Older blog entries for deirdre (starting at number 19)

I ran into ESR the other night; he and Rick went to BayLISA and I went with my friend Vinnie and my mom. The talk was a howl.

Just reading a bit before doing more writing tonight. Deadlines loom.

I have to disagree with Elise about how good the last Baylinuxchix meeting was. In fact, I was seriously considering, given how lame it was, never going again. Let's just say it was all way too newage (rhymes with "sewage") for me. Elise mentioned two of the reasons I think it was so pathetic: tarot readings and bird burials, neither of which have to do with Linux or chix.

And, to my immense embarrassment and horror[1], Lile and Gail decided to go to DevCon and *have a panel* on how you didn't have to be male to be a hacker. No, and you don't have to be male to be a twit either. How about if you just produce some insanely cool piece of code? Or would that be so fscking difficult? ::rolls eyes::

For GOOD examples of group meetings, there was last week's FreeBSD meeting in Foster City. I've been to other good meetings of course, but that stands out as a recent example.

[1] Speaking as someone who makes a living as a coder.

Been doing a lot of BeOS hacking lately. My C++ was slightly rusty, but fortunately my recent PHP coding bouts had gotten me back in the habits of braces and semicolons. Perhaps some cool stuff to come out in the near future, but some of it I can't talk about.

Busy week this week, and depressed about my cat, who was injured (not badly, but he needed antibiotics). He had two infections and, it was pointed out, a heart murmur. It's the last part that is somewhat depressing.

Spent time learning more about programming for BeOS this week and, I must confess, it has really changed my opinion of the suitability of C++ for core libraries. Favorably.

My coauthor and I received the contracts for our book on Python thiss week. I'm quite excited.

Last night, Linuxstammtisch in Mountain View. As Seth says, Mountain View's not all that bad a place. Not all the peninsula or south bay cities have "charm clusters" like downtown MV, but there's a few that are OK. I'm now working in downtown Menlo Park, which isn't as charming but still pretty nice.

Update: I'm very sad to hear about Elise's cat dying. I've met him and know how much she loves him.

Slept in until after noon today, then ran some errands. I may finally put a finish on the bookcase I bought two years ago.

Talked to mom about my vision problems (where I sometimes have randomly bad vision in one eye) only to find out she's had that, from time to time, for 20 years. Maybe it's just another stress-related genetic fluke. ::sigh:: In retrospect, I should have talked to her before I panicked.

She's on Vancouver Island and has been looking for a summer interneship in web design, databases, programming or something. It's not a heavily-populated area and I know I could find her something here in Silicon Valley, but if anyone knows of anything even in the Vancouver area, let me know. She's got lots of skills other than computers including as a financial manager. But she really wants a tech job. She's also a US citizen.

I'm very very glad that Deb is not going to get her cat declawed. I missed the posting about her intent, but I'm glad others talked to her about it. A few years ago, I was very badly bitten by a declawed cat. We were playing, but he couldn't claw me to signify I'd gone too far and, not picking up on the clue, he bit me. The bill for the antibiotics (as it was a deep puncture wound and quickly turned into a very nasty infection) was $150 (some high-tech combo that was very new and countered antibiotic-resistence well, thus the price) plus I couldn't use my hand for a week. Oh, and there was the doctor bill, not to mention having to tell the constable NOT to put the cat down as I was sure he wasn't rabid. The owners volunteered to pay, but it really was my fault, so I paid. At the time, I had to be checked every 6 hours as if it got worse, they were going to put me on IV antibiotics to make sure I didn't lose my hand.

Just a note that declawed cats aren't necessarily less expensive to own. Besides, in a couple of years, you'll want new fabric on the sofa anyway. ;) Even *with* cats, the fabric on my sofa has *got* to be about 15 years old, though it really has faded and should be replaced. But it's still in reasonable condition.

Heard from Arnaud this morning. He says about two weeks to something pre-alpha. I can hardly wait! I was so excited I put up the project page on SourceForge and gave a heads up to the gtk.org webmaster.

It's not until now that I truly realized some of the very extensive work put into SourceForge. Truly cool and very appreciated.

Today's my last day here, the new project starts next week. Almost a whole week off. Whee!

I worked more on CottonBale last night (when I desperately needed sleep). I'm sure I'll have it done by Weds next week. I signed up for a SourceForge account for it too. I might even move ALL the projects I have there, especially Poppy. I want to finish Poppy before starting the next work project.

Got an email from a guy named Arnaud this morning saying he too had been working on a Gtk+ for the MacOS project. He's further along than I am. I sent him a note suggesting we combine our efforts and post them to the SourceForge account I'd set up, but I haven't heard back. I'm amazed and encouraged; I still wasn't even sure how viable the project was. I haven't even booted either of my Macs in two weeks. ::sniff::

CottonBale is coming along moderately well. I've got two different front ends for it so far (one shamelessly snarfed in part from Bruce Perens because I think his www.linuxvc.com site is pretty nice and clean). You can see the prototypes at http://www.deirdre.org/events/bale.php3 (html snagged from http://linuxmafia.com/bale -- which it will eventually replace) and the other prototype is at http://www.sfknit.org/bale.php3. (knitting = cotton and bay area linux events = bale, thus CottonBale). Yes, I know all the "knitting" events are the same events. When I'm ready to go into production, I'll switch databases for sfknit; it's easier to make changes in one database than in two.

I don't currently have many events in there as I'm working on other aspects, but I do have a whole gaggle of stuff to add when it's ready to go.

Off to Baypiggies. I'm not prepared and I hope they don't shoot me....

Yesterday was power failure day -- at least three. The upstream didn't have backup power on their routers either. Losers.

So I brought my box home, leaving me to struggle with non-authoritative DNS and trying to fix DNS for 16 domains I do primary DNS for as well as notify everyone I don't.

When I moved the box home, I separated the apache/mail box from the DNS box. Had I known the trouble this was going to cause, I probably wouldn't have done it, but...

There is also no reverse DNS for my boxes, which is causing sendmail to have "issues."

All this was made to work with the magic duct tape of name service, /etc/hosts. Grr.

Stock Prices

Stock prices are fickle things. The one really good thing, which Seth didn't consider, is that the low stock prices are a GOOD thing in hiring new people. After all, their stock options will be inexpensive. So, those people looking to move to a public Linux company, now's the time.

Stress

Stress makes one tired. Rick had been quietly watching as I'd been exhausted, weekend after weekend, this last one not being much different. I think it's from being in "crisis mode" on the job for several months. I'm not completely convinced this is the cause though.

That said, there's good crisis and there's bad crisis. Good crisis is the kind where something suddenly happens and everyone pitches in and they become more of a team for having done so.

Bad crisis, which this is, is never being able to be in NON-crisis mode, so one is always responding to stressors. Rather than building teams, it tears them apart. There's never anything to be on top of. There's never action, only reaction.

It gets really old really fast.

Weekend

Spent it decompressing mostly. I read all three of the existing Harry Potter books, knit some, spun some, and did no coding whatsoever, mostly because my eye was bothering me again (another sign of stress?). Reading a hardback book with large type was about as much eye activity as I could muster.

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