Archive for February, 2009
I found, to my delight, that the New England Conservatory has free music (classical! jazz!) concerts and workshops just about every day. I’m going to try to go to the jazz recital on Tuesday, if anyone’s around and wants to be a music geek with me at 8:30pm.
After a great deal of practice over the past week, a confusing-in-a-good-way lesson, and a day of “why isn’t the way I’m practicing this making me better at what I want to learn?” reflection, I think I’ve come up with a way to learn how to solo on “Well You Needn’t” in an unscripted, non-robotic fashion. (My current methodology: left hand comping, right hand occasionally frantically stabbing at random notes on the F blues scale. This does not sound particularly good.) I need to write this down to solidify what I learned and what I’m going to do; when I’m confused, I write. Text is my input/output mode for making sense of what bewilders me.
I gave up alcohol for Lent; I’m also only eating meat one meal a day. As the weeks of Lent go by, I’ll see if I can decrease this to N meals per week – most of this is an “other people cooked me meat” thing, but I am trying to be “as vegetarian as comfortably possible.” I find myself preferring vegetarian food and lighter meals these days, though I’m still a total sucker for excellent steaks and roasts and anything involving prosciutto. (And cheese-stuffed pasta with a heavy cream-based sauce. Mmmm.)
Last night I was at Mauna Loa and went with them to a (free and very good) negotiation workshop that turned out to be based on “Getting to Yes.” I learned two things from this. The first is that I’m still a math dork. As an exercise, the speaker held an auction for a $20 bill based on a twisted set of rules; the MBA alumni jumped in immediately and ended up in a bidding war over who would get to pay far more than $20 for a $20 bill, with the price climbing. My first reaction was to work out a proof for the optimal strategy for the game to maximize your earnings from it to the nearest cent. (Downside: by the time I finished the proof, the bidding had already escalated to ridiculousness. However, the proof was a general one for a Nash equilibrium for the game at any point in time, so it could have been used to cut their losses.)
The second thing I learned was what my dad has tried to tell me for years; I shouldn’t be this underconfident about my negotiation abilities. I always thought that I was too young, inexperienced, had crippling blind spots, and “didn’t know” how to “negotiate properly.” Watching the workshop and the MBAs in it convinced me that I wasn’t missing any magic. They didn’t know any better, they just had more practice and experience. I probably have blind spots still, but they won’t kill me. And others will probably have those blind spots too. And I can find them and get over them. With that, I now believe I can learn how to negotiate by negotiating; there are no prerequisites I’m missing before I can start. (And heck, I’ve been haggling since I was a little kid at garage sales and the tiangge. What was I so worried about?)
Then I went out to consult with a few friends who are doing a startup (we have an agreement; I consult for them as long as they’re feeding me dinner – from when the food appears to when I finish my last forkful). My job is best described as “kicking their asses.” I give them blunt and scathing criticism about everything. It’s good for me to learn how to criticize the operations of a business in a clear and actionable way, and apparently they think it’s helped them too, since they keep feeding me. And by uncovering their blind spots, sometimes I discover and clarify my own. (This paragraph is vague for confidentiality, but if they open-source their product*, this will change.)
*…working on it. I’m pretty convinced they should – it makes the most business sense, as best as I can tell. But I am biased.
Friday, February 27th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
it feels good to be back in more or less full swing again. I slept for 9 hours last night, but woke up feeling sleep-bloated instead of bone-weary – craving less sleep instead of more. I thought the transition back to not needing a lot of sleep would be more gradual (especially since I still have a cough and cold), but I’ll drop back to a luxurious 6 hours for the next few nights and see what happens. 6 is my usual “if I’m really tired” upper bound – I’ll typically wake up refreshed after that length of time, but after nearly 3 weeks in “Has Pathogens, Dislikes Consciousness” mode I think I’m sleeping too much due to mild habit.
