Go forward in time to Sep 2000.
Went to the dentist. He gave me a temporary filling on my upper right back molar, apparently I need a root canal done when I go back to Mexico. Sigh. Dentists are ridiculously expensive here.
In any case, said process looks interesting. I hope pulling out the tissue with (dead?) nerves in it doesn't hurt too much. If that stupid tissue can be pulled out and filled with hard stuff, why the hell do we have soft tissue instead? Have us humans not evolved enough to grow indestructible teeth? Will we ever? What the fuck?
My mouth hurt for the rest of the afternoon, and later my whole head. Did not get much work done.
Dinner at Chinatown seemed to improve my spirits.
Fixed two instances of signed vs. unsigned confusion in size_allocate() methods. One in EPaned in Evolution, one in GnomeDockItem in gnome-libs. Sigh. Fixed a flicker problem in EPaned. It feels strangely good to be hacking a little bit of widget code again.
Damon rocks my world. His new date range selector widget is the cutest thing.
Went to make an appointment with the dentist. I'll go tomorrow to get my mouth fixed. Nat tells me I should be afraid of the price. I wonder what's going to hurt more; my mouth or my pocket.
My cousin Marco just came back from Japan a few days ago, and my aunt is visiting these days because she is helping Marco move his stuff to California. We all went for dinner to the North End; had an excellent meal and a very pleasant talk. Then we went for coffee and back to my cousin's apartment. He's getting rid of as much stuff as he can, so I came back with quite a few tins of pickled chili peppers and hot sauces. Yum. He had already sold his furniture, unfortunately.
Finished updating the calendar views to get their notification the Right Way, i.e. directly from the model; the old Gnomecal code was centralizing it in the meta-widget that holds all the views. This makes the code much prettier.
Awaiting help from Damon, since I'm stuck with some asynchronous updating bugs and I am too sleepy to track them down right now.
Dinner with Mike and Jeff at Bartley's; had a monstrous and really good burger.
Illustrator is fucking complex. This is not what most cultures call "user friendly".
Built Sodipodi, played a bit with it, got weirded out by the UI, decided to put it off until I have a weekend to spare.
Did some refactoring of the calendar code to make the view widgets use the CalClient by themselves instead of dispatching everything from the central GnomeCal. This makes things much cleaner and will fix the loader bugs in the correct way.
It makes me happy to see the last crufty bits of the old Gnomecal code go away.
Dinner with Anna and Jeff at the Ethiopian place in Central Square, and the food was excellent.
Played the piano for quite a while before going to bed. I'm kicking ass these days. It must be the nice weather.
Woke up late. Hacked at home. A laptop in bed is a wonderful thing.
Released gdk-pixbuf-0.9.0 "You Kissed Lilly".
Just as I was arriving to the office, Ettore was outside waiting for his cab to the airport. Said good-bye. I hope has a good trip.
Very nice dinner with Joe, Michael, and Jeff at the Ghandi Indian restaurant in Central Square. We should go there more often.
I just listen to Albéniz and know that I will not be able to play his music without N years of piano practice. It makes my skin crawl and it makes the world look so big.
Arik left for Seattle early in the morning (way too early, i.e. like 11:30 AM).
Ettore was feeling very sick today. Bummer.
Lunch with Bradford at Bartley's in Harvard Square. Man, they have good hamburgers there; it was nice to have a burger with good guacamole on it. It reminded me of Luis Javier's birthday parties. I'll be going there more often.
We went to Cafe Algiers afterwards; discussed the inherent suckiness in the layout of all-residential city suburbs.
Back to the office. Wrote more docs for the gdk-pixbuf release. It is ridiculous that XlibRGB now has documentation while the original GdkRGB is completely undocumented. I need to spank some people around about documentation yet again.
Illustrator is oh-so-fucking-cool. I hope I have time to work on Sodipodi at some point in the future. We do need a tool like that.
