I noticed that almost all the people who have certfied me, especially those who have certified me as master, have been inactive on Advogato for ages, as in years. I wonder if I should take this as a hint.

Actually, given that I rarely, if ever, read the diaries anymore, and that pretty much all the articles are boring, I probably shouldn't be returning here daily. Hm. Yes. Old addictions go away slowly.

Stupid usability problem of the day: I use some programs that bind ctrl-backspace to delete-previous-word, and others that use alt-backspace. Yesterday, I was typing in something and hit ctrl-backspace to delete the preceding word. That didn't work, so I typed alt-backspace instead. Or at least I tried: I failed to let the ctrl key come up properly, so I inadvertently hit ctrl-alt-backspace instead. Bye bye X.

My latest hobby project, Lodju, released yesterday. I'm still high from the excitement, even though no-one seems to notice. :-)

(Yes, of course this is a way to advertise.)

My friends who play in LARPs talk about pre-low, pre-high, post-high and post-low periods surrounding a game. I seem to have skipped the pre-low period altogether. I hope the post-low doesn't come either.

I don't seem to be as much of a mental exhibitionist I thought I was, since I haven't written diary entries for a year. During the year many things have happened, of course, which I'll completely skip. I will note that I have retired from the Debian and Kannel projects and am trying to find the time to finish my studies, work full time, complete some hobby hacking projects and also continue my new hobby: photography. Some day I might write an essay or two on my experiences with Debian and Kannel, but not today.

Back from about a month and a half vacation: both real vacation and medical leave. Boys and girls: hacking enough to get back problems isn't worth it. Even a small amount of exercise, attention to ergonomy and taking a fifteen second break to stand up and stretch every half hour or so seems to give a very good return on investment: one is then able to continue hacking even in the long run. End of sermon.

The reason I hacked so much was to get over a death. It was a good thing in the short term, but I got too addicted to hack mode to notice when I had gotten over things. So I continued until my back stopped me. On the whole, it might have been a better idea to have a life instead.

I've solved the mystery of the missing life, I think. Too much work, too little time for friends, all hobbies concentrated on computers. I've decided not to work overtime, and to make a special effort to spend time with friends, and to get a new hobby. RPGs and amateur acting seemed fun before, so I'll start with them.

I've sold my computer. I have a laptop from work that now handles all my computing needs. A nice enough laptop, at that: an HP Omnibook 900, only problems are that it weighs about a kilogram too much and has an abysmal battery life of only about 3 hours. I do not miss having to admin several computers. Having only one makes life easier, and if it has to be only one, a laptop is a very good choice, at least for me. I like the fact that it's small (compared to a desktop - there are much smaller laptops) and mobile. Mobile computing happens to be interesting.

The Palm V is not a computer: apart from backups it requires no administration, and crashes only about once or twice per year. I don't even yearn for new software. I'm quite content with the current selection of installed software: the builtin stuff, a better launcher, a calendar and to do list summarizer, and a game. Oh, and a `hack' for making åäö easier to input.

With the home computer I lose my TV card, so I've bought a real TV set instead. Should be nicer to watch DVDs on a somewhat larger image than the 10 by 25 centimeter one I had on the monitor.

I notice that I've just about stopped reading diary entries on Advogato. There's simply too many of them: it gets too hard to keep track of who is who, and even just the total volume is too large to read, now that I'm back to work. This is probably a loss.

On the automake thing: autoconf is useful enough, but I won't use automake, as long as it generates Makefiles that are both huge and complex. In theory, if the Makefiles would always do what I wanted, that wouldn't really matter, but of course there is sometimes a tweak or two that needs to be done to make them work in a particular scenario. Not very often, but the risk is too high even so. Makefiles are hard enough to do portably, I don't need them to be incomprehensible as well.