It is entirely possible I need 6 hours or more on a consistent basis now; this is a good time and opportunity for me to find out. I have been told by many, many people that they lost their ability to pull weird sleep schedules without adverse effects as they proceeded through their twenties, and I know I can’t sleep 5 days a week now like I used to when I was 15. (I’m getting old and need sleep every day to work at peak effectiveness. I realize the irony of writing this as a 22-year-old who is usually full of vigor after 4 hours of unconsciousness out of every 24, and sluggish with more than 5 a night.)
The past two days have been good – productive enough that I haven’t made time to blog for a bit, so let me catch up on that now. I’ll skip the work bits, since the projects I’ve been working on are still in incoherent phase and will likely be posted here as soon as they are not, but Sugar smoke testing is moving forward (currently slogging slowly through a reproducible cross-platform SoaS install; I probably should start doing that in parallel with writing actual smoke tests).
I should clean up my notes on SL marketing, Local Labs, university groups, deployments, and annual/quarterly goals. I also have notes from after my meeting with the One-For-All folks, because they reminded me about habits deployments tend to unconsciously fall into (with very good intentions – but habits that it might be good to experiment with breaking). I ought to post these notes to Planet SL/OLPC - should try to get to that tonight. (Yeah, I’ve been considering a more regular SL/OLPC post schedule, but I need to establish other rhythms first, and get used to writing about them in a less rambly fashion.)
Our IIF session next week is going to be awesome. (I keep saying that, I know. But we’re going to make law students do business-school-esque rocket pitches. How can this not be fun?) Had a great conversation wtih Joe last night (he came out to pika) on sunset clauses which I’ll have to muse on more – basically, “planning to exist in perpetuity is less effective than planning to end at a concrete date, then reviewing things immediately before that date to see if you ought to continue.” Liang and I got tons of leftover veggies for pika dinner last night, so I did get to practice my knife skils, though I’ll have to plan menus more in advance next time to make a really awesome meal. As it turned out, it wasn’t all that bad.
- balsamic-roasted turnips (note to self: roast turnips longer next time, and spread them out in a single layer earlier – they were cooked, but mostly still crisp)
- butternut squash puree (with cumin and coriander, it was fantastic with the pork)
- cajun-spiced pork roast (beautiful pork, juicy and flavorful, from a local supplier)
- BBQ ribs
- lemon chard (chard leaves blanched and tossed with lemon juice and salt – I now think I should have toasted red pepper flakes in olive oil and tossed that in as well)
- baked chard in almost-vegan bechamel (using gorgeous rainbow chard stems; I was attempting to make vegan bechamel with olive oil and soymilk instead of butter and milk, but there was no soy milk – however, I learned that olive oil makes roux that is reasonably acceptable)
- roasted sweet potatoes
- couscous
- apple cider cardamom cabbage slaw
Lots of food. So many leftovers. Like I said, knife skills were practiced yesterday. A lot.
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Being a nomad pleases me today. It helps me subdivide my day into work sprints, which is what I need right now; a lot of smallish projects, punctuated and transitioned nicely by small meetings.
This morning I did a bit of work from my aunt’s house, then commute, then purchasing bagels for Ayelet’s place at Bruegger’s, where I did more work – then working at Ayelet’s place (her thesis on online moderation is spectacularly cool) – and now I’m off to be very, very early for a meeting at Au Bon Pain, where I’ll do more work – and then more work from Harvard Law School where I have class this afternoon, and then I’ll probably end up at pika and do more work there. I can work from anywhere with wifi and an outlet. Actually, I have books and paper and pens, so I can work from anywhere without an outlet, too. Just in a more limited manner.
These bike wheels are ridiculous. This reminds me that I should, at some point – maybe next month when it’s a little warmer – give my bike a spring overhaul. (Read: learn how to do it by doing it – this is the first spring I’ve had a bike to overhaul, and I didn’t take very good care of it this winter – I need to ride it more.)
