Morning

Chris Grams (New Kind), Jonathan Opp (Red Hat), and John Adams (Red Hat) visited the FAD this morning and spent several hours answering all sorts of questions from us on branding, how they created the Red Hat brand, their impressions of Fedora’s brand, and so forth. The full transcript of this conversation is available in the logs. Some highlights:

• Jonathan Opp: “Speak not as a crowd of voices, but a chorus of voices. Everyone is playing different parts, but everyone sounds great together… in the same key.”
• Chris Grams: “[The brand book for Red Hat] was never designed to be an enforcement tool, (it’s) meant to be an empowerment tool, to start a conversation, to tell a story that would get people excited at being able to extend this – not ‘what’s the set of rules for what I can and can’t say.’”
• John Adams: “The tendency is to think of brand as soft and fluffy. that’s a misperception… there is a very data-driven way to measure how effective branding is… what do you want to be associated with?”
• Ben Williams (in response to Nelson Marquez’s comment that Fedora is the son of Red Hat): “I would say Fedora is the father to RHEL.” Paul Frields: “And the son has an incredibly lucrative job.”
• David Nalley: “From a user perspective, ‘innovation engine’ sounds a lot like an euphenism for ‘beta.’”

Afternoon

I think I’ll just link to the exhaustive brainstorm notes with action items that onsite and remote attendees tag-teamed to generate and point people towards the Gobby doc if they want to see the bizarre rainbow of diverse contributors editing each other mid-sentence… how I wish we had a playback feature for Gobby like etherpad, because that would have been spectacular to see.

The driving question for the brainstorm: “What metrics can we gather right now to tell us how well our brand is doing and what direction we might want to go in?”

Evening

The evening’s “Late Late Show” was packaging 101 – for most people, that is. I took it to read through the logs and recap today’s FAD events by doing things such as writing this blog post, so I’m hoping that someone else who was actually learning packaging will give a rundown of what happened there. ;-)

Best segment of the day

For me, this was the part I took away the most from. Transcript follows:

John Adams: I’ve seen frameworks where you have a user base defined, and then you start developing insights about that audience. Once you have those in hand, then you think about the benefits of your product. “We know that X Y and Z are compelling, and we can match or exceed those things with A B and C. The reasons we can back that up are the following tangible things we can point to.”
Max Spevack: At what point do you think Fedora might be reaching a steady-state in its branding?
*the Red Hat brand folks laugh*
John Adams: We’ve been doing that for Red Hat for 10 years.
Chris Grams: It takes a very long time to build a brand. You must have patience, there are no shortcuts. The key is that you don’t get anywhere without repeating the same things over and over. The #1 association of the Red Hat brand is with Linux… work on associating Red Hat with open source has been going on for about 9 years, and it’s still developing. It can be 5, 10 years before it’s really accepted. Chris Grams: One litmus test is “do people in this room even agree on it?” Because if everyone in this room isn’t on the same page, that says something.
John Adams: Part of the marketing instinct is to say “oo, new stuff,” but people using your stuff every day don’t care so much about new and fresh sometimes. They’re using it, it works – so you have to fight the instinct to go “oo we have to do something new and fresh all the time.” Make sure your stuff works for people now. Be timeless.

How did we do during the F12 cycle? What was good – what could be better? You’ll see lots of ideas for improvement here, as well as things we’re happy about. Please add your thoughts! Here are some of ours…

Things that went well

1. The Marketing team has been a great example of a team coming to maturity “the open source way.” We’re not swooping in “from above” to solve a problem; we’re building a community of contributors to do and learn and teach Fedora marketing, with radical transparency as a cornerstone.
2. The beginning of one-page release notes: “It was a much better projection of our core values and the way we portrayed ourselves than we’ve ever done in the past.”
3. Our deliverables now “show source” – in the past, from the standpoint of a user, marketing wasn’t very visible – there was no identity of who was behind it or how to get involved, deliverables “just appeared.” Now deliverables have things like “this was created by the marketing team (JOIN OUR LIST) using this procedure (LOOK AN SOP) and you can help (JOIN THE TEAM)” embedded in them, so people can more easily trace things back to us and start helping out as well.

Also a plus that wasn’t listed in the postmortem: attending a hockey game after the first day of the FAD. (Photo CC-BY-SA from Neville Cross, featuring Ryan Rix on the left and David Nalley on the right.)

