Go forward in time to Jul 2000.
Sigh, woke up very late after sleeping through the whole morning. At dawn Ettore and I went from the office back home; people were watching Saving Private Ryan with the conference room projector. I can't handle that movie at that time of the day and with the tiredness level I had.
Upon waking up made some espresso to kickstart the body. Yummi.
The GtkHTML flamewar seems to be dying. That's good. That was a good flamewar.
Went with Ettore, Miguel, Vlad, Arik, and his sister to watch The Perfect Storm. It sucked. Big time.
Then we went to an awesome tapas place on Newbury street. Ate great Spanish food like pigs, watched pretty girls, made fun of each other, had a great time. Afterwards we wussed out and postponed the plans for going dancing to a salsa place. Sigh. I was in the mood for dancing.
Five-liner in EOG to make zoomed scrolling much smoother. There is no trailing anymore when scrolling, but zooming is still interruptible. This makes it *nice*.
The new CalComponent object kicks ass. I like how it wraps the low-level icalcomponent structure from libical.
Nice dinner at the Korean place in Harvard Square with Miguel, Ettore, Richard, Vlad, and Arik. Unfortunately Richard did not like the sushi. Then we went for coffee.
More Khachaturian action.
So someone forked GtkHTML, added 100 lines of code, removed the gnome-libs dependency, and now is trumpeting that the world is a better place because an eeeeeeeeeeeeevil GNOME dependency is now gone. I don't know what people are smoking, and I don't know if I want any of it.
Fell asleep last night in the office after watching Being John Malkovich on the conference room's projector. I love this movie. Woke up at around 13:00, went home for a shower and some piano practice. I can play three pages worth of Khachaturian's Toccata almost fluently. This is good progress, and I am very happy!
Cannibalized Damon's machine and renamed it from karuna to archaeopteryx, which was my old machine's hostname. Set it up with my work environment. It is nice to have a fat desktop box with a big monitor again. This Dell monitor sucks, but it is way bigger than my laptop's display.
Dinner with some monkeys, of all places, at the downtown Wendy's. U.S. people have serious food issues. Then we went to Borders but they were almost closing down for the day, so I could not browse the book stalls in peace. Discussed many canvas/ETable issues with Chris on the way to and from the office.
I'm going through all the fields in RFC 2445, one by one, and implementing all of the iCalendar properties. This is grunt work but is nice because it can be done in automatic pilot with about 1% brain usage. We'll have kick-ass iCalendar support in Evolution, and that makes me happy.
Nice and long discussion with Ettore about iCalendar and monikers.
Last night we went to the barracks to watch Fight Club yet again with Richard, Arik, and his friends. Went to sleep late after practicing the piano for a while. Khachaturian's toccata for the piano rocks. And it is not on Napster, which sucks. Will have to hunt it down at the Boston Tower Records.
Woke up late. The breakfast of champions at the office consisted of a tin of Beefaroni and some ginger ale. I need to go shopping, because there is absolutely no food at home.
Last night I fell asleep in my clothes, and I was melting for most of the night. I need a fan for my room or something. Had an interesting quasi-nightmare of two dogs chasing me. One of those nightmares in which you run away by jumping and flying. Maybe Nick Park is playing tricks with my brain.
Gnapstering for Peter Murphy. I'll have to buy some CDs soon.
Went with monkeys aplenty to the closest ABP for a coffee. We didn't go to a real coffee shop because it was raining. Discussed lots of stuff. Arik is one stubborn dude, but eventually he turned reasonable. I'm glad that we agree on what needs to be done for EOG.
It is good to be with the Helix Code monkeys again.
Finally back from Usenix, and now I am in Boston. It's cloudy, rainy, humid, and warm. Sigh.
Was happy to see that my Korg keyboard still works. Will be practicing a lot at nights.
Red-eye flights suck. And I didn't know where the fuck Cincinnati was, so I felt lost for a couple of hours.
OK, Usenix summary follows. Monday. Flew to San Diego through Los Cabos. Did not wake up on time for my flight, so moved it to a more decent time of the day. Delta is in partnership with Aeroméxico and they forgot everyone's luggage in Mexico City, so upon getting to San Diego I went shopping. Got two very nice shirts and some underwear. Got a voucher for USD 50.00 from Aeroméxico. Dinner at a semi-fancy pizza place. The masochistic food experience in the US begins again.
Tuesday. Spent the whole morning in my downtown Marriott room, reading mail and hacking and the whatnot. Decided the day was nice outside. Decided I was hungry. Went out for lunch. Ate at a kick-ass Thai food place. Then went to the convention center Marriott to see who was there for the conference. Found Paul Fisher, talked for a while, went for lunch, coffee, and a beer. In the evening there was a party in which I talked to Tom Christiansen and some other people.