More Rainer Maria Rilke, from Diana. Whom I quietly admire and adore… I should tell her so.
And if there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this. Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.
Spent some time working on LifeCampNYC today. It’s based on Sacha’s LifeCampTo, and I’ll be posting more about it when I get the website up. Other rough plans in the works include a Sugar Activity development sprint with Jerome and some teachers and students in the Philippines. But I have things to do today first. Namely…
- Finding out what’s happening with the CFS pilot, and making (if needed) a gameplan to move forward with community involvment on that.
- IIF class notes/readings for today’s session on the tensions faced by traditional companies who have difficulties adjusting to the new business models enabled by the internet.
- Planning for my team’s class session on online activism, which is next week. I am really looking forward to this.
- Refine SoaS smoke test instructions so I can show them to Caroline tomorrow morning.
- Make sure cooking plans for tomorrow are all set.
And the usual piano and exercise stuff, and then whatever else from the “stuff I should do” list I have time for / want to do.
Monday, February 23rd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Finally, an animated primer on how to use the internet to answer questions.
Today was productive and I had a lot of leisurely fun with family – best of all possible worlds. Stretching feels good for sore muscles. I memorized “Someday my prince will come” and started soloing over it (somewhat clumsily, but this will improve over time) and can fluently sightread “Well you needn’t” and feel way better on shell voicings in general.
It’s not that the songs themselves are hard, but I’m going slowly because there are so many new concepts to internalize and soak into my fingers, like being able to jump automatically into a shell voicing instead of laboriously plotting out the chord and then finding the 3rd and 5th and playing those. Some stuff is in my brain but not my hands; I can work it out but need to stop and think before I place my fingers. Some stuff is the other way ’round, like when my fingers automatically hit the right sharps and flats for each key when playing scales and simple chords but if you asked me what notes I just played and what key I’m in, I can’t tell you. I need to film my practice sessions so I can review my progress. I should also use my play-along book now that my CD drive works again, since I’m at the point for “Well you needn’t” where I should start playing with soloing; there are some licks from Kevin that I need to try out on it.
Spent most of today going around Boston with Melanie. We stopped by the library and grabbed a bunch of cooking textbooks. It was a sort of disappointing haul; I’d hoped to find the knife book, but at least we got a textbook with a great section on eggs, so breakfast tomorrow is going to rock. Dinner tonight rocked; apparently nobody in the house ate lunch, so when we landed at a Chinese restaurant for dinner, multiple massive plates of food were demolished with somewhat alarming speed. (And oh, the crispy bottoms of pan-fried dumplings. Glory.)
Melanie has also fallen in love with my guitar and is rapidly catching up to my paltry stock of skill on that particular instrument. That’s what we spent the rest of the day in Boston doing – trying out guitars, becuase she wants to save for one now. She has her eye on a particular Art & Lutherie Ami at Daddy’s Music, a small-bodied steel-string acoustic with a slim rosewood fingerboard and a solid cedar top. I’m not sure what the relevant specs are for guitars that you’re supposed to list, but she also likes the fact that it was blue. It sounds wonderfully warm and rich, and her first comment after playing was “this has a better tone than your guitar.” (I agree, but mine sounds pretty good and the small scale and portability are killer apps for me, so hey.) It’ll take something like a year, because she’s determined to get a nice instrument she’ll actually enjoy playing.
At this point, I had a flashback to myself at that age patiently saving for my first computer, a process that took almost 5 years – and how much I treasured that machine as a result. I hope that Melanie will someday have the same kind of “save for something you really want, then treasure it and use it all the time” experience, with a guitar or otherwise. It changed the way I looked at things I owned and things I wanted.
