Putting out another call for hackergotchi heads, if anyone's inspired to bring out The GIMP... We're missing heads for: Marco, Rodo, Rodney Dawes, Jordi Mallach, Julien Moutte, Shaun McCance, Matthew Garrett, Mariano, Danilo, Christopher Blizzard, Kristian Reitveld and Bryan Forbes. The standard image size is around 65x85 pixels, usually on the smaller side. #
Work and "Play"
I figured I'd blog about my trip to the UK pretty quickly after coming home, but I had a quadruple-knockout-punch of vicious jetlag, mental exhaustion, seething inspiration and a small dose of niggling fear. Messily intertwined and difficult to resolve, as always. The last few weeks have not been kind to anyone hanging on items in my todo list.
I was in the UK for the first face-to-face meeting of a new company I've agreed to join. As soon as my contract is finalised, I will announce this change of affiliation to the Foundation. Although it's not required, I think this is the right thing for any Board member to do, should they change their employment status mid-term. Foundation members deserve to know, and we have important by-laws regulating affiliations (even though Board members do not represent the companies they work for).
The small dose of fear is due to an intermingling of two previously separate areas of my life: Work and Play. Although this new job will only be tangentially related to GNOME (at least to begin with), it will certainly be active in the greater Free Software community, which is where I spend a fair chunk of my "play" time. Of course, I take my play time quite seriously...
So there's a lot of personal and professional interplay between these roles, and not just in the short term. I want to get it all Just Right, but where I don't, I want to recover gracefully. :-) If nothing else, I'm lapping up the challenge. #
Crazy linkage action!
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Bob Metcalfe on The Visionary Thing: "Now, to be sure, there are visionaries who don't end up poor and bitter, or at least haven't yet."
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Read some really cool articles on some email feature wishlists for high-volume mail usability. EmailUsabilityWishlist links to a discussion about how "heavy mail users use incoming mail as a to-do list and appointment tracker". Mmmm. Another nice idea would be a "way to concatenate messages conversations with the redundant quoted material stripped out", as suggested in The Perfect Email Program.
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Bram contrasts recent and historical comments by Brendan Eich, for humour value. Haw haw. Meanwhile, here's the Mozilla vision email everyone's talking about.</i>
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With everyone raving on about Longhorn, competing with .NET and XAML and so on, Cringley came out with a very timely pulpit titled, The Only Way to Beat Microsoft is by Ignoring Microsoft: "The central point was that paying too much attention to Microsoft simply allows Microsoft to define the game. And when Microsoft gets to define the game, they ALWAYS win."
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Amused by some recent flames of the Ximian dudes, claiming that they should get off their arses and code instead of blogging all the time. But hmm, perhaps it's true? (See jpr's closing statement.)
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Finally getting some personal insight into the Columbine protagonists. "Psychopaths follow much stricter behavior patterns than the rest of us because they are unfettered by conscience, living solely for their own aggrandizement."
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Colin Walters released his exceptional Grokking GNU Arch presentation, which is an awesome intro to the fundamentals of Arch - a globally distributed revision control system built on neatly layered simplicity. Yum.
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Colin also released gnome-gpg, a really sweet passphrase caching agent which integrates with gnome-keyring. Very tasty. Since he has gone to work for Red Hat, I decided to keep it warm until he gets back. :-)
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eWeek reviewed GNOME 2.6 and mentioned GARNOME again. Cool.
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Luis knows what turns me on. He kindly pointed out this fully-working replica of the Back to the Future DeLorean. For sale on eBay. Funnily enough, Pipka recently mentioned something about wanting a new car...