Archive for January, 2009
I finally went to sleep as Tabitha and Edward crept off to work. “Did you sleep at all?” they later asked. “While you were eating breakfast,” I replied.
After 3 hours of light sleep, my phone went off. I deferred the alarm a few times, sprang up, blinked, and went through an extended QA meeting that turned into a 3.5 hour discussion with Michael and left me with much food for thought about both testing and how I handle different kinds of conversations. I’m going to have to go over that transcript again once I get out this round of testing notes; I still (in part) curl up in a ball and agree with everything whenever someone challenges something I say. It’s something I need to get used to more. Disagreeing with people scares me. I wonder how I can rapidly get tons of exposure to it.
I found the key, ran out the door, and Carl and I hunted through electronics stores looking for sensors and solderless breadboards in vain. Then I ended up at the Catalyst office, where I took part in some delightful conversations about git (and started asking questions about security systems and symmetrical keys). The theme for the evening quickly turned into Friday Night With Alcohol; not overly keen on alchohol, I discovered a delicious vegan burger with a pumpkin-based patty and mushroom-something-something sauce).
I can now sightread sheet music in a somewhat halting manner for the guitar, so long as it’s in the key of C (I guess I could probably figure out sharps and flats, but haven’t come across songs with those quite yet) and assumes that I’m mostly staying in first position. I miss my piano, though.
3 hours ’till the SLOBs meeting, 9 ’till the Welly testers meet. Still have notes to transcribe. Regaining ability to function and focus. Need to remember to keep taking care of myself. I’m glad I know and can tune and shift my sleep schedule. I’d best chug a jug of water and head to bed, then wake up and think about stickers, Remora, and 8.2.1. Blog post comprehensibility can come later.
Friday, January 30th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
No, really. Don’t be so happy about being un-burnt-out that you get excited, work too much, and then burn out again; be happy and rest. Resssssssst. Rest now. For a couple hours. And then you can get up and test like the bloody blazes – but right now, The Pillow Is Your Friend.
Someday I’m going to learn this. Someday. Tonight, I sleep unwillingly, briefly, exhaustedly, and happy.
Thursday, January 29th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Let’s see how I did with my to-do list today.
- Being happy. (Boy, am I!)
- Rest. (Working until 5am and sleeping ’till lunchtime wasn’t quite what I had in mind, but hey, it works. Tomorrow: earlier wakeup.)
- Sunshine. (YAY)
- People. (Catalyst office + Martin + Douglas = w00t. Also, HAPPY BIRTHDAY HENRY!)
- Food. (Cheap falafel makes a happy Mel, and I want to take all the desserts in Wellington home with me right now.)
- OLPC community notes (my notebook is practically stuffed with them, yay Pia!)
- Getting ready for the Welly testers meeting on Saturday (which includes stuff like Actual Testing and the Thursday/Friday QA meeting).
- LCA followup + general reflections (other than OLPC community notes) that may not be LCA-specific + OLPC/SL-community-related responses (such as to comments on my blog, emails, etc.)
- Remora for Sugar Labs, as part of the “You Know, Defining QA Cycles May Not Be A Bad Idea” revelation.
- Thinking about What I Will Do Next (still an open question, but with bits of things that may be answers starting to trickle in).
Not bad, considering this is day 1 of 4. Other things that happened today, not from the to-do list:
- Can now fluently play and read (sheet music now, not tabs!) a C-major scale in first position on guitar, which means I can now construct chords instead of blindly memorizing finger positions; apparently the trick for me is to play on a travel guitar, which fits my small hands nicely.
- Got a tour of Wellington, thanks to Martin.
- Got a long list of software engineering books to add to my reading list, also thanks to Martin.
- Discovered good expresso, thanks to Martin. I think I will now join my housemate Chris in declaring my love of NZ coffeeshops. I have never liked coffee before.*
- More Terry Pratchett novels!
*and I still need to ration myself to one very slow, small cup early in the day, taken with lots of food and water. I’m very, very, very caffeine sensitive, and definitely felt jittery both times.
Wait. How am I more productive when I work less? Wait. Wait. Work is fun again! YAY!
Also, I’m looking forward to borrowing Cjb’s powerbook-touchstream, because my wrists are becoming unhappy with bad posture and a Thinkpad keyboard. And I need to learn how to pack. And sleep. And… travel. And keep up with meetings as my timezone changes around (I’ve been going bonkers trying to convert UTC to EST to Welly time and back and forth and back, and slept through a couple meetings as a result).