Good-bye party for Ettore, Michael, Arik, and Bradford. As usual we got them some cake; Chris should have pictures of the decorated cake soon. Then we watched The Big Lebowski on the projector. Apparently some of the monkeys had not seen it yet. Let this be considered their Helix Code initiation ceremony.
Wanted to have a nap in the couch afterwards, but Michael managed to scream some sanity into me and convinced me to go home instead.
Work on making a gdk-pixbuf release. Integrated John Harper's excellent patch to allow gdk-pixbuf to be used from plain Xlib applications, so Sawfish will now be able to use gdk-pixbuf.
Ettore wanted to go to Legal Sea Foods once before he leaves for Milan, so we took him there for dinner. Had a good time with Ettore, Anna, Michael, Dan, and Ian.
Afterwards Michael, Anna, and myself wanted to see a movie, so we headed over to the Kendall Theater. Michael eventually decided against going; what a shame. Neither Anna nor I knew what most of the movies there were about, so we pretty much picked the one that was starting earliest then. Saw Alice et Martin. Except for the good music, it was incredibly boring and confusing. Oh, well.
Walked Anna back to the T and then went by myself back to the office. Hacked a little. Michael's new menu merging stuff in Bonobo looks really cool.
Did a metric shitload of laundry.
Played the piano while laundry was being done.
Fixed Evolution for the new import of libical. This library really needs its build system to be fixed.
Dinner with the monkeys at CBC. Had some good pork chops, but their portions are extremely big. Had to take the leftovers home; there was just too much leftover food to leave it there.
We started watching Godspell with the projector, everyone got bored, switched to eXistenZ instead. I just love this weird movie.
Amazing. For some reason I was up at 7:00 AM. Having nothing better to do, went running across the river, around the park where I stopped for breakfast, and then back to Cambridge. Slept until 11:00 AM. Hell must be pretty chilly these days.
It is very freaky when Raph gets an idea.
JPR and I started debugging the iCalendar stuff in the calendar GUI now that the code is mostly complete. I'll have to completely rework the way alarms are computed; we have to do it in the client instead of in the Wombat now because iCalendar alarms cannot be easily identified over the wire.
Dinner with Anna, Ettore, and Mike at John Harvard's. Had a not very good bean soup (they put paprika in it! Horrors!) and a rather good salmon with ravioli. Everyone had a good time.
Sigh. My laptop's power cord started spewing smoke. It is broken somewhere in the middle. This does not make me happy.
Sigh. Woke up at 5 fucking PM. This is what happens when I go to bed late and forget to set my alarm clock.
Dinner in Chinatown. Anna took us to a place where there are many little stalls each with different food. Pretty good, and really cheap.
Watched The Last Temptation of Christ with the hackers at the office. Excellent movie.
More iCalendar hacking. JPR is incredibly fast (or maybe he's not yet as sick of iCalendar as I am). The calendar GUI is one file away from being completely iCalendarified.
Majorly ass-kicking dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in Harvard Square. Had a wonderful chicken curry soup and a superb whole fish. For some reason people were weirded out at the sight of the fish. Hey, it's only a fish!
Ettore arrived to the office while we were having dinner, apparently. Which is a shame, since he missed it. We stayed in the office and watched Thunderball.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Released Eye of Gnome "Scream While You Burn" 0.4.
That was last night. As a result, went to bed at 5:00 AM.
As a result, woke up at 3:00 PM or so. Rode the T with Michael; he went to church for the second time today, which I found a bit insane, and I went for lunch. Having nothing better to do and being downtown, went to the Borders to get my book fix. My stack of books to read is really not getting any smaller.
Waking up in the afternoon makes your days very short. Read mail. Had dinner with Arik at Mary Chung's. The bastards were pretty much kicking us out because they close early and stuff. I hate that.
Woke up at 2:30 PM. Michael and Jacob seemed to be still asleep; they must be tired from the show.
