Not a lot to report work-wise so far this month, just the usual fun and games in the lead up to a code freeze. Testing, bug reports, all the stuff you always think your test team is supposed to be doing rather than your designers and engineers.
There are piles of French and Germans and Americans and Scandanavians and English and Russians at Sun who are always hanging around in the corridors together and having a bit of a laugh. And the women do much the same thing because that's just what women tend to to. It's the same when you wander out of the office for lunch... the walls and benches are lined with all manner of Europeans nattering away in their own fair tongues...
...but where am I supposed to go when I need to speak to someone who knows the subtle difference between mockit and clarty, and understands that a choob isn't for keeping your Smarties in and a stoater isn't a cat who's advanced from catching mice? :o)
Oh, didn't post at all in June or July, did I...
Just back from a three-day break-ette on Guernsey, but back into the swing of things now. Oh, and the wee banana boat made it through its NCT this afternoon, so that's me unleashed on Ireland's roads for another two years, provided Mr.McNealy keeps funding my board and lodgings...
Well, made it back from CHI2002 in Minneapolis safely last week. It's fair to say it's a rather different kettle of fish from GUADEC... although we had a speaker to far outweigh the juggling bloke in Seville-- Stelarc, who suspends himself naked from hooks through his flesh for hours on end, and sticks electrodes on himself that are wired to the internet so other people can move him via his website. Right.
While I was away, Motherwell FC were put into administration... not quite sure what I'd do with my Saturday afternoons if they went out of business, I've been watching or listening to all their games for the past 25 years. Hopefully tonight's fund-raising friendly against Italian Serie A side Chievo Verona will raise a few quid for the coffers...
I'm getting seriously sick of airports... the Iberia Airlines debacle on the way back from GUAD3C notwithstanding, I'm just back from England yesterday, and at 8am on Saturday morning I'm off to the States again (to help run a workshop at CHI2002) for the second time in six weeks!
GUAD3C was kind of a laugh I guess-- Spanish beer at least has that non-hangover-inducing quality that the Germans excel at! Somehow I didn't come away with the impression that everybody was quite as enthusiastic as last year though... probably because last year we were all looking forward to an all-new shiny GNOME 2.0, whereas this year we were all looking forward to... GNOME 2.0.1.
Back in the land of the living after a week's skiing at Pico, VT. Sadly I was unprepared for America's Legendary Haute Cuisine and ended up with food poisoning after a mere two days in your wonderful country. So I spent the third day in the condo sampling America's fine televisual output, which consists almost entirely of adverts (apparently Americans spend their entire income on lawyers, cars, and drugs with embarrassing side-effects) interspersed with the occasional fleeting glimpse of programme.
They almost persuaded me to call 1-800-SUE-PICO for the dodgy cheeseburger, but I decided just to stick to the chilli for the rest of the week..
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.
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.
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.
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