(Edit: Suddenly I find myself getting thousands of stickers to Brussels in less than a week. Life keeps getting more and more interesting. I like it. And now the sun rises and I’m off to bed…)
Thursday, January 29th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
(Gah. I posted a better, longer version of this, and then something went funny with Wordpress, and I think I overwrote it. Anyway…)
Heads-up on one thing I’m working on: Wade, David, andTomeu caught me up on the Remora port, which is a Sugar Labs ActivityTeam project working to use the software behind http://addons.mozilla.org as a Activities user-facing infrastructure for installation, reviews, and ratings of .xo bundles. I’m looking forward to hanging out with the Welly testers this weekend, and this is something they need so that we can migrate their Activity test results upstream to Sugar Labs.
The Remora port is still a small project, but Wade says it’s the biggest crucial blocker to the ActivityTeam moving forward. We could use some php/mysql wizards to define and hack on tickets for this, and we’ll need user-facing testers soon. There are instructions up on how to help, or feel free to poke me / holler with questions. I have some questions of my own about it.
Thursday, January 29th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I started to take down, in Extremely-Draftlike-Alpha-Form, some notes on OLPC community from discussions during the last week. We know we’re not the only people talking about this, and would love pointers to discussions on the same being held by other groups in other places, as these ideas form.
Budding ideas and new wiki pages include things like Pia, Michael, and Chris’s discussion (long transcripts are included in the links) about a community-run release team, as well as transcribing Pia’s diagrams of how the addition of two project teams (a community council and an advisory council) might help our already self-governing and distributed (yay!) community to define and understand itself a little more. (I feel like I should be parading around with huge “These are rough ideas! These are drafts!” signs right now, because they are.)
We’d love ideas, thoughts, people to chime in on the conversation, pointers to current conversations and resources, and so on. Concerns and criticisms are particularly welcome; please keep asking the crucial question of “do we actually need this?” There are definitely many missing bits – were I more adept at shaping witty words, I would write some clever variant of “it takes a community to create a community” here, but I think people here know what I mean.
To eat my own dogfood regarding balancing metawork with non-meta (or at least less-meta) work, I chugged on upstream migration of Activity testing to Sugar Labs for a while.
Nifty reading of the day: Mitch’s response to the conversation about AMD halting development of the Geode. And applause to Cjl and Seth for battling the Tedious Spam Beast (two separate battles, two separate victories) today – it’s tedious and thankless work, but necessary to keep the noise-to-signal ratio low so the rest of us can be productive.
Thursday, January 29th, 2009 | olpc | No Comments »
(title reference here.)
I spent my last two days in Hobart wandering the streets with a sketchbook and some pencils, and eating handfuls of fresh raspberries and blueberries very, very slowly in the sunshine with a jug of farm-fresh milk. As one of those suburban children whose previous exposure to milk consisted of homogenized pasteurized mass-produced plastic supermarket jugs, I did not know that milk could taste that… milklike. Zow.
Also in Hobart: went out on a boat, scrambled around the top of Mt. Wellington with a camera, and rediscovered a phenomena called “sunshine” and that exercise feels extraordinarily good (and that I’m going to be ridiculously sore when I get back into training after 2 months of completely ignoring martial arts in favor of getting my ass kicked by work.) And… music. Mmm, music. And writing – not on my computer, but with a pen, on paper, for a long, long time. My Big Notebook is filled with scribbles and scratches and sketches and gloriously unbroken streams of thought written in surprisingly clear handwriting. And sun. And sun and sun and sun, and then a predawn bus, and flying out as dawn broke through the clouds.
Airport security is so much faster here. And far, far less ridiculous. And vegetables are real. And there is air and you can breathe it.
And then there was Melbourne, where I stuffed my backpack into a cubby at the train station and ran across town as the city was waking up and ended up watching the Australia Day parade assemble – the streets were thronged with people wearing flags, a ukulele band on stage singing a Beatles medley, different ethnic groups in full regalia marching and occasionally playing music – and plenty of strange architecture, and sun, and sun, and sun, and sun, and sun, and then I ran back across the city and threw myself into a bus, into a plane, into a semi-comatose state until the plane hit tarmac in New Zealand…
My camera is literally falling apart (screws and plates and things are bending, rattling loose, falling off, etc) so the quantity and quality of these pictures are rather questionable, and that’s okay.
Perhaps I’ll post those pictures, perhaps I’ll transcribe that notebook, perhaps I’ll fill in more details on this later, perhaps I’ll do a lot of things. If I want to, when I want to. I’m going easy on the promises right now; I have enough to last me quite a while.
