Older blog entries for Skud (starting at number 133)

San Diego. The Perl Conference 5.0. Highlights:

  • The weather's great... kind of like Melbourne, warm and dry.
  • We managed to get this amazing penthouse suite, completely by chance. We've been having parties every night.
  • Caught up with a bunch of friends (and got to know some of them lots better, yay)
  • Met a few new friends
  • Met some "big names" who said nice things about me when we were introduced. It's great when you're all paranoid about going up to someone important, then as you approach they're all "Skud! Wonderful to meet you!" Ego-affirming.
  • Presented yesterday. Got good reviews.
  • Got wireless working on my laptop. I'm sitting in a session right now, and doing email and IRC and stuff. It's great.
  • Had my photo taken by supersnail. I've posted some of the good ones on my site. Here they are.
  • I've also posted the #perl photos

Lowlights:

  • The Microsoft vs Open Source debate/panel/etc yesterday. Dull as hell. Should have slept through it. I had hoped that it would either be nasty or funny, but it was neither.
  • The hotel's a long way from anywhere, and we have to find our own lunch today.
  • The water tastes crappy

Home to Ottawa tomorrow morning, then off to Amsterdam for YAPC::Europe, then off to Pennsic the week after.

Pennsic sewing frenzy is peaking. Eeek. Gotta get it mostly done in the next week.

Went to a yoga class today. I need to be more flexible.

Reading: Umberto Eco's "Name of the Rose".

Eating: Ma Po Tofu. Yum.

Long time no diary. *shrug*

Sitting at home watching '80s teen rebellion movies ("Pump up the volume", "Heathers") and eating chinese takeaway.

I bought a tent today, for Pennsic and other such camping events. It was a bit of a saga, but eventually we found the right poles and stuff.

I read "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" last night. Almost didn't make it past the first chapter or so. That abusive family he was staying with freaked me out. And this is meant to be a *kids* book?

It's Canada Day Weekend this weekend. Everyone has their flags out and stuff. Looks like being a bigger event than Australia Day, but then I guess Canada has the whole ultra-defensive "We're not the US!" thing much harder than Australia does, and perhaps doesn't have quite such a strong "Invasion Day" thing going on this particular day. On many levels, Aboriginal affairs in Canada and Australia seem quite similar, but I don't *think* the general population of Canada feel that little tug of guilt on July 1st as Australians do on January 26th.

More rain.

Spent most of the day in bed today. I woke up fine, then as I was reading email and stuff and getting ready to head into work, a humungous headache hit. I ended up crawling into bed and sleeping for most of the afternoon. It seems to have sorted itself out now, which is a Good Thing. Checking an online health site seems to indicate that this headache (and last night's near-identical one) may in fact be migraines. I've never suffered from migraines before.

I really need to do dishes. *sigh*

Just returned (well, OK, a day or so back) from New York City, where I was giving some presentations about e-smith to NYLUG and NY.pm. Stayed with Tori (a friend from Usenet) and spent most of my time shopping and looking around at stuff. The shopping gets 10/10, the Cloisters museum (medieval part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) gets 10/10, but NYC overall gets the thumbs down. It was smelly and dirty and just icky. I would never want to live there, and I don't even have any urgent wish to visit again, though I'm sure I will sometime.

Realised over the weekend that Pennsic is sneaking up on me. I need to start sewing. Argh.

It's raining today, which is a good thing. We really need it.

Yesterday afternoon I went for a walk down by the river and discovered a beach. It's not much of a beach, but it's at least as good as the beach at Warneet, where I spent most of my holidays as a kid. I should find out if there's anywhere nearby that I can hire a canoe to paddle round in.

Reading: "The Book on the Bookshelf" by Henry Petroski. It's about the history of bookshelves. Really.

23 Mar 2001 (updated 23 Mar 2001 at 06:28 UTC) »

Mmmm, vegetables. Made a thai vegie stir fry with all kinds of good stuff in it. I can feel my arteries unclogging.

Spring is in the air. It rained today, and it wasn't the freezing kind. And nature is blooming in glorious shades of... well, brown, actually. Apparently the green starts happening in about a month.

Work today was mostly meetings. Did some docco in the morning, then into the office, and had a loooooong meeting about the status of the next version. It was pretty good actually. One of my assigned tasks was essentially "ponder and brainstorm" and I had some useful suggestions to make, so that was good. Some of the docco I'm doing is stalled waiting for the developers to actually write the stuff, so in my stalled periods I'm working on a bunch of HOWTO documents and also some more theoretical/descriptive papers for the .org site. I drew a little map of what docco relies on what other docco being updated, and it turns out that I have to update just about *everything*.