Things we need to do better in F13 (and beyond) – this is stuff we can actually commit to now.

1. Fix the home and Join pages of each team (which is our game plan for between Beta and GA already). “People show up with random ideas and need to understand the context within which ideas become reality in FOSS.”
2. Catalogue barriers to entry – we think IRC and wikis are normal, but they are not for most people (and then we wonder why more contributors don’t show up). Of note: “there are certainly tools that are at least as complex as IRC within commercial marketing environments – how are they dealing with that challenge?”
3. Actually work on press kits – we have little notion of what they are or how to make them, and we should bring more of this process out to the community.

Not listed in the postmortem but also important to consider during the remainder of the F13 cycle: BBQ consumption. (Photo CC-BY-SA from Robyn Bergeron; going from front right arcing around through the semicircle to front left, it’s Henrik Heigl, Paul Frields, Ryan Rix, David Nalley, Mel Chua, Ben Williams, Neville Cross, Max Spevack, and Russell Harrison.)

Things we’d like to do in the future, but may or may not have the bandwidth for – this is the “if I’m looking to start contributing to Marketing, this list has good things to pick up on” list.

1. Make a marketing materials archive location (for things like past release deliverables, videos, slide decks…)
2. Create a press.fp.o landing page.
3. Ambassadors are getting the same questions over and over; if we can capture these, that list will tell us what things we need to be answering.

And this is what we actually look like when we’re working. (Photo CC-BY-SA from Robyn Bergeron: from left to right, Ryan Rix, Ben Williams, Neville Cross, and Max Spevack.)

1. An enthusiastic classroom teacher who “gets” Sugar and open source, is excited about integrating Sugar into her curriculum and having her students participate in the upstream Sugar Labs community, and is in constant contact with…
2. …a local deployment support team with ties and familiarity with the Sugar Labs and Fedora communities and the ability to introduce the teacher and her students to them, hands-on troubleshooting experience, the ability to document events so that they make sense to both educators and engineers, and a quick QA feedback loop with…
3. …SoaS developers with expertise in creating and customizing not just the SoaS software but the build and release engineering infrastructure needed to get it out the door on a regular and timely basis, who are aware of and responsive to the needs of the students and willing to adjust the software frequently and on-the-fly to make things work out for that classroom, and…
4. …the small number of students in it, who all have their own SoaS stick (small number, 100% coverage) and are working to not just understand the open source community but to actively participate in it, with the blessing of…
5. …school administrators and parents, who remain fully aware of what is going on at all times so that the learning can, when possible, extend into their homes (which all have computers) and beyond, and…
6. …the hardware for the pilot itself chosen specifically for its compatibility with SoaS so everything will work out-of-the-box, with…
7. …no funding/resource problems with all hardware purchased ahead of time, time volunteered, and a bit of discretionary budget for other needs that might crop up at…
8. …a series of weekly deployment check-ins between developers and the support crew, between the support crew and the teacher and her students, between the deployment and support crew and the larger Sugar Labs community, between the teacher and the parents of her students, but only…
9. …for a limited time, with the understanding by all parties that this is an experiment and that our biggest contribution to the Sugar Labs community is finding out whether it works or not, and demonstrating how and why – and of course,
10. wonderful, supportive, informed upstream communities – in this case, Sugar Labs and Fedora (since SoaS is a Fedora Spin).

Which is exactly why the CFS pilot was set up the way it’s been set up. We’re not really working under realistic limitations – what we’re doing will largely not scale. But much of it will. And we’re trying to pull together the different components and show how they interrelate – by blogging, by slowly starting to find the right mailing lists to talk on, by experimenting with different ways we can all cope with data overload (for instance, Lynne May didn’t really start blogging until I put scribefire on her laptop – the tiny decrease in activation energy was enough). 

Now if only we had a test case system. Note to self: stop being such a slacker in this department and get smw up already! If anyone would like to help me pick up on the smw-based test case management system project, let me know. It’s something I can easily mentor, but don’t have a lot of time to actually do myself.

I’m also having some trouble getting a good VM-based test setup going so I can quickly verify SoaS bugs being reported without having to get a spare stick, a spare laptop, boot things, etc… I’ll try again when the next nightly build comes out, and if that doesn’t work, will actually post a detailed trouble ticket. (Right now the chances that it might be the image’s fault rather than my setup’s fault are reasonably high.)

