Older blog entries for shaver (starting at number 4)

Yes, zab, I remember that I have a diary.

In Montreal still (since the 9th, I think). The original better-living-through-martini-shakers party crew didn't show last weekend, but Zach and Jen and Tyla did, and that was fun. Zach found a place, and it's quite a nice place. Now Tyla and I have to do the same.

(Yes, Zach is the Smart Person mentioned below. Progress on the other one in question continues apace.)

The PR people convinced me to do another interview, this time for Upsi de. Went pretty well, though Mr. Williams seems to have melded Ian Goldberg (our Chief Scientist) and myself (Chief Software Officer) into one "Chief Science Officer". Some people here are a little frightened by that thought, and I can't quite understand why.

Looks like I'll be at mozilla. party 3.0 on the 6th, and speaking at the Alphanumerica Mozilla developer gathering the next day. Come one, come all.

Before that, of course, Zero-Knowledge is hosting a party for CFP 2000, on the 4th. If you're a CFP attendee, look for details at the conference; we throw good parties.

Update on the previously mentioned Smart People I'm trying to lure into low-shaver-orbit at Zero-Knowledge: one has now Signed On, though I still can't tell you who, and the other is looking very promising. (Oh, and we got graydon, who is also Smart People, but who wasn't there on that particular weekend.) A friend of mine is starting to call me The Great Sucking Sound Of The North. I think I'm flattered, or something.

In other news, someone is writing things about fantasy ads involving both my sister and the phrase ``fabulous sex''. I'll try and adjust to that, over the next few decades.

Looks like the party crew from Wednesday is going to come hang out in Montreal this weekend, and help Tyla and I find an apartment and stuff. Whee!

(It's a shame I can't buy a spare liver on eBay.)

So, I went to Ottawa on Wednesday, for Danielle's birthday and general mayhem. Mayhem did indeed ensue, and it would appear that some people's children are blaming me. I'll admit that I was a little tipsy at the time, but I'm having a very hard time conjuring up a memory of either of those folks telling me to stop ordering drinks.

As amazed as phil was by my ability to get moving in the (barely) morning, I was stunned to discover that girl was already long gone by the time I woke up. (Which is to say that she had vacated the other bedroom, you sick little monkeys.) She's a better man than I, or something.

Got to Montreal around 3pm, to find the office in a relative shambles as people prepared to move to the new place. Retreated to my hotel for a bath, some P. J. O'Rourke and then real, actual work. Dinner with Adam at ``Lele da Cuca'', a nice little Brazilian/Mexican place on Mary-Anne just east of St-Laurent, was good, and so was the sleep that followed. 10 hours later, I'm a new man, but the office is still a shambles.

We're all getting kicked out of Mothership in the afternoon, so I guess I'm not getting much done today, either. (Actually, I do have an interview and a handful of planning meetings, but I haven't really adjusted to the attitude that meetings can be productive and useful.) Maybe finding an apartment? People in Waterloo should go see mang talk about Mozilla, and visit our booth at the career fair: the career you save could be your own.

Update: I am a ``moderately sub-par husband'' today, according to my moderately above-par wife. Something about not wanting to wait an unbounded amount of time for a piece of pork to be cooked to an indeterminate level of doneness. I'll keep you posted.

Dad arrived at 0800 to take Tyla, Steph and I to visit with the grandparents. Aunt Jill and Uncle Bill showed up too, which was nice. A pleasant morning, all in all, though I was yet again reminded of The Press Event. I keep telling myself that it'll seem less surreal as time passes, but current trends are not promising. I really wish I managed to spend more time with my family. Hrm.

Spent Wednesday to Saturday on one of those trips to Montréal. One month in, and I'm still dazzled by the sheer coolness of the company, and people, and technology, and...you get the idea. A few smart friends were in town to visit, and that was much fun. (I can't tell you who they are until they come to their senses and join the company. Only a matter of time, I hope.) It's always nice to see smart people agree with me about how cool Zero-Knowledge is, since it makes me more confident that I haven't been high for two months or something.

Travel is tiring. I need to find a place in Montréal, so that I can at least stop having to ship clothes around. (I left my cell-phone charger in Montréal, too. Being dumb is tiring.) It would be nice if it was possible to spend some time in Montréal without smelling like an ashtray afterwards. Maybe I should just start smoking cigars or a pipe. As long as tobacco smoke is going to kill me, it might as well be my own.

On Friday, DoubleClick caved and said it would delay plans to correlate online activity with ``real life'' identities. Definitely a positive move, but lingering doubts remain. It's not that profiling is inherently evil -- blinded demographic data or pseudonymous, partitioned-identity systems could arguably be more powerful -- but it's easy to see how people are getting that impression. Someday, DoubleClick will thank us for making them grow up and protect the rights of their users. Someday.

(It really doesn't make me feel much better to read things like this from the attorneys who might well be suing to improve DoubleClick's privacy policies:

Granholm continued to level criticism the company failed to disclose to Internet users it is ``systematically implanting'' electronic files on the hard drives of users' computers - known as ``cookies'' in tech parlance - without their knowledge or consent.

Policy is obviously necessary, but it's also obviously not sufficient.)

We're going to be moving into the righteous new offices next week, if all goes according to plan. Well, Development won't move for a while, but it's still major progress. I'm looking forward to actually having a desk, so that I can stop squatting in Austin's office.

I'll try to enter here more frequently, to keep Some People's Children happy.

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!