And then I went to Wellington, discovered the cheerful thoroughness of the NZ customs department, which last night featured Walter and Sugar talks and Catalyst’s incredibly cool office and fantastical Italian food (and sun and sun and sun and sun and sun). And now I am living in a place with internet (with deep gratitude to Tabitha and Edward) once again and oh my gosh sunshine is wonderful and instead of panicking about my backlog this time I’m going to see what happens if I move forward on doing productive work instead (and use that momentum to occasionally trowel out relevant material from this month until I’m all caught up / have publicly dropped things that are no longer relevant).
Tonight I went dancing; the style is called ceroc, which is like swing with the footwork replaced by walking. I also discovered why so many people complain about American coffeehouses not being up to snuff. For example: in a “normal” coffeehouse, my “normal” hot chocolate was an entire bowl of thick, rich chocolate-laden milk, dredged with cocoa powder, then the milk foam poured on top so that the cocoa powder swirled into a beautiful crown, and then there were handmade marshmallows, and you’re drinking this glory (shown up-close with terrible lighting, and then to scale – that’s Edward in the background with a thumbs-up, and yes, the bowl of chocolate is half the size of your head).
And rest. I’ve slept for 7 hours the last two nights, and dreamed like mad, and didn’t have to wake up for anything, except to amble around a new city in the warm, warm sun, when I wanted to, and read Terry Pratchett novels, and eat gorgeously fresh food, and think. And most of what I think sounds like this: gosh, have I been this tired? And most of the rest of it sounds like: yes.
And slowly another small and cheerful voice, much too quiet the last month or so, has started chiming in again, more frequently. And there are projects that you care about and want to work on, communities you love and want to contribute to, and you can do this, it is wonderful, and doing this, it feels like flying! Work, meaningful work, not out of panic or guilt, not flogging myself through more stress because I feel obligated to Do Stuff, but actually having that sense of abundance flowing, that sense of happy gratitude but not of debt – the glory of being able to Do Things I Really Want To Do.
I have… missed this. To have found it for the first time, lost it without realizing it, learned how to recognize its absence, and now slowly learning how to bring it back and keep it at will – the joy of working on the thing you love – it’s a hard-earned lesson, and one I’ll likely learn again and again, but each time better.
And it has been wonderful to find that deep down, I really do love this. I think the things I’m working on and the people that I’m working with are going to change the world. It’s still a painful letting go. I’m being vague here; when I’ve articulated this more, then it is something that I will write down here. Cjl’s reminder that I didn’t need to represent all of OLPC – or even 1cc – but instead was free to represent myself – was exactly what I needed to become unstuck in doing that.
Oh. And apparently there’s this thing called “community management” and people do it for a living and why am I still amazed at this and how have I always managed to feel obligated to do something else (y’know, like be a Real Engineer or… become more Qualified or… what have you) such that I was not Able And Worthy to do this thing I loved and why do I have to keep on re-realizing this? I suppose I have a thick skull that takes a lot of spiral learning.
There’s work to do. There’s always work to do. I have conversations to transcribe, stories to recount, pictures to post, conversations to have, software to test, emails to write, meetings to attend, books to read, comments to reply to, and – well, look, I can’t do this all at once. Here is my currently prioritised list of things to do while in Wellington.
- Being happy.
- Rest.
- Sunshine.
- People.
- Food.
- OLPC community notes (my notebook is practically stuffed with them, yay Pia!)
- Getting ready for the Welly testers meeting on Saturday (which includes stuff like Actual Testing and the Thursday/Friday QA meeting).
- LCA followup + general reflections (other than OLPC community notes) that may not be LCA-specific + OLPC/SL-community-related responses (such as to comments on my blog, emails, etc.)
- Remora for Sugar Labs, as part of the “You Know, Defining QA Cycles May Not Be A Bad Idea” revelation.
- Thinking about What I Will Do Next (still an open question, but with bits of things that may be answers starting to trickle in).
The first half is guaranteed – the rest we’ll have to see about. I am at present happily distracted by being free to wander in the sunshine.
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
All right. I’ve got my feet under me once more, enough to express the things I’ve been thinking about but didn’t have words for; the words and phrasings aren’t right yet, and the ideas are also not particularly fully-formed, but it’s enough to start, and watch them form from here.
Begin the torrent.
Walter showed me Minsky’s essay on Education and Psychology this morning.
“A new class of 6-year-old children will soon begin to share similar ways to think and behave. Then, next year, when they are 7 years old, most of those pupils will still remain in that group—and thus will tend to perpetuate those same patterns of activity. The next year, they will be 8-year-olds, but will continue to share many attitudes, values, and cognitive strategies. So as those children proceed through their K-12 grades, large portions of their ways to think will remain much like those of 6-year-olds!”