Went with Michael for lunch at the pretty good kabobs place near the Symphony Hall. Then we went for coffee, discussed Bonobo API and UIHandler issues. It is nice to have a good conversation over good food and good coffee; it makes me so happy. And today the weather was beautiful. Life is good.
We wandered around a bit, went into the store where I had bought my Korg keyboard, looked at the stuff they have. Found a *nice* keyboard that supports three pedals, and they had a three-pedal thing plugged into it. My keyboard does not seem that cool anymore. And the pedals on this new thing are much nicer.
I'm considering trading in my keyboard for a newer one, or at least one that does support better pedals.
Went to the Coop with Michael; didn't find the book he was looking for. Got a book for myself. Michael told me about his extremely evil plans for a mail correlation system. People on the subway just stared with that "those goddamn nerds" stare. Poor victims. Mwahahaha.
In one of those moments of total gnosis that happen when you wake up, I figured out how to fix auto-sizing of windows in EOG for good. It is working much better now. The GTK+ scrolling interface could still be improved, though, to avoid fiddling with usizes and window policies and whatnot.
Started integrating Eliot Landrum's documentation for EOG into the source tree. I have to convert it from an <article> into a <book> and add some extra screenshots and information on the new options.
All the hackers arrived tonight from LWE. Stayed hacking until pretty late in the office, watched The Talented Mr. Ripley on the projector. Very kick-ass movie. Eventually we went home at around 4:00 AM.
Amazing, managed to wake up before noon. This allowed me to do half of my mail-reading before lunch.
Why am I getting so much mail these days? Wasn't Gnus supposed to scale and stuff? Maybe I should start using Evolution as my main mailer now.
Lunch with Anna and Peter in the K2 cafe. Dinner with Peter at Ginza, had a pretty good sukiyaki. Then we went to the cave to watch eXistenZ. I love that movie.
I had forgotten how good tea is. Wakes you up and stuff, has a delicate flavor and won't leave you sweating coffee.
Not that sweating coffee is a bad thing. You could lick yourself all day long, for that matter. But tea is good after you have not had it for a long time.
Mail mail mail. Way too much mail to read. And RMS flamed the Photodex dude, which made me happy.
Decided that I needed my movie fix, so went to see Croupier in the evening. Very very good movie.
So pretty much everyone is at Linux World Expo. It gets lonely in the office without all the monkeys bouncing around.
Some people have too much time in their hands. And plenty of skill. I just love this gallery. Now if only POV-Ray were free software. I remember when I had the time to sit down, design a cool scene, write the code, and wait. And wait. And wait some more. And then look at the ridiculously small preview image that my poor 486 would spit out, panting. And then I would edit two lines of scene code and wait some more.
It was painful. It hurt so good.
Someone fucked with the office's security alarm control panel thingy last night and it started beeping, like, very loudly. After about five minutes of button-pushing, we managed to turn it off.
But the thing was still armed.
When someone opened and closed the door to go to the bathroom, it started beeping again, like, very fucking loudly.
So I figured out how to disarm the stupid thing, after five more minutes of button-pushing.
It is disarmed now. If anyone ever arms it again, I will punch them in the genitals.
Woke up late. Seemingly woke up Michael with my piano playing, or maybe we just woke up at around the same time. We went for breakfast/lunch downtown, as he wanted to go near Park Street for church service. So we saw the schedule, went for food, and then we went shopping for clothes. I got two kick-ass shirts and a couple trousers. We found some trousers with ridiculous sizes like 42W 30L; wondered what kind of cetacean would wear such a thing. My stupid braindead evil Visa card did not go through, so Michael lent me his. This sucks. I have to phone my bank yet again and scream very loudly at them. I *know* the card has enough money in it, damnit.
Then we went for a quick coffee, Michael went into church, and I went back to the office.
"Don't you love it when you come back from the restroom to find your food waiting on the table?" That's the feeling I get from this obnoxious reply, which was happily waiting on my mailbox as I got to the office. Seeing that the guy is completely missing the point and making an ass out of himself, I'll have to compose a carefully-constructed and polite flame.