And Trac mail notifications have been… inconsistent, at best. Sometimes, when a ticket is created or commented on, and I own that ticket, I do not get email notices. It’s not my spam filters; I checked those first. Still trying to track this behavior and narrow it down so that it isn’t intermittent; I am not sure what triggers this (apparent) bug, or if there’s a way to see (on Trac’s end) whether it thinks it’s sending me an email each time.

Good things happening, always more things to fix – such is the nature of life, and the nature of satisfying work.

My “recaps” generally consist of TL;DR data overload, so here are the complete logs from the day – I’m very proud that we transcribed everything (just about) that went on. Mel standpoints also acknowledge that complete logs don’t get read, so here’s a summary of Robyn describing the morning (capped off by Max making a lovely wastebasket basket from across the room).

Deliverables from the FAD’s first day are trickling across Planet (and mailing lists), so I’ll just do my top-three list of things we accomplished and learned…

1. WE HAZ A MARKETING PLAN! (draft. wiki link coming shortly) The remarkable thing about this is not so much “we haz a plan,” but in the manner we are going about doing it – there’s a lot of open debate, as much transparency as we can muster, all our rationales and arguments are logged, etc – so nobody will have to look at this plan later and go “um, where did this come from? What were they thinking?” This is particularly important because we’re figuring out this “open marketing” thing as we go along, and are inevitably Getting Things Wrong – so this is our equivalent of “here’s the source code, patches welcome.”
2. That we are figuring out this “open marketing” thing as we go along. We’re not just marketing open source products (or even a community), we’re also going about this in a very open source way. The mix of backgrounds in the room helps; people with formal marketing background explain terms to those who don’t, and vice versa. We’re constantly checking each other’s assumptions of what people “should” understand by default.
3. We have a better grasp of what we don’t know. We have empty spaces and questions in our deliverables that point out our blind spots – so it’s less and less a “we don’t know that we don’t know” and more and more a “we know this is somewhere but that we do not know it,” which is usually a precursor to… well, knowing

And things we could do better on today.

1. Conversation balance – if you’re talking, listen more; if you’re listening, speak up more. If you’re transcribing, call for help more; if you’re not, help out.
2. Infrastructure – hopefully the phone does not drop quite so much today as it did yesterday…
3. Remotee participation – we did a heroic job of trying to keep remote folks in the loop, but sometimes we forget that it’s hard for listeners not in the room to get a word in edgewise. They can’t raise their hand to remind us of their presence. So we made signs – now on 3 of the 4 walls of the room, so everyone can see one at all times. (adapted from a photo by Ryan Rix)

The sign says: “REMEMBER THE REMOTEES!” – then the three speech bubbles on the three people-figures say “#fedora-fad,” “Fedora Talk,” and “asynch on wiki and lists” (to remind us of where people are), and then instructions to “Transcribe! Slow down, speak up. Describe with your words, not just your hands. Solicit participation. LISTEN.” (This is 1 of 3 posters; the others are variants on the same theme.) Thanks to Karsten (who is a remotee, yay!) for the poster text, and for the reminder.

Remotees, what were your impressions? How can we help you participate better? (Is that last sentence even grammatically correct?)

On the agenda for the day:

1. F12 postmortem
2. What are our goals and thoughts for the future, both short-term and long-term?
3. OLE TIME BBQ (om nom nom nom)
4. Marketing plan
5. Market research
6. CAROLINA HURRICANES (wooooooooooo hockey)
7. The Late Late Show: David and Ryan teach everyone who’s still awake how to package PHP libraries. I suspect I will be playing the role of Obsessive Documenter once again, since I learn things by documenting them.

Everyone else is already up and about in the lobby, and I’m about to go join them right after I post this – I got my customary couple hours o’ sleep and then woke up before my 6:30am alarm, decided to spend the morning time jogging around the shopping center parking lot (discovery: Raleigh does not have sidewalks) and looking for hearing aid batteries (success!) and now… it’s time to go and join the party.

Rock it!

And glory do I have a lot of things to do. In order of priority (at least as my mind is thinking about them at the moment – the Flywheel of Momentum is still accelerating):

1. POSSE
2. Assorted CSEET followup
3. opensource.com/education article(s)
4. Marketing deliverables; I have been Slacky McSlackster on this lately
5. Marketing non-deliverables: FI status as well as the Summer Coding swap. Again, Slacky McSlackster.
6. SLOBs duties – for which I volunteered a bit this week.
7. taxes (one of the downside of having a less-than-stable life: they get more complicated than my actual income for the year 2009 warrants)
8. A bunch of overdue tickets in my RT queue
9. A bunch of Olin followup
10. Prep-tacularness for three weeks at Allegheny, coming shortly.