I also had to figure out how to work my health insurance. I need to visit a doc for my shoulder. Since I'm on an interim insurance plan until I qualify for OHIP (that takes 3 months) it seems that all I do is go to the doctor, keep the receipts, and claim it afterwards. Easy. I'll go see the doc tomorrow. Any money s/he tells me to stop typing :-/

After the round of meetings there was a happy-maternity-leave thingy for one of the finance people who's going to have twins. I grabbed a slice of chocolate cake then dashed off, because I had an Irish dancing class to attend.

I've done some Irish set dancing before, but it's been run by people from a folk dance background, not from a competitive Irish dance background. This class is run by the latter type, so we spent most of the session learning how to do certain footwork, then just 15 minutes at the end putting it together into (part of) a dance. Coming from an SCA dance background, with a bit of random folk dancing thrown in, I'm used to dances being described like this:

Double up and back, set and turn left, repeat with S&T left, mirror hey, sidings etc in the same format as the doubles, hey holding hands, armings etc, crossover hey.

(that's an entire dance -- Grimstock, from Playford, which we used to dance lots in Stormhold). Everyone groks it, and you can dance it pretty much in its entirety with maybe 3 minutes preparation explaining the heys to those who haven't done that dance before.

On the contrary, this Irish dance class took FIFTEEN MINUTES to get everyone understanding the following:

Advance and retire, sevens and threes right, advance and retire, sevens and threes left.

And that's gotta be just the first figure of a dance that should be *at least* three times that length. *sigh*. I'm used to doing up to six full dances an hour, or maybe only two or three if there are newbies, so this was INCREDIBLY SLOW. On the other hand, I got plenty of opportunity to improve my footwork.

And in tonight's review of strange Canadian television: "Yvon of the Yukon". It's a half hour cartoon, ostensibly about a French explorer in the 17th century who discovers the north-west passage then accidentally gets frozen. Sometime later (like, now-ish), he's defrosted when a huskie pisses on him. And that's all explained in the opening credits. Then it gets *really* strange. It's kind of like Northern Exposure meets Les Visiteurs meets The Simpsons.

Coming up next: Are You Being Served. Wow, I haven't seen this since before I was old enough to understand most of the jokes. I saw that To The Manor Born was going to be on earlier tonight, so I watched it, and found that it was the first ep. I saw that just recently in .au when it was on the ABC, but I didn't see more than a couple of eps beyond that. I thought I was going to see something new, but oh well. Haven't seen TTMB since I was a kid, really. It's quite good. Unlike AYBS (she says as she watches the opening scenes) which, to be honest, is BLOODY AWFUL.

Things I hate: websites where you have to uncheck their "spam me" checkbox to avoid them sending you email all the time, then when you make an error on your details (like, say, a postal code that doesn't conform to the US format) they present you with the same form again, with your details filled in as you had them, EXCEPT they've rechecked the damn "spam me" checkbox.

Other things I hate: ex-co-habitants who can't manage to contact the real estate agents and say "Yup, take out money for carpet cleaning etc from our bond, that's cool" for SIX TO EIGHT WEEKS. Apparently, in my absence, the agents failed to receive thorfy's OK to charge us for the cleaning etc, and escalated it to the Residential Tenancies Tribunal. Dad got a Nasty Letter about it and contacted thorfy a few weeks ago. Now Dad's just got another letter saying that since "we" failed to show up at the tribunal, they found against us and our agents are allowed to take $X out of our bond. They could have done that weeks ago, without me ending up with "failing to show up at the tribunal" on my tenancy record, if only thorfy had contacted them. And on another note, it's a complete PITA for Dad to keep getting these increasingly nasty letters and have to deal with them, and it's somewhat annoying for me to keep being told about it long-distance and not be able to give thorfy a smacking.

Other, other things I hate: "Angela Anaconda". I don't get this show. I don't even know why I've got it on, except that it was what was showing after the Simpsons.

Tonight: no SCA dance practice (the church hall was being used for a (late) St Patricks thing) so we went round to one of the guys' places and ate lots of food, talked about random crap, and watched bits of the _Galaxy Quest_ DVD. In particular, we watched it dubbed into, um, I forget the name of the language. That alien language. OUCH.

Work: more docco. Ergh.