Wednesday. Found Jonathan, Miguel, Ettore, George, his brother Martin, Jim Gettys, Keith Packard, Maddog, and others. Talked to lots of interesting people. Missed Bill Joy's opening talk, but people said it was crap anyways. Rob Pike's talk on "getting dot-dot right" was very good. Went to Ettore's talk, which was good. It looked like there was too much material to cover in such a short time, however, and Ettore looked a bit rushed at the end. Afterwards we went to the exhibition area where they were handing out biscuits and wine and the whatnot. Everyone just stared at the beautiful girl who was handing out the colorful necklace thingies at some random booth. I got two myself. Later there was the Intel party at the hotel's fake casino and the Compaq party somewhere else. The finger food was not bad, actually, and we all flocked to where they were carving ham on bread rolls. Talked with Tom some more, discussed the merits of Italian insult techniques with Ettore.
Thursday. Woke up late, missed the Microsoft antitrust case talk. Went to the terminal room to finish my slides; Magicpoint sucks really hard. Went with the usual GNOME guys for a very rushed lunch. The waitress did not understand the concept of being in a hurry, so we were a bit late for my talk. The talk came out pretty well, but I didn't have time to give a demo of EOG's microtile rendering code. Afterwards, went with Roberto to move my stuff from the downtown Marriott to the YMCA Inn, because I could just not afford to keep paying the Marriott. Went to the Usenix 25th year anniversary party in the afternoon, which kicked ass. Good food and lots of wizardly people. Talked a lot to Nicholas Walker, a friend of Maddog's, and to Elizabeth Zwicky, from the Usenix committee. After the party, went with Ettore, Miguel, George, and Maciej to look for some more party action. We found nothing, so we went to a pretty nice bar in downtown San Diego with a live band. Not bad at all. Ran into Todd Lewis there, had a long and unfruitful discussion of why the US sucks from the viewpoint of many other countries, and then all of a sudden Todd ran away.
Friday. Rumors of David Miller being around the conference, but I never saw him. What a shame. Dilemma of whether to go to Keith Packard's talk on the new rendering model for X or to Miguel's talk on GNOME. Went to Miguel's, deciding that I could read Keith's paper instead and I had already talked a lot to him on the subject. Miguel's talk was very funny as usual. Watching him say "Unix sucks" in front of old Unix bigots was insanely fun, and so was it when Margo complained in the Q&A session afterwards. Yes, Unix is pretty cool technology, but it is pretty cool 25-year old technology. Things change and it is no longer up to par. Afterwards Ettore and George and Maciej wanted to go to Tijuana for some trashy action, but I decided against it. It is a shame that they decided to go to such a dump. Anyways, it seems they had fun. Thomas Dolby's closing talk was a complete disappointment; it was basically a big advertisement for his proprietary software company. Went back to the YMCA Inn to move my stuff to the conference Marriott, and we had an extra bed put in Miguel and Ettore's room. In the evening we went to a party on a suite on the 25th floor of the hotel, which was full of old wizards and interesting people. Talked with Elizabeth and Tom some more. Talked to Ettore about plans for Evolution.
Saturday. Relaxed day; was glad to be able to wake up late. Went with Ettore and Miguel to the mall. Lunch action there; had a not-too-bad falafel. Then George joined us to see Chicken Run. Pretty good and very funny, although not as good as The Wrong Trousers. In the afternoon we went to walk around Seaport Village and had a good dinner at a nice seafood place. Discussed lots of stuff about GNOME and the future.
Sunday. Miguel and Ettore left in the morning. I could not move my stupid flight to an earlier hour, so I had to fool around until 10:00 in the night. Walked around the mall and downtown San Diego, had some trouble with the ATM machines while trying to get money for my cab to the airport. Ran into Roberto in the airport, had some food with him while waiting for his flight. When he left I went to my flight's gate to waste some time, hack a bit, and read magazines. Talked to a nice girl for a while; she was going to pick someone up and looked quite tired. The flights to Cincinnati and then Boston both sucked; both were full and with noisy little kids who kick your back seat all the way through. Was glad to get home at last.
Accomplishment of the day: I'm using Sawfish instead of FVWM2. The world is a better place.
My talk went out well, although I didn't have enough time to give a demo of EOG's microtile rendering. We were late for the talk because we went to have lunch first and took too long while there. I'm glad that the talk was very fluid, though.
Busy busy busy for the last week.
First ain't-technology-great moment of the day: my stereo did not wake me up at the proper time for my flight to San Diego. I don't know if it just did not trigger the alarm or if I didn't wake up; the latter is unlikely as I set the volume fairly high.
Second ain't-technology-great moment of the day: I turn on my Visor and the screen has random dots on it, and it wouldn't respond. A soft reset did nothing useful. A hard reset was necessary, with the ensuing fun of having to restore it from a backup.