Oh, yes. The piano at my aunt’s house has some weird resonance things going on with the living room. (I think it’s also slightly out of tune.) And something strange happens to hot peppercorns when you don’t cook them quite right; they taste… metallic, like sour copper. I’m not sure how that’s caused or how to prevent or fix it, but it’s something to find out. And for some reason, I was quite conscious today of how different kinds of lightbulbs affect the feel and chroma (is that the right word?) of a space. It’s nice to notice things again. I guess this is what happens when you have a bit of breathing room and aren’t all consumed by panicking about work. I feel too young to be writing a sentence like that, but – well, there it is.
Tomorrow will be awesome. We’ve got Eggs: The Project for breakfast, as previously mentioned. Depending on the freshness of the eggs in the fridge, we’ll either have fried and poached eggs or soft-boiled and shirred eggs; either way, there will be scrambled eggs and possibly an omelet). And then the ILXO reunion at Sunset, which means I’ll be stuffed silly with nachos and root beer (yes, I know it’s not good for my cough, but you only live once) and possibly get to watch Coraline. Aside from the usual daily music and exercise stuff, there is nothing on my “have to do” list for tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to finding out what I actually do.
Ah, the wonderful feeling of abundance!
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Due to the impending Sugar 0.84 release and the need to have a simple answer to the question “does build X work?” Colin, Elsa, and I came up with the beginnings of a smoke test procedure over dinner on Thursday. This is meant to be a <20min sanity check for developers to make sure nothing horrible has exploded, and to verify that the build is functional enough to go on to more in-depth (and interesting) testing. It can also be used to verify that your new development/testing environment has been set up correctly, or as a quick (but boring) intro to Sugar’s basic functionality.
This smoke test only tests Sugar. It uses some Activities in Glucose to verify basic sugar functionalities, but it does not smoke test that Glucose Activities themselves work; we’d encourage Activity maintainers to make smoke tests for their Activities. We even started a howto write smoke tests, which will improve as we read other howtos on doing the same thing.
As you can see, these are still drafts and have just gotten to the point where they’re first usable. Edits/comments/criticism/help welcomed, both regarding the tests and the format they’re listed on in the wiki. (Cross-linking of features and tests to keep track of coverage is somewhat onerous right now, but I can’t think of a simpler way yet.)
Work on this will continue; I’ll be running these smoke tests myself on Monday and Tuesday during QA Party Time. One thing we’re in desperate need of is a link to step-by-step “here’s how to set up to test our latest build” directions. Can someone point us in the direction of whatever is considered canonical for this release?
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 | sugar | No Comments »
Ah, okay. So today’s todo list (at the end of this post) was a total epic fail, and Saturday’s list is going to be edited accordingly. Nothing on the list was time-sensitive (I made sure of that before I went “actually, what I’m doing now is better”) and so I got good stuff done – some Sugar QA infrastructure setup with Colin and Elsa that I need to document, my laptop being set up leaner and meaner for productivity.
I read things, and saw people I haven’t seen in ages, and played games with the family, so that was great. And scoured stains out of the big pot that had polymerized oil glommed onto its surface. That one took a while. I fell off the piano/exercise horse today (played guitar instead) and that’s fine; I’ll get back on tomorrow.
There are a lot of things I could do tomorrow; I’ll let those two activity lists hang out until I chew through them this weekend and early next week. Tomorrow, though, I’m leaving as Hang Out With Family day. I want to follow-up and document the stuff that Colin, Elsa, and I did tonight, and I want to return my library book (the last one – all the rest are already back at the BPL) and get my next big Round o’ Reading. That’s all I have to do; both of these things need to be timely. Well, that and piano and stretching. But the exercising and the music should be every day.
Things that would be nice to do: stuff from the two lists I’ve already made, and a few things which I’m going to experiment with; in lieu of saying “I’ll do X on this day,” I’m going to set them as prerequisites for things I’ll inevitably want/need to do. Before I do more graphics work in Gimp or Inkscape, I should be making my tablet work in Fedora (Why is there no /etc/X11/xorg.conf? It seems odd to not have that file at that location. I may be missing something obvious.) Before I next chat on IRC, I need to put up bip and bitlbee. And I can’t just copy things from my homedir backup to my laptop; I have to check it out from a vcs.
