Kernel Class: Kirk wore a 'Peace, Love, & Rdist' shirt to class tonight. It was great. If you wear t-shirts, and you are a teacher, or you hold meetings, or do another job where you are in front of people for long periods of time, be kind and wear amusing t-shirts. You don't have to look at you, but the people you interact with do.
Alum: Man, this place is just crawling with Simon's Rock alum. Hi Joe.
Fair Oaks Street Fair: I've lived in San Francisco for about 6 years now. In that time I've been to the Folsom Street Fair, the Haight Street Fair, the Castro Street Fair, and the Columbus Street Fair. They all have their charm, and I've enjoyed them. The Fair Oaks Street Fair, however, has them all beat. There are no hippies, no naked people, no leather folk; there are just people. People who live on the block selling stuff that they don't want anymore. There are people sitting on lawn chairs on the side walk and on stoops drinking beer, eating chips, petting dogs, watching children run around. One house was selling coffee and lemonade the procedes from which are given to charity. It is a huge garage sale, and all the sellers know each other. I got tours of 3 apartments, petted 2 dogs, and attended 1 barbeque. What a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon in the city. I hung out with Betsy, grilled up some chicken wings, bitched about life in general, and met a guy who works at Microsoft and uses Linux at work. It is impossible to find a party in SF where the computer industry is not discussed. In addition to the computer professionals, this party also had an animal behavioralist, a pizza parlor worker, and an information retrieval student. Fascinating.
Jobs: Lilo, if you think that juggling 3 firms is difficult, you should've seen me last week: 5 interviews in 4 days, and that's not including phone screens, or finishing my final for kernel class. Being unemployed is a full time job.
Work: I really dig my new job. In all of the jobs that I've held since graduating from college, this is the only one that seems to fit me well. When I was young, my parents always told me that when I grew up I would be able to do interesting work that I enjoyed. For a long time I thought that it was a myth, and that very few people actually got to do what they really liked to do and get paid for it. I feel like I have a decent grasp on some key elements of my personality now, like: what I enjoy doing, what I want to do, how I work best, with what types of people I work best, how I respond and react to different environments, how I learn, and where I want to go in the future. This in addition with my ability to read people fairly quickly upon meeting them has done me well, me thinks. Hopefully this job will continue to be as wonderful as it seems now in the beginning. I have a feeling about the place and the people, a good feeling. I also dig that we get to do lots of super secret stuff. Open source is cool, and I totally dig it, but there is something delicious about a super secret....
Life: Life, ahh. I guess I now have a work and a life. On the organic veggie front: I've had to put my box (Bay Area Organic Express) on hold, as I now take the 14 Mission to work, and do not drive. This means that I can no longer haul a box of fruits and veggies home with me on Fridays. On one hand, taking the bus is better for the environment, and certainly cheaper than a monthly parking pass at Linuxcare, however, now I must drive to the grocery store more often, which may just about cancel out all that public transit taking goodness. I guess it's a wash, and now I never have to deal with kale on a bi-weekly basis.
My room has received a good dusting which means that 1) I'll be sneezing for a day or so, and 2) looks like I'm in for some good personal growth over the next month or two. Go figure. The dust is making me thirsty.
The Bay Linux Chix meeting on Tuesday was great. The group talked about all kinds of things. The meeting started while Stephane was reading my cards, and toward the end Lile's cat killed a bird which was taken to the river to be buried. In the middle was good conversation about many topics, including open source and linux.
Guess I've been sleeping or something, cause I didn't even notice until today that Adam made it to Advogato.
It's good to see David Mandala has arrived here at Advogato. I can't wait to read his diary entries.
org charts: for a company that does open source professional services, specializing in integration and support. Take groups of about 4-6 employees. The group will have a focus, like the Mac integration experts, or the Alpha people, etc. Each group will have a technical lead. The group will be responsible for a project from beginning to end. Meaning that the group will evaluate the business need for integration of open source into the current environment, architect possible solutions, implement the appropriate solution, and support that through the contract. Employees who wish to apprentice themselves to group with another focus, would first transfer their knowledge to a more junior member of their own team. Then, after they switch groups, they may act as a consultant for their former group. I see maybe 4 - 5 of these groups all having a manager type work with them to track projects, and employee well-being, budgets, etc. Any given job could require one or more groups to work on it. This is, of course, a very loose sketch.
work: okay, so I start my new job on Thursday. Yay! I definately want to take this moment to thank my former bossman at my former place of employment for giving me the heave ho so I could have a good long vacation, and get a new exciting job.
life. I guess it's all just life these days until I start work again.... Last night was extraordinarily interesting: it started with a scorpian bowl, and ended with a bail bondsman. I will leave the middle to the imagination of the reader.
I finished my project for Kernel class. Kirk wore a shirt with a rather cute, chubby orange daemon on it. I think that in addition to wearing a different BSD shirt to class each week, Kirk should have a deal where the students can get a different BSD shirt each week as well. Think of the profit! I think that when this class is over, I might actually try writing some code, instead of just reading it.
kernel class is interesting these days. We are covering VM, which is my favorite part of the kernel. Unfortunately, Kirk isn't wearing anymore exciting shirts too class. I need to take up a collection to get more of those shirts that look like they advertise porn movies for him. I finally got serious about my final project, which is due on Thursday. It looks like it will be easier than I had originally thought.
work is certainly coming along. I've found out that it doesn't matter if I work for an 'open source' company or a company that produces proprietary software, I will still be required to deal with Windows boxes. I love it!
life. I want to know why I'm the only one who drinks one drink, and has a 2 day hang over. This is not fair at all.
more on org charts coming up in future diary entries. really. i know you're fascinated.
Noodle
When I adopted a cat with feline leukemia, I was told that it would be very expensive in the end. It wasn't expensive at all; none of his illnesses could be treated. It was just sad.
Cyber Bowling
I highly recommend cyber bowling after putting a cat to sleep.
Open Source Companies
Can anyone tell me if there are any 'open source' companies that don't use Windows internally?
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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