyota Corona 2L estate. All for an amazing $1400, which really is beyond belief. Why doesn’t Ireland work like this.
Started working on the big list of user feedback from the beta versions of JDS – it’s really hard to know where to start, and trying to separate the good from the bad. Lots of ideas though, which is good, and patches are slowly being created. I kinda like being in this hacking mood. It’s also nice at the end of a long day to see news like this, it does actually give you a warm fuzzy about your work. I guess I’m in the hugely envious position of enjoying what I do. My housemate is constantly teasing me about giggling at the screen though.
Settling in nicely living with Patrick and Maeve – it’s always good having to live with other people. I guess in a way, we take our friendships to another level. All very deep I’m sure.
Today was a pretty productive day, although we really didn’t get anything out of it in the end. We all headed into town, down on to Moorehouse Ave to visit some of the car dealerships. The entire road is full of them, with masses and masses of cars – all a little out of reach with our budget. Which is kind of a funny thing, because our budget is about $1500, which by European standards is a bit of a joke. We thought that a car auction might work, but everything seemed to be in the $3000 region. It was all pretty disappointing.
After getting back home, we started to read through the Buy and Sell newspaper which we were kind of avoiding mainly due to laziness. A couple of calls later we were ready to look at 2 cars – almost all the others were either gone or not answering. Took 2 cars for a test drive – one a Toyota Corona, which seemed a bit rough around the edges, had a pretty annoying clicking sound from the dashboard and squeaky breaks, and the other, an 83′ Honda Shuttle which drove pretty well, but had a small boot size. The fact that it was 20 years old was another slight worry, since we had planned to put it through its paces in the Southern Alps. It was with a bit of hesitation that I rang up afterwards saying that we were going to look elsewhere. More searching to come I guess.
Patrick quit his labour job after 1 day. What a wuss.
Went out on the piss last night. Some more than others. Started off investigating Oxford Terrace, known by ‘The Strip’ to most locals it seems. The first pub seemed a bit of a dead ringer so we ambled down to The Bog, where things were a bit livelier. Tried Guinness for the first time in about 2 months – mostly watery, and over priced. Still, the music was beaty and there was a good atmosphere from a packed house. From there, we wandered down to Micky Finns, another Irish bar for a couple of beers and more dancing. Pretty crazy night which made today a complete write off.
It’s been a pretty busy week, with Maeve and Patrick arriving. From a work productivity point of view, it hasn’t been wonderful, but it’s been fun to catch up with them. The two of them started to look for work, and within a day Patrick had decided that he was going to try his hand at being a labourer, given that there was no other jobs available in New Zealand. It will be interesting to see how he gets on, and it’s providing much source of amusement in the household.
Met quite a few people at the climbing wall recently, including a guy who had recently lost interest after having climbed for 10 years. He told me a bunch of places to visit, and recounted some tales of climbing in Australia for a week with Ben Moon. Hopefully we’ll visit a car auction at the weekend and pick up a cheap Japanese import so that we can see some of these places.
Had a pretty awesome conference call with the Norwegian GUADEC committee – the conference is really starting to rock, even during it’s early stages. Things are coming together really early, and the proper amount of forward planning is getting done. Is it just me or is the whole GNOME infrastructure getting heaps better? A long time ago when I first joined the GNOME project, I seem to remember things being a little bit random and chaotic. Now things seem to be running like clockwork. In a way it’s rather disconcerting.
It’s 1am, and again I find myself working away on the laptop with the TV turned to Channel 4. After midnight the channel turns to showing continous chatline ads with semi naked men and women, complete with tasteful stars coving the naughty bits. In the background they play pretty good music, which is why I have it on. Staying up until 5am waiting for meetings isn’t fun, and it’s kinda nice to listen to a random collection of music. Anyway, I just thought I should justify myself or something. Radio Smut, it’s the future baby!