Slept wonderfully well, and woke up way too late. Did quite a bit of maintenance on the books page; added a bunch of books I had not listed.
Dinner with many hackers and Daniel Veillard at Mary Chung's.
Flamed the Photodex idiots. I don't want proprietary a software maker to hoard GPhoto for their own purposes.
Fíngete sano: ya me ha acontecido
fingir que duermo, y aunque esté despierto
hallarme, sin saber cómo, dormido.
We have Anna, our new user interface expert at Helix Code. This should be good. Told her about the horrors of iCalendar recurrence rules and how to get a UI for specifying them.
Wrote plenty of code in automatic pilot today. Boring code. I hate iCalendar.
No movie today. It is a sad weekend in the movie universe.
Woke up earlier than usual. Just as I was coming out of the house, Ettore was going back to lock his door. Walked with him to the office. Then we went for lunch at KHOP with many other hackers.
More integration of iCalendar into the GUI, a little refactoring here and there. Got plenty of work done. Waking up early can be a good thing.
Went with Peter to the FSF to meet Tim Ney, and he took us for dinner at a *good* restaurant in Chinatown. It was awesome. Had some spicy meat in garlic sauce, an excellent seafood soup, some ginger lobster, and egg noodles. Good food makes me so happy. Good food at a place I didn't know before makes me even happier. We will definitely have to go to Chinatown more often.
It reminded me of the Chinese restaurant scene in Existenz.
Then we went for coffee at some bar in downtown. Had a nice talk about previous free software and Linux conferences and how they have changed over time.
Then we went back to the FSF and installed Helix GNOME on all the machines. Now they are all consistent and pretty.
Woke up way too late. Sigh.
Wrote a patch for the foobar clock so that it can display the date as well as the time. Without the date on it, I never know what day it is. Sent the patch off to Jacob for review.
Fixed the way itimer deltas are computed in the Evolution calendar alarm engine. Oops.
Called my dad in Mexico, it was nice to talk to him. Asked him to tell my stupid useless braindead bank to transfer some money from my account there to my account in the U.S. so that I can buy my fucking laptop. Doing a transfer over the phone is next to impossible with this stupid bank. Banks are so useless it makes me want to cry. But then I shrug it off and just emit a primal scream. I have that kind of self-control.
Dinner at CBC's with many of the hackers. Slow service, quite uncommon for that place. Good food, good beer. Tea afterwards in Harvard Square with Ettore, Michael, and Miguel. Sat down just by the T station to look at the human specimens that roam the place.
Radio stations in Boston suck. Jamie's station does not suck at all. Jamie has good taste.
Started reading Bertrand Russell's “Unpopular Essays”. I love this guy.
Woke up not very late, had breakfast with Michael, fell asleep again, woke up later.
Some calendar client re-architecting. It sucks that we have to do this, but iCalendar has properties that are not easy to identify over the wire and we must do more things on the client instead of in the Wombat.
Dinner with Michael and Arik at the stupid Cheesecake Factory. Service was sucky enough to warrant not going there again.
Lunch with Jonathan, Rosanna, Peter, and Chris. It was raining, so we went close by to the mall. JRB and Zana left for the airport afterwards.
Fixed a nasty object finalization bug in Bonobo. This made me happy.
Michael Meeks arrived in the afternoon. The craziness level in the office increased by a substantial amount.
Dinner at Mary Chung's with Mike Whitson, Mike McDonald, and Peter. Pretty good food.
Ettore arrived afterwards. The craziness level in the office increased by a substantial amount again.
It's good to have these hackers here!