In other news, I’m back in gear. Yar! A giant thank-you to the Teschs this week for putting up with me – pictures/videos forthcoming, along with CSEET notes. I may at some point need to rent a car for the weekend and come down from Meadville to see the other Olin folks – I need to buy Bonnie dinner again, and Katie says there’s dancing in Pittsburgh, which I would very much like to attend (though I did not bring my dancing shoes) and Matt has offered to use his shiny new pilot’s license to take me up and – well, it’ll be good to see these folks again. Dellin and Aasted and Kristen are also thereabouts.

After a stopover in Detroit (apparently Michigan is between Pennsylvania and North Carolina), I’m finally in Raleigh once again, in the room I’m sharing with Robyn Bergeron for the Marketing FAD. Sleep is not especially predicted; the two of us are notorious night owls, a fact corroborated by #fedora-mktg timestamps. Everyone’s tired right now, though, so after the traditional “David Nalley arriveth” Waffle House run, we all slumped back to our rooms to be unconscious.

Assorted imagery from the last few days:

The Mr. Rogers computer terminal exhibit runs Windows, apparently. As evidenced by the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library crash.

Pittsburgh: it is extremely pretty.

Even during overcast days. There were both hawks and helicopters circling overhead – the city’s at the confluence of two rivers, there’s a football stadium named after ketchup, there is a church that turned into a brewery…

Yep. Church that turned into a brewery. See that up near the altar? Tanks. Of beer.

And then the dancing fountain that kept me entertained during my Detroit layover.

Not particularly eloquent or beautiful, but memory snippets that’ll help me remember what I was seeing and thinking during the week – most of my brain was incoherent for the past few days, so these are the bits that actually make sense.

Tummy all full with Waffle House now. Going to bed.

Community research – how to predict whether a chatroom’s going to stay alive. This is the kind of stuff I’d like to learn how to do.

Via Uncle Tom, a scientific look at what makes good teaching.

Found my birthday present, thanks to Liz. It looks like Ginneh’s going to be doing the course with me, and with luck I should have my license right around the time I turn 24. (I will wear a helmet. I will wear a helmet. I will wear a helmet at all times.) Actually, the class is half my birthday present; something like this is going to be the other half. Regardless of the kind of bike I get, I’m spending extra on a good helmet and a ridiculous bright-yellow riding suit – the kind that has reviews like “yeah, I was hit by a truck and walked away.” I’m trying to be sensible about the risks I take; I do want to kitesurf and wingsuit and all that, but I also want to have a nice, full life ahead of me.

I’m feeling sleepy (this is very good – last night is the first night this week I was actually able to sleep, and I’m going to go back and be unconscious again now) and hungry (also good!) and generally mostly back to normal, which means yay work yay!!!! will happen again once I regain consciousness for the second time today. Yay!

One of the nice things about staying with friends over staying in a hotel is that they keep me looped into a more-like-normal-person rhythm. “Mel, the glass of water in front of you that you just filled, you should… drink it.” “Mel, have you had dinner?” “Mel, sleep is good for you.” Should I stop reading and/or staring out the window? Go outside? Eat? As long as I follow Matt and Bonnie around, I can be confident that I’m adhering to some kind of reasonably humanoid life-script. Matt also has a tendency to occasionally look up 47 hours after starting work and go “oh, um… wait, have I had food yet?” – we worked together on projects in college and… well, the sleeping didn’t happen quite as much as it perhaps should have – but Bonnie is quite good at countering that.

One of the things that Bonnie and I were talking about over dinner last night (as noted previously) were the books we liked as kids. I actually didn’t fully get into my textbook (well, good textbook) phase until high school, though I’d occasionally ask for them for Christmas in middle school. Around 12 or 13 or so I went through a classic lit stage where I read – largely out of obligation – pretty much everything by Dickens and the Bronte sisters and Austen and et al, all the while going “these books would all be so much shorter if people in them just talked to each other.”