I’m hoping that need will drive me to do these things more than arbitrary deadlines with no meaning would. I’m feeling pretty good about my productivity over the last few days, and actually think that it’s been quite sustainable so far (instead of my usual “sprint ’till you collapse, then feel guilty about everything!”) so we’ll see how long I can stay on this horse… just gotta be gentle enough with myself that I can keep getting back on.
Bedtime.
Saturday, February 21st, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
One thing I’d forgotten about switching keyboard layouts: passwords become much more interesting to type.
I’m writing this post from my shiny new Fedora 10 install and figured I should list the tweaks I’m making to my vanilla install to make it feel like home. It’s surprisingly minimal, and I know most of the config files I have to save ahead of time. Dream scenario: I run a script on my old OS installation to grab config files into a nice .tar.gz, move that over to the new one on a thumbdrive, and run another script which installs the programs I need, then the plugins/extensions I like on them, and then spits custom config files into the right places. Instant customized laptop. It’s non-onerous enough that I don’t mind doing it manually, since I only do this every 6 months or so anyway. Here’s what it took to get my laptop feeling “normal” again.
- Set up accounts and permissions (give myself sudo, etc).
- yum install vim, emacs, git, svn, bzr, gobby, and wget. And Inkscape, for that matter; I sketch things in it often enough that Inkscape has joined the ranks of the “I assume this is present and need it to feel functional” programs, which is pretty neat. (Gimp was already preinstalled.)
- GNOME customization; get the right applets into the right panels in the right places, set up keyboard shortcuts (swap ctrl and capslock, make the Windows key launch a terminal, etc.) and install my favorite font family and change default window settings so that windows and fonts feel “the right size” to me. Set up keyboard configurations so I can swap between qwerty and dvorak.
- Install and configure Thunderbird and the quicktext extension, which is the killer feature for me.
- Install and configure XChat, which I like for limited screen space setups (like my 12″ laptop) where there’s only room to display one channel at a time. In a setup with more monitor real estate, I’d likely tile a workspace with irssi terminals; I think this is cjb’s setup.
- Get my Firefox shortcut bookmarks up, along with the few extensions I use regularly: session manager, del.icio.us (okay, this is more of an “I probably should use this regularly”) and scribefire. Adblock plus and download statusbar are also on the list.
- That’s it. I use a surprisingly small number of things on a daily basis, and my tweaks are relatively self-contained (and now documented!) My calendar and email archives are now on the web, most of my projects are on the web or available via externally hosted repositories, and it feels really nice to live so light.
The big thing I haven’t yet done is to mount my old homedir partition (though it probably says something that I’ve been going for most of a day without feeling the need to access any old files yet). This will give me useful things like my .bashrc and ssh keys. The reason I haven’t yet done it yet is that I… uh, might have accidentally overwritten that partition, because I’m an idiot and blithely clicked through default answers on the installer. Don’t worry; I backed up. The cockiness of knowing I backed up likely contributed to my “oh! I don’t need to pay attention!” bypass of partitioning stuff the way I should have. Eh. I will fix it… later.
Anyway, it might be a good opportunity to move most of my archives to version control. I’ve been intrigued by the idea of keeping your life (or your homedir, anyway) in vcs, and I would not be the first. We’ll have to see if I get excited enough to overcome inertia this time; I’ve been toying with the idea for nearly a year, but this is the first OS (re)install I’ve done since I began considering it seriously.
Saturday, February 21st, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I made a set of handy Firefox bookmark shortcuts for common Sugar Labs services based on the most useful of my OLPC bookmarks. These massively speed up the rate at which I’m able to find and process information, and others have found them helpful, so I’ve documented them for a broader audience. Here’s the full list of shortcuts; requests and suggestions for more are welcome.