To learn new ways of thinking, keep seeking out and learning from groups of people who think in ways you are unable to. This means you’re in a constant state of being a non-native speaker, of having to struggle to understand things others take for granted. It means it’s constantly uncomfortable.
Sugar emphasizes reflection, collaboration, and exploration as things that help us learn how to learn. Reflection comes more naturally to me, an introvert by nature; the other two are tough for me. Incredibly tough. Going unfamiliar places, trying unfamiliar things, talking with people I don’t know… I might look stupid. I might waste somebody’s time. I might mess up. And the litany of excuses goes on, giving me reasons to be shy.
I think it is important that we ourselves model the kind of learning that we want the children we’re helping to have. It is important to dogfood not just our hardware and our code, but our learning – our behavior, our processes, the way we work with each other, the way we move forward.
Do we want them to create? We must create, not just pontificate. Do we want them to share, even if they’re hesitant that what they have is not quite fully formed? We’ve got to post our own drafts, our own half-baked thoughts, our own questions. Do we want them to be unafraid of conflict while remaining respectful of those that they may vehemently disagree with? To admire, acknowledge, and appreciate all disciplines, not just our own? To reach out and bring in newcomers, teach others, bring forth leaders from the communities that they belong to?
I think that if I’m hoping to help some kids somewhere grow up to be great dreamers and doers, I’ve got to keep on trying to grow into one myself. It’s not something that you ever know, or something you can ever stop; learning how to be a learner is something that we all have got to keep on studying.
Now I will proceed to learn by making things – I’m sitting here in Donna Benjamin’s Inkscape tutorial, and there’s an idea stuck in my mind I need to get out…
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 | sugar | 3 Comments »
Well. That plateau ended rather sooner than I expected.
The last 24 hours have been intensely uncomfortable. I’m being barraged by my inability to operate at a higher level of thinking about community catalyzing and facilitation, organizations, technologies, and hacking than I’m used to. I’m expected to be able to assimilate this on my own, without hand-holding, and struggling to articulate my confusion into questions that can help me find my own way.
I am incredibly happy about this – I am learning. It feels good to be lost, to be off that plateau – even if it means I’m now in the painful backslide phase of notching my abilities up to the next level. I just have to stick in there and fight the temptation to fall back into being just okay, and being comfortable.
I’m also expecting to be barraging this blog with posts sorting out the same, once I’ve forced myself to fight through the worst of this confusion as fast as I can handle it. The last few weeks (months?) of sheer exhaustion have sapped me more than I’d like to admit, and now I have to learn how to perform through yet another layer of tiredness, to deal capably with more pressure and more chaos while still taking care of myself so that I can be pushed further without causing damage that I can’t repair.
I’m happy to be tossed around, bewildered, transcribing, recording, absorbing, absorbing, absorbing, and absorbing. The question is how well I’ll be able to share the lessons that I’m learning.
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’m in Australia at long last. Arriving here at LCA was… more of an adventure than I bargained for (but a most excellent one). More on this later.
Two days, two resolutions to contradictions that have plagued me for quite some time.
The first is from a long discussion with Yifan about the problem of communication between members of a community balanced with the desire to have that community be decentralized. After a frustratingly incoherent (my fault) conversation, she went back into the room and I cooked dinner – then sprinted into the bedroom with a sudden thought.
Me: Wait, you were trying to tell me that what you want is centralized communication, but decentralized action?
Yifan: Yes! [probable subtext: That's what I've been trying to tell you for an hour.]
The second is the contradiction between taking initiative and being invisible so others can shine – this one is thanks to Marco.
I think that sometimes if you are trying to maximize effectiveness in a project, your visibility has to come and go in cycles. You become visible to build something around you, something that did not exist before, and then once it is a bit solid you pass it to others and become invisible. Repeat
Sometimes it is true that if you don’t do it, nobody else will. But once you’ve done it, someone else can.
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
New webcomic discovery: Daisy Owl. I actually did this kind of thing as a small child. I also read it in a book.
Tomorrow (which is technically today) is going to be an interesting exercise in prioritizing, efficiency and effectiveness of execution, and forced rest. I have many things left on my to-do list, and exactly 11 hours before I leave for the airport (after which I’ll spend the next ~40 hours getting to Hobart, Australia).
I’ll write this up sometime, but the last few weeks have left me in awe. Stress, frustration, and Way Too Many Things To Do, yes. But awe and gratitude first and foremost. I have been blessed far, far beyond what I deserve. I never thought I would grow up to have a life this wonderful, or that sleeping on the floor and eating refried beans (because you’re out of nearly everything else) would be something I’d consider parts of that wonderfulness.
I’ll never have nothing.
Sunday, January 18th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