Afterwards, I decided that I didn’t really care to read them much again now that my “you should read these books” obligation had been discharged. Instead, I beelined for Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Heinlein, Ellison, Gibson – and went into my sci-fi/fantasy phase. I was also something of a Shakespeare nut in 6th grade, thanks to Mr. Panitch. And I went through a renaissance when I discovered good science and tech writing – Lewis Thomas, Alan Lightman, Richard Feynman, Neal Stephenson (In the Beginning was the Command Line – I still have not read Cryptonomicon.) I walked rapt through the hallways reading Darwin, unwilling to put down The Origin of Species, because my 12-year-old mind was floored by the concept that people could think this way, people could see this way, that all the aching beauty that I felt in numbers, figures, gizmos, textbooks, all that sense of play – was something that these people had also experienced, and more acutely and maturely than myself, and written down. Somehow they caught that feeling in their words, and when I read, I realized, comfortingly, that I was not alone.

I also went through this phase in my life, starting around the age of 11, where I read a lot of screenplays. To back up, for context: I grew up with a hearing loss. I rely largely upon lipreading. Television and film… do not work so well. (Except for foreign films, the one exception – those came with built-in subtitles.) It was around the time I was 10 or 11 or so that closed-captioning arrived in my neighborhood. Or more precisely, the next-door neighbors got a new TV that had it, and I would sometimes go and stand in their backyard just to watch the captions through their sliding glass porch door – hey, wow, these talking heads, they say things!

Once I caught onto the notion that films and TV shows could have interesting dialogue, and that this could be a factor in choosing them for entertainment (over visuals/special-effects/explosions, which was my previous criteria – Power Rangers, etc) I started to discover scripts for plays. And movies. I think it may have been a “screenplays” section in a bookstore or… I’m not sure exactly how or when I made the connection that Movies Have Scripts, and that Sometimes These Scripts Are Available, and that reading them beforehand gives me a pretty good idea of what the film is about and enables me to understand that film when I go watch it later (without captions, usually), but once it clicked, BAM.

I started reading screenplays – words that made you think in pictures (because I do think in pictures). I started writing them, and they were awful; instead of writing essays for my 6th grade English class, I opted whenever possible to make a film instead. I had no editing software or equipment other than a cheap tape camera… so these movies featured such advanced technologies as “rolling credits over background” == plastic wrap + sharpie being pulled up in front of the lens, and “in-scene music” == off-screen radio. One film – they were usually co-authored and co-filmed with my friend Becky – cast my brother Jason and her sister Molly as the villains (and then we wondered why they were reluctant to play their parts). Another was a fake documentary about a day in the life of my sign language interpreter. Another was a remake of The Three Little Pigs shot with stuffed animals instead. I also used Microsoft Paint to make an animated movie about… I think it may have been Malaysia. Or Singapore. Not sure exactly.

I was also rabid about special effects and props. If there was a “making-of” book for a movie I’d enjoyed, I would go to the bookstore and stand by the shelf and read it right there; I read about rendering the unique specular qualities of skin for Final Fantasy (bad movie, nifty tech) and how the Death Star battle sequences were filmed for Star Wars; I learned about stop-motion and body doubles and different sorts of shots and clever editing that could make things look real. How lightsabers were made and actors trained to fight and the “light” part of the lightsaber inserted in postproduction; how CG Treebeard was composited with mechatronic-hand-holding-hobbit-actors, how virtual hairdryers were attached to the feet of Shrek and Donkey so that the grass would part before their feet as they walked through a field. Even to this day I’ll watch, say, Surf’s Up with Audrey and then proceed to gawk over the handheld “camera” rig they made to give the film a documentary-style feel. It’s storytelling-supporting magic, and I love storytelling.

I followed up on this in high school by doing A/V tech workstudy, successfully applying for that at a time when most of my classmates were doing things like wiping down cafeteria tables or whatnot. Learned the names of lots of plugs and cameras and interfaces (which I’ve since forgotten), lighting (which I’m decent at) and mics (which I’m really bad at, for obvious reasons – I have no basis on which to gauge the quality of my setup), did more editing in Adobe Premiere than I really care to remember, playing with the green screen. Didn’t really have time to keep up with it, though, so it faded. I did 48-Hour Film Competition in college (with the Somervillains team – mostly as a storyboarder) but otherwise, that was… about it.