I have similar quicktext autocompletes in Thunderbird, which is the secret sauce that lets me stay on top of floods of “I’m new and want to help!” emails. It lets me rapidly include things like wiki page and ticket URLs as well as longer common snips of text like “create a wiki account here, and see X, Y, and Z for tutorials on how to start editing” or “if you’re new to IRC, check out these resources” and “some good getting-started projects might be foo and bar.” I don’t know of similar autocompletes for other mail clients, but would love to be able to do this within pine or mutt (bonus points for autocomplete within the browser or the desktop, so that I could – for instance – autoexpand “sma” to give me a mailing list archive URL here, as I type this blog post).
If you want to get really ninja on your Sugar Labs information processing skillz, learning about mediawiki templates is a handy thing. We have a few on the SL wiki – for instance, the draft template. You can make more. Learn the keyboard shortcut for saving wiki pages (alt-shift-S) and enable edit-on-doubleclick in your wiki preferences. Learn to use xobot, which hangs out on the #sugar channels, if you find yourself repeating something in IRC over and over again. Basically, if you find yourself doing something over and over again, automate it.
These are the most useful shortcuts and tools I’ve accumulated over the last few years; I hope some things here will help people navigate the rapidly growing, changing jungle of information springing up as the Sugar Labs community grows.
Friday, February 20th, 2009 | sugar | No Comments »
At some point I should actually sit down and mix spice combinations into instant mashed potatoes and just try them out systematically. Yesterday’s balsamic vinegar pan sauce (with red wine) was awesome, and the pork chops turned out perfectly seared and juicy. However, the orange-cilantro reduction I tried to make to go with it was… not so awesome. And rosemary and orange peel do not go very well with a raw tomato pasta sauce, although that one was mixed up by Melanie – I put the caramelized carrots in, though, so the blame is partly mine. (Ginger and soy sauce help, though.)
I’ll be dropping a line to America’s Test Kitchen to see if they’d like a part-time equipment testing intern for a while. (This serves as the primary motivation to update my resume this weekend.) Being surrounded by food and cooking is something I would like to do at some point in my life – working a grunt job chopping vegetables in the back of a nice restaurant for a year, or spending a year in culinary school (honestly, I’d rather do the former and study with textbooks on my own at home). It’s not going to be my career, but it’s something that, if I don’t do it at some point, I’m going to always look back and wish I had. Equipment testing isn’t going to satisfy that craving, but it would be a start at peeking into that world; I don’t really know anyone who’s in the culinary profession, and I’d love to be able to geek out about that stuff with people who know more about it than I do.
I have several opportunities to practice my cooking over the next 1.5 months. The biggest one is that I’m on the pika mealplan this quarter, which gives me the chance to cook (mostly vegan) meals for a few dozen people each Tuesday – so here’s some stuff (to continue my string of list-making) I’d like to learn and practice while I’m doing that.
Knife skills. I should pick a set of recipes that call for ridiculous amounts of fine dice, juliennes, and many different kinds of weirdly shaped veggies and fruit, yank the CIA’s text on knife skills from the library, and go to town. This will probably apply across all the dinners I do.
I can haz flavr. I’d love to do a flavor combo dinner wherein relatively bland bases (bread, potatoes, rice, pasta) get their choice of mix-n’-match toppings and people can try a dozen different sauces in a meal. Of course, given that people are actually going to eat this, I probably won’t experiment as wildly as usual. The Flavor Bible might have some nice groupings to try, and I could actually do some of the classic sauces for the non-vegetarians in the house.
I want to learn how to make good stock. Given the predominance of vegetarians at pika, I will learn how to make vegetable stock and do a number of simple soups with that. Soup night! However, I’d like to make chicken, beef, and fish stock as well; maybe I’ll do this at my aunt’s house. I hear On Cooking and Cooking have awesome selections of basic recipes.
Ah, yes. Bread. I’d like to learn to bake a bunch of kinds of breads and rolls (for aforementioned “lots-o’-soup” dinner).