Third ain't-technology-great moment of the day. Or maybe people-are-stupid and-airlines-even-more-so. My luggage is not here in San Diego; it stayed in Mexico City. It will get delivered tomorrow, sigh. Went shopping for some clothes and dinner.
It was raining all night last night, which was fantastic as it made me sleep like a rock.
Got a haircut, finally. With this kind of humidity, longish hair gets uncomfortable.
CalendarModel hacking. Discussion about ETableModel memory management with Chris. It seems like ETable will need some changes to make it sane, especially for non-local models.
Lunch with Miguel and Francisco de Urquijo at Sanborns. Between two coffee expeditions I managed to get the Rammstein Live aus Berlin CD. Neat.
Arik says he wants to hack on EOG. Woohoo!
Nice dinner at Cluny with Miguel, Mancha, Ariel, and Chema. Discussed lots of stuff.
Did not wake up on time for the concert, which was a shame, since Beethoven's 5th piano concerto was part of the program. Called Damiana in the evening and she said that the concert had indeed kicked ass. So we made plans to go to the piano recitals at the Centro Nacional de las Artes in the following weeks.
Nice lunch with my dad at the Club Japonés. Ate like pigs.
Miguel called in the evening and we went with Arturo and his girlfriend for dinner at Cambalache. Ate like pigs again.
Javier Gutiérrez's graduation lunch. Had a good time.
Was bored in the cold and rainy morning, so I wrote a cool demo of the gdk-pixbuf scaling functions. If you tweak some parameters it does show some bugs in the pixops functions. That should be a good test case.
Dinner at Paco's house to celebrate his birthday. Many good friends there. Afterwards we went to Luis's house to watch The Usual Suspects, an awesome movie as always.
Reading the gnome-pilot sources to see what can be improved to make it robust.
Finished the contact editor GnomeAppification. Back to the calendar. ETable is cool!
Working with Seth on the delicate transition to iCalendar, so that we can suck in an interoperable way. Things are in a state of flux.
Damon's new recurrence code for iCalendar kicks ass. It is a beautiful generation and filtering system.
After many, many months, started practicing BWV 565 from the beginning again. My fingering is much better than that time. I hope my piano technique will improve a lot with this fantastic piece. Was very happy to see that a certain chord progression which I had deemed as unplayable was easy to play now. It is good to be aware of your own progress, both in technique and in being to wrap your mind around more complex musical structures.
Two things made my day today: add-log-keep-changes-together in Emacs, and LispMe for the Pilot. The world is a good place. Now I just need dinner.
I want a Scheme interpreter for my Visor. I want it to have bindings for the PalmOS GUI stuff. I want the whole thing to be GPLed. I also want some ice cream.
Pinochet loses his ridiculous immunity. Wooooo!
Converting the addressbook contact editor to be a Bonobo UI-handled GnomeApp.
Dinner with Miguel and two guys from Televisa. Pretty interesting talk. And I had an excellent spaghetti with a mixture of cheese and huitlacoche.
Played a bit with gnome-pilot and my Visor. Gpilotd seems to be flaky at times; I had to kill it and restart it several times to be able to upload a bunch of files to the Visor. This will need some loving action for Evolution's purposes.
E-table for the calendar hacking action.
Michelle introduced me to Damiana, a girl who plays the piano extremely well. Had a great time playing at her house. Made me realize that I ought to take piano lessons again.
We were too late for the concert at noon, so we went to walk around downtown for a while. The cathedral had the first part of the scaffolding removed, from the main facade up to the transept, so the interior of the nave looks huge, bright, and beautiful.
Went with Alexandra to Plaza Loreto in the evening; did not find a movie worth seeing.
Javier Ortega's graduation lunch. Good food, good friends.
Went to watch Flawless, which was pretty good. Both De Niro and Hoffman rule. Quote o'the day: “Life is a bitch, so I turned into one”.
The calendar prints! Wheeee!
Lunch with Miguel, Pepe, and Toño at yet another Argentinian steaks place. Pretty good, though still not as good as Cambalache. They make good salads, though, which are a nice side to the beef.
The University servers had to go down because tomorrow they are shutting down the power for maintenance work on the campus power plant. This means I won't be able to read mail until Sunday. Sigh.
Went to El Bulbo, a dancing club, with the usual suspects. Had a fun time.
Starting today I am using GNUS to read my mail. This thing is neat. I took too long in adopting it, but it is so much better than good old RMAIL.
Wrote housekeeping code for the event editor. Need to play with Outlook some more to see what it does in certain special situations.
Lunch with Miguel and Toño at the same steaks place as yesterday. The beef was better today for some reason.
Go backward in time to May 2000.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Mon 2001/Jun/18 17:18:52 CDT