Sat 03 Aug 2002

  • Movie: Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It’s an excellent, excellent movie. Definitely the most fun I’ve had with a movie this year.

  • Work: Wrote redhat-config-packages with Jeremy. Some screenshots are available at http://people.redhat.com/jrb/files/rcp/ It should be coming to a Red Hat Linux distribution near you.

  • Deals: Tomato Paste was on sale for 20 cents a can. I bought ten.

Mon 29 Jul 2002

  • Movie: Watched “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” with Owen last friday. It was a lot of fun. I watched the first fifteen minutes six years ago on a trip down to Duke with the fencing team. It was booed off of the bus — I was the only person other than Henning who wanted to keep watching. After a long delay, I finally get to see the ending.

Sat 20 Jul 2002

  • gnome summit: This is quite cool. It might be nice to have a fewer talks, and more discussion, but we’re doing well. I’m going to talk with dave camp tomorrow about nautilus. Hopefully we can straighten out TreeView drag-n-drop.

  • gnome summit (2): Attended a workshop on the fileselector. Blah. It was difficult to focus. This confirms my feeling that you can’t have a large group do any kind of design at all — especially if none of them are planning on working on it.

  • googlewhack: Played a game with Vinny and Jacob tonight. We’d select a word, and look for a googlewhack that goes along with it. The winner would then select another word, and the process would repeat itself. My personal favorite of the evening: “habitrail monorail” It will be dead shortly.

Sun 07 Jul 2002

  • sick: I’m a bit better, and will try to go to work tomorrow.

  • music: Zana and I got a fantastic new set of speakers a couple weeks ago. Sibelius Symphony no. 3 (performed by the London Symphony Orchestra) was on the radio tonight. It was wonderful to sit back and code to it.

  • bookworm: I spent the long weekend working on a new project. As I wasn’t feeling well enough to do much else, I thought I’d try to learn something about databases.

    Zana and I have been using a spreadsheet to organize our books for the past couple years. As good as gnumeric has become, it’s very clearly the wrong tool for the job here. We can’t sort the books in any meaningful fashion, let alone make any interesting queries.

    The result was that we spent the last couple days setting up a postgresql database and entering some books. I’ve been writing a frontend to it that we’re calling ‘bookworm’. It’s taken a bit longer than I wanted to write (partially because I’m sick), but it’s starting to look almost useful. I’m getting done with the ‘person’ dialog. I’m not sure who else would be interested in this code (other than possibly Federico), so I’m not sure if I should check it into GNOME CVS. Still, it took my mind off my headache.

  • music (redux): Sibelius finished. Now I’m listening to Shostakovich’s fifth. This is a great piece to listen to while recovering. It fits my current mood a lot better, too.

Wed 03 Jul 2002

  • sick: I’m officially quite sick. This is no fun at all.

  • pedant: The singular form of the drink is “gin and tonic.” The plural is “gins and tonic.” Google finds “gin and tonics” winning over the correct plural form 4870 to 76. It even helpfully offers up “guns and tonic” as an alternative. I’m too sick to enjoy either the singular or plural form of the drink, though.

  • GNOME2: Rocks. Time for 2.0.1. It’s a pity I’m sick.

  • Vacation: Went to the outer banks with my family. I had a lot of fun, and enjoyed seeing my family again. However, I need another vacation to recover from it. Fortunately, I have a four day weekend this weekend. It’s a pity I’m sick.

Mon 17 Jun 2002

  • gnome-python: I’ve been playing with gnome-python, trying to do gobject-style inheritance instead of native python style inheritance. It’s been a lot of fun to see all the great work that jamesh and msw have done on the core. It’s so easy to add small improvements to the bindings. I haven’t quite gotten a fully working widget yet written from scratch, but I’m so much closer then the last times I tried. I was hoping that we’d have full parity with the ‘C API’ in the python bindings. We’re so darn close to being at that point.

  • Graduation: I surprised my brother by flying out to see him graduate. I won’t say that watching the graduation was fun (it wasn’t) but it was good to see him. He’s hoping to take a couple months off to go to the US Virgin Islands to work before finding a more ‘serious’ job. I hope it works out well for him.

  • Cows: Everywhere. They’re everywhere!

  • Changes: Dave Mason has left Red Hat. While we all had an idea he was thinking of going, it doesn’t make the shock of his leaving any less. He was a great guy to have around the office, and always fun. And while I’m sure I’ll see him around town, and while I’m sure he’ll be back on irc before he realizes it, he’ll still be missed a lot. Good luck Dave!

Sun 26 May 2002

  • GNOME: I might have fixed a nautilus tree bug. I need to fix Drag and Drop. GNOME 2.0 is so close to being released. We only have nasty showstopper bugs left.

  • experience: In software, we often say “write it once intending to throw it away.” After spending a few months working on a workbench, I would like to redo all the holes I have drilled. I needed to do the joints first, and then do the large holes for the supporting legs. I’ve also learned that being off by an 1/8″ is way to much for a lot of things. I need to be more careful. I also need a workbench to build this on.

  • passings: Stephen Jay Gould died this past week. The two and a half years of Biology in college is largely a testament to his writings. Thanks for the inspiration.

Sat 18 May 2002

  • gcws: Getting read/write errors on my laptop. Between the screen going, the disk dying, and the keyboard broken, it is getting very sick. Going to send in the machine monday. I really need to back it up this weekend.

  • gcws2: It’s now running out of battery too. Time to find a plug and go to bed.

Thu 16 May 2002

  • Drink: This is the drink we made tonight:

    1 pound strawberries (hulled) 1 cup ice 1 cup nonfat plain yogurt 1/4 teaspoon rosewater 2 tablespoons honey (or to taste)

    Puree strawberries in blender on high for at least a minute. Add the ice, rosewater and honey. Be warned that a little rosewater goes a long way, and adding too much will make the drink undrinkable. Once the ice is crushed, gently blend in the yogurt on low, slowly bringing up the speed of the blender until it’s nicely frost. Serve and enjoy.