Pastry crust. I’d like to make at least one sweet pie (this may be a good excuse to finally go apple picking) and one savory thing with a pastry crust; I’m not sure what the latter thing will be yet (chicken pot pie is the only thing that comes to mind, but there must be something more interesting out there).
Handmade pasta. Including ravioli.
I also want to work on presentation, which I’ve utterly ignored to date. With luck, I’ll be photographing the food I cook.
Friday, February 20th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Since the small-todolist thing is working out quite well, I figure maybe Saturday (in between hanging out with family) I might be able to…
- Put my todo list in emacs org-mode in another good-faith attempt to try out that editor (seriously, there’s got to be a reason so many people like it, but I haven’t gotten over the “but it’s not vim!” part yet)
- Move the projects that I host to other places; why bother keeping up infrastructure? If I’m playing with things like gitosis, I should do it for a project; there’s no reason to have a Mel-specific code repository. Be a better lazy bum.
- Write character sketches for TWITMWI. Post them. (They’ll be awful. That’s fine.)
- Poke the ProjectVRM folks and see if I can pop into visit and find out what they’re doing. This curiosity has festered long enough.
- 150 pushups throughout the course of the day. Reflect on how the people at crossfit are utterly insane.
- Solo on the A section of “Well You Needn’t.”
- Ask about lifecamp-NYC locations for April 11th. All day Saturday, lifehacking unconference, w00t. Throw up a wiki for that while you’re at it. And an excellent excuse to finally see Sumana’s standup comedy presentation!
That’s all guaranteed to get done; this later stuff might not. Not all of it will happen, in any case.
- I’d like to try out Eclipse and its purported “it hooks up with version control! it has lots of features! it contains plentiful magic!” stuff by writing a patch for either the IRC Activity (SJ is right; it needs a name that isn’t “IRC,” but XoIRC seems narrowly inaccurate) or TracBacks. I’m usually a minimalist and throw open a couple terminals and just edit code in vim, but I have allowed myself to be happily spoiled by nice IDEs before. They’ve never stuck more than a few months, though. Yet.
- Check out liquidpcb by making my own clone of the AVR business card. I’m not actually going to use this as a business card; it costs too much. But it would be awesome.
- Try building a SMW-based test case system in a clean sandbox mediawiki installation – sort of a “if you were to remake it from scratch now that you’ve used the first iteration for a while…” experiment. Document the creation process as a public service, and because you tend to document everything anyway.
However, I should clean my inbox on Saturday. It’s down to a backlog of 246; I didn’t really chip away at it today.
Even if I’ve been quiet on IRC and mailing lists for the last 2 weeks as I’ve crawled out of being miserable and sick, it’s been very inspiring – and heartening – to see my friends continuing to make progress on Sugar and OLPC, steadily being Awesome. Sean marches forth with marketing; Walter (how does he have time for this?) keeps turning out new versions of TurtleArt. Cjb keeps the wheels of OLPC’s software turning. GuruFest takes shape as Colin makes arrangements with guest speakers, Yifan is working on the CFS XS, and every time I turn around, Mick’s made more things in the Activity infrastructure work. And Tomeu and Simon are nuts; there are no other words for it. They’re everywhere. They’re doing the work of at least 10 men apiece. I can’t even keep up with all the things they’re doing. And there are many more, and other friends who are likewise right now a bit more in the background than usual (new jobs, job hunting, life).
You know what? OLPC feels like what I think a first breakup would feel like. We’re still friends and all, but it’s no longer the Giant Huge Defining Factor in my life. It’s an important project-friend, but now it’s also one of many. And I’m rediscovering old buddies (like sci-fi writing) I’d neglected in my prior infatuation. Strange. But good. And interesting to watch the resettling into unstable equilibria.
Woo! Backup’s done – Fedora install time!
Friday, February 20th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