Health: last week I slippped when disembarking from a bus and landed on my right hand and left elbow. The elbow was just a little bruised, but my right wrist and shoulder just haven't been the same since. I've been trying to use xwrits as much as I can and make sure I take breaks, but I'm finding that I'm waking up sore and getting much more cramped and tight than usual even when just curled up on the couch watching television, or in bed reading a book, or carrying my backpack walking to the bus. I should probably go visit a masseur or something and get pummelled. Also, in a more long-term way, I should find a form of upper body exercise that I enjoy and which doesn't trigger flashbacks to my adolescent-body-image-nightmare days. Kayaking might be a possibility when it gets warmer.

Documentation proceedeth apace. *yawn*. I seem to be spending most of my day bombarding the internal tech mailing list with dumb questions. Well, I guess they're not so dumb... it's mostly about stuff which has only just been implemented, or hasn't been implemented yet.

There was another question about i18n/l10n/etc on the e-smith devinfo list today. I want to be able to tell them "here's what needs doing" but I have to wait til I finish the aforementioned docco before I can even explain it. The problem is that before they can start doing translations, we have to convert the relevant bits of the e-smith manager to FormMagick and extract the relevant strings. Then and only then is it meaningful to start translating. In the meantime, I'm saving all the volunteers' email into a separate mail folder so I can get in touch with them when we're ready.

I don't think I've mentioned this in my diary yet, but I've just set up a mail gateway so that anyone who'd rather read this by email can do so. Go to http://lists.infotrope.net/mailman/listinfo/diary/ to subscribe. Needless to say, it's low-volume ... usually a post every couple of days, unlikely to be more than a couple a day.

Someone on IRC said they were repeatedly clicking on the "random" link over at LiveJournal just to see what kind of people keep diaries online. I went to take a look and... yeesh... I really hope that the fact that I keep an online diary doesn't put me into any kind of category with most of these people. Highlights:

  • The dinky little faces that show your mood
  • The high proportion of people who write about doing homework
  • The fact that most diarists seem to think that a sentence or two is a meaningful entry.
  • The quality background images. I thought I'd escaped that kind of "web design" around 1997 sometime.
  • People who write their entire diary in free verse or something.
  • Or chat logs:
    whitewussy: he already has a new girlfriend?
    StarGirl3663: interesting eh?
    StarGirl3663: yeah...that's why he dumped me
    whitewussy: oh
    StarGirl3663: yeah ho
    whitewussy: what a fag.
    whitewussy: should i punch him?
    StarGirl3663: ha ha
    StarGirl3663: YEAH!
    StarGirl3663: i wanted to
    
  • The almost total lack of capitalisation or indeed coherence

Right, I've wasted as many cycles on that as I ever want to. That shit makes advogato look like... well, a less bad thing.

I've been invited (by one of the local SCA people I made the acquaintance of yesterday) to attend an outing on Saturday night to a place where they make (harvest?) maple syrup. It involves sleigh rides and so forth. Sounds like it should be good fun.

And on that note, I should get dressed and head downtown to run errands and stuff.

Work

Working on lots of docco for the next version of e-smith. That's about it, really.

Home

Mmmmm, curry. Discovered a really really good food shop on Bank Street this afternoon on my way home. They have all kinds of asian and carribbean food things, but most importantly they have my favourite brand of thai curry paste. I got a tub of red curry paste and a tub of green curry paste. Made a vegie curry. It was amazing. Mmmmm.

I finally managed to throw most of the empty boxes in the place into the cupboard, so they're not cluttering up the study. Well, except for the two which are currently serving as a coffee table.

SCA

I went to an SCA dance practice the week before last, and I've managed to get myself on a few local mailing lists and get in touch with some locals. Now I've got a pile of costuming I want to do before an event sneaks up on me. Looks like there's a coronation on the 21st April, so that gives me a reasonable length of time to get something simple together.

Television

I'm catching up on lots of stuff I should have seen long ago: Simpsons, Xena, even M*A*S*H. Last Friday I saw the M*A*S*H finale for the first time. I can't believe I hadn't seen it before.

*yawn*

Finally got FormMagick 0.4.0 out. Yay. Only discovered minor bugs since then. I've also written and rolled RPMs for the glue needed to use it under e-smith. Meanwhile, Reefknot proceedeth apace. Had a good big architecture discussion yesterday on IRC. Now I'm meant to be doing docco stuff... heaps and heaps of docco stuff... for e-smith.

A friend's offered to host some mailman lists for me, so hopefully soon there'll be an email gateway for this diary. I don't imagine it'll be wildly interesting to many people, but it may be useful to some.

Other than that, life's quiet. The apartment's getting rapidly more livable. I got a haircut today. Went to an Ottawa.pm perl mongers thing last night. Ho hum.

124 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!