I actually bought a churro; it was absolutely delicious, every bit as good as those East Coast cannoli. Advogato is providing free advertising for the South of Market churro industry.

I don't know whether I'm going to LWCE or not. If I do, I'll see some of you there.

I went to a Linuxcare program on workplace discrimination and was very concerned by the "hostile work environment" rules. The rules about behavior aimed at a particular person make some sense to me, but the work environment bit seems like a problem to me. For instance, what if somebody is offended by my "Jon Johansen is watching you" poster? A very long story.

RSI

I found some other things to do at Linuxcare that don't involve typing -- mostly teaching classes. The interesting thing is that I'll have to get permission from my department to do work for other departments, and maybe they will bill each other. Unfortunately, I seem to squander most of my non-typing gains with bursts of typing to check e-mail and (say) write Advogato diary entries; that seems to undo my progress. I am still going to investigate more weird suggestions about interface devices, all the way to electrodes which read nerve impulses (no, they don't have to be implanted or anything) and maybe some voice recognition. I don't mind dictation quite as much as I thought I would.

Lots of people are visiting -- dhd, who taught me a bit about calling conventions, signal handling, and processor modes; lkcl, from whom I hope to learn a bunch of Samba lore tomorrow.

Tumble rings

The tumble rings I made in 1997 were unaccountably a smash hit in the office, after languishing in obscurity for almost three years. I just had to find the right people to show them to, and now we have a Linuxcare 19th-century mechnical optical illusion cottage industry. A visiting industry analyst saw them, too (you want maybe I should have shown her that Makefile instead?), so maybe they will become internationally famous tumble rings.

Zack of Kernel Traffic is extremely funny and creative, aside from being a clever Perl programmer.

Evening

A one-minute question turned into about four hours of conversations and e-mail relating to my ex-girlfriend. Ouch. (And not just because of my wrists.)

Which is more fun, failed relationship politics or trading playing card lore with somebody on another continent? Either way, I was up very late. Just like old times, in many ways.

In other news: "the depredations of the copyright industries".

Wendy has actually been mentioned in my Advogato diary once upon a time, but not by name, I don't think.