In terms of making, anyway. I will still read scripts and screenplays – sometimes because I’m in a bookstore and I’m bored, sometimes just for fun, sometimes because I’m going to a movie with friends without captioning and need to get the dialogue in my short-term memory first. It also works for plays. In fact, this is what I do before each summer’s showing of Shakespeare on the Commons – I head to Project Gutenberg, print out the script in the tiniest font I’m able to read, read the script on the train on the way in, watch the play with friends, re-read the script on the way back… the three memories (two text, one show) overlap to produce a pretty good approximation. I’d also sit reading a movie script in the background when my friends were watching something in the lounge and I didn’t want to bother them with subtitles.

It’s also faster that way – I read faster than movies play. So sometimes I’ll read a screenplay instead of watching a movie I’m not sure I will like. If I like the screenplay and can’t imagine certain parts of the movie, then I’ll watch the movie.

Away from Her is a great script. Now I just have to find the movie.

“…as people are introduced to tech tools, they have to deal with the issue of option overload. I think its a good exercise to learn that often you only care about a few key options.”

I’m hoping that the “blog paper” templates (and the “trac ticket” templates, too!) will be posted up under a CC-BY-SA license sometime soon – I’m pretty sure that’s the intent. They’re very simple. In the meantime, the students have begun to post, and have also started to get comments on their blogs – which is very exciting for them. I need to learn how to set up a Planet-like feed aggregator for the class (suggestions welcome – I’d like something a bit more recent that isn’t abandonware, as Planet itself hasn’t been touched for several years).

Without further ado, here are the kids, under their “Sugar Names.” If you read the comments, you’ll notice their parents are also getting into the act. ;-)

• E.L.U.
• Amethyst
• Jay
• Ash
• L34
• Rosey
• Claire
• Ron Weezlee (yes, it’s spelled that way)
• Spike

They’re still getting used to blogging and haven’t gotten to the point of submitting their first bug reports yet, but I’m told that a few have since been discovered, so perhaps tomorrow (the next “upstream day” – where the class circles around to think about what they have done with SoaS over the past week and figures out what and how they want to report back upstream) we will hear more.

1. rediscovered that I’m really bad at sleeping (big surprise, I know)
2. went down to Hollywood Video to try and find a movie (also, Bonnie wanted to watch the new Star Trek one, which I haven’t seen yet) and discovered that the location nearest their apartment was closed
3. climbed a hill and watched the sunset instead
4. …then discovered that they lock the gates at sunset, so instead of walking all the way around to find the open gate, I shrugged and scaled the fence
5. (but climbed carefully down instead of leaping like I normally would have because I’m trying to be less extraordinarily stupid at the moment, and also because I didn’t want to accidentally rip my brand-new Olin sweater)
6. also on the “be less extraordinarily stupid” front, got back to Bonnie’s apartment as night fell instead of walking through the (unfamiliar) streets of Pittsburgh in the dark, which is my usual (although very idiotic) habit when I first meet a new city
7. played Matt’s guitar, which is standard-size and therefore too big for me (I have tiny hands)
8. ate Filipino food, which was both comforting and tasty
9. talked with Bonnie about books we’d liked when we were kids
10. generally speaking, took a breather and (I think) regained some functionality (will find out tomorrow whether this is the case).

Life is pretty good. Pittsburgh is a noisy city – it’s got a lot of hills and a lot of little houses, and it used to have a lot of snow but it got warm and the snow melted, so I was slushing up and down through snow today, and it felt good to run and my socks didn’t get soaked through enough to start being uncomfortable. There’s sunshine here, and when the sun went down the whole sky lit up like it had caught on fire and someone had thrown a red blanket over it to smother out the flames, and the blanket had gotten snagged up in the trees – just lovely, especially with the traffic streaking past under the bridge. I dunno; there’s just something about cities that I like, and it’s good to just stand outside and breathe in the pulse of them. Granted, that probably means breathing in a lot of traffic exhaust too, but… y’know, it’s a city. (And less smog-tastic equipment is getting installed/used/driven every day, so that’s a good trend.)

Taking time to rest is an extremely good idea – I’m going to go and try to do the sleeping thing again now, because I’ve been extraordinarily bad about it for the past week or so, and I am really tired. If there is one ability that I’ve come to appreciate over the years, it’s that no matter what the rest of my brain may be doing, I can always look around at things and go “ooh, shiny!” and be easily amused.

To that end, it’s easy to cook a perfect egg atop a bowl of chili when you invert a second bowl almost perfectly over it (leave it a bit off-center so the steam can escape) – it makes a little pocket of hot steam that circles back around and cooks the egg just right. Mm, thermodynamics.

Okeydokey. Bedtime.