Older blog entries for calum (starting at number 11)

Valentine's Day. Gives you the dry boak, so it does.

/me hides flowers and sad helium balloon that his girlfriend sent to the office, requiring a well-timed journey from reception to desk via the back stairs so nobody would notice.

Lots of cool GNOME usability stuff on the boil at the moment, so much so that I shouldn't really be sitting here typing. But I haven't done an entry for a while, so I felt guilty.

/me hopes the pressie he sent his girlfriend turns up before she goes home tonight, or he's for the high jump later.

16 Jan 2002 (updated 16 Jan 2002 at 15:17 UTC) »

Blianna mhath ur

A pretty uneventful Christmas and New Year was had by all, in my household-- mostly because I live alone! I did a lot of gadding around, though... England the weekend before Chrimbo, back in Dublin for Christmas Day, Scotland on the 26th, and back in the Emerald Isle for Hogmanay. All for under 100 quid, thanks to Mr Ryanair.

New Year's Eve in Dublin is crap, though-- half the pubs are shut and the only free 'event' involves hanging around outside a dingy cathedral waiting for the midnight chimes, then going home!

The dressing room bust-up down Fir Park way seems to have done the trick, though... the 'Well are back to their winning ways, with fine victories over Dundee and Dundee Utd in the space of a week.

Took the banana boat round to some dodgy local garage to have its shiny new exhaust fitted this morning-- and it was closed :) Luckily they were open when I went back later, 'coz I'd already bought the exhaust and had it sent it straight to them, so they've got 300 quid of my hard-earned cash sitting in their workshop!

Now I'm just waiting on the phonecall to tell me it doesn't fit, or that they decided to take it out for a test spin and ended up in Dublin docks...

Hardly any email waiting for me at all, this morning... always a bad sign, means I'll have to do some work instead. (One of the few was to inform me my actress friend in England has started seeing a new bloke she doesn't fancy-- if I'd known that was her type I'd have asked her out years ago!)

The first public draft of the HIG will apparently be released for review later today. Fortunately I've only just picked up my flameproof suit from the dry cleaners.

Bought my first Christmas present at the weekend, as it has to go to America-- I promise not to think about Christmas again until about December 17th. Saturday also saw Scotland soundly thrashed by the All Blacks, and Motherwell winning again. The latter is becoming a worrying habit.

Well, I'm still here... the GNOME team at Sun got away without too many casualties, one voluntary and a couple of not-so-voluntary.

Went to see The Proclaimers in town again last night... good show, ended up going on my own though. I did get them to autograph my unused spare ticket, though, so that was always something...

Saw the new Harry Potter movie at the weekend, too... wasn't bad, pretty faithful to the book, not entirely convinced about the acting abilities of young Harry, though-- his school chummies and chummettes were rather more accomplished, I thought. At least Gryffindor are obviously Motherwell fans, judging by their claret and amber scarves...

19 Oct 2001 (updated 13 Nov 2001 at 11:57 UTC) »

Hmm, so little has been happening recently. Work on the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines finally got underway, the mighty Steelmen have themselves a new manager, and Sun have decided to cut 4000 jobs, which may or may not include mine. All will be revealed on November 7th, apparently.

My brother works on Wall Street, and my parents were sightseeing in Manhattan until Monday. They're all okay.

A mixed weekend of World Cup football. Ireland pull off a great result against Holland, guaranteeing them a playoff place, and Scotland prolong the qualification agony with a poor goal-less draw with Croatia, leaving us needing to beat Belgium on Wednesday.

(Apparently, England had not a bad result either, but only against a Germany team whose defence I could have cut open myself with a slightly-sharpened sponge).

My bit of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines is finally taking shape-- nothing committed to cvs as yet, but at least I've finally had time to write something.

My first mildly pleasant weekend for a while passed partly in the company of an actress friend of mine from London. Admittedly she was mostly over in Dublin not to see me, but ageing bland middle-of-the-road popsters U2 at Slane Castle, but it was great to see her again anyway... young, single, gorgeous and talented, we're a perfect match :P (Were it not for the fact she thinks I'm merely "cute" and "sweet", which are of course a the most illusion-dispelling words in a girl's armoury.)

Anyway, back to reality, and there's a surprisingly shallow pile of email to catch up on this sunny Monday morning, so it looks like I may have to spend the rest of it doing proper work. Such is life.

So, Michael Schumacher wins another dull race and another dull F1 World Championship, and Motherwell's dismal start to the new season is relentless. Blissful normality.

Plans to write the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (mini-edition) continue apace, and we've now all agreed who's writing what. I've hastily been trying to learn DocBook in preparation for this monumental task, by converting my latest draft of the GNOME Accessibility Guide. "Trivial" and "not" are two words that spring to mind.

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