Woke up semi-late. Had breakfast with Miguel and Arik at the Trident Cafe. Then we went on a dangerous expedition to Tower Records; got some CDs and some DVDs. Jacob joined us there. We went for coffee on Newbury street. Sat down on a table on the sidewalk, watched the human race go by. Then we started walking towards the park; Miguel and Arik stopped by some place to buy shoes and Jacob and I sort of wandered down the street. We lost track of each other eventually. I sat down on the grass in the public garden, watched the squirrels, watched the birds; watched the children terrorize the squirrels, watched the parents terrorize the children. Watched pretty girls go by. Watched some more squirrels. Watched the grass grow a bit, got tired, and started walking back across the park.
Got sidetracked, went into a used book store, browsed a bit, got a book. I guess I did something the booksellers would not have wanted me to. While leafing through some random music book I found a couple handwritten papers between the pages; they seemed to be a student's (old!) notes of some sort. Being morbidly curious as I am, I took those two folded sheets of paper and put them between the pages of the book I actually got to buy. Dum de dum. Browsed some more, but did not find any books on music engraving. Walked back towards Charles street. It started to rain a bit. Walked faster. Eventually got to the office.
As it were, Jonathan and Rosanna were at the office. I did not expect that; their flight got canceled and so they have to wait for a day here.
So we went for dinner; Jeff, Dan, and Bradford joined us. We went to the North End to an awesome Italian restaurant. Had some delicious gnocchi in pesto per Zana's suggestion. It was a good suggestion. Then we went for coffee. It was all good. I should go to the North End more often; there seems to be a fair amount of real food there.
Went back to the office to get JRB's and Zana's suitcases, went back home and then next door to the Barracks, since there's an extra room where they can stay tonight. JRB and I played Bomberman. He mostly kicked my butt, but it was fun. Zana was knitting a square tile for some sort of big blanket or quilt thingy. We started watching some Paul Newman movie, but we were tired and decided to put it off for some other time. Played a bit more Bomberman and then I went back to my apartment.
Somehow the bottom part of the left leg of my trousers got torn. This makes me sad; they were kind of new and I liked them. I wonder if I'm scraping them with my chair at the office or something.
My new CD of Moroccan music kicks ass.
Bleh. Fell asleep on a couch in the office last night.
Didn't do much. Basically went back home and slept some more.
Went with Arik and Miguel to see Loser. Nice movie, and boy, was Arik drooling over Mena Suvari as a goth chick. She's hot indeed.
Arik and I had a nice walk home afterwards.
Woke up late. Did some laundry. While waiting for laundry to be done, finished re-reading Neuromancer once again. It is one of those books that gets different every time you read it.
My teeth hurt. I am scared.
Then it really started hurting. I went to see Aaron's dentist, but it was closed. Went to the CVS and they gave me some gel anesthetic thingy. It works for a while, but it is basically a bad hack.
Dinner with Chris and Arik. We decided that it would be a wonderful thing to go to the Cheesecake Factory because they are open late. I was mildly apprehensive about it because the service sucked last time I went there, but perhaps that was just a waiter in a spacy mood. So we went anyways.
Bad idea. Service *really* sucked. And Chris tells me that my complaining about it to the waitress was rude. Hey, tough. It's their job. The food was reasonably good, but my ultra-sensitive Super TasteBuds 2000(tm) have detected the it-tastes-like-it-was-put-together-in-an-assembly-line flavor. Sigh.
Jonathan arrived today to Boston. Met him at the office and went with many people from the office to have lunch. Of all places, people wanted to go to CBC's. The food is really not bad at all. It's just that the selection is small. Had a pretty good pasta dish with scallops.
Later Jonathan, Bradford, and I went to get a haircut. Discussed the shortcomings of GConf vs. well-defined CORBA interfaces for setting configuration options.
Dinner at the Trident Cafe with Miguel, Jeff, and Arik. Went book shopping afterwards and then to Tower Records. These expeditions are dangerous.
Changed desks; moved from my old crowded desk with the Ultrasparc to what used to be Richard's desk. This is better as I can fit my CDs and my laptop on the desk now.
Dinner with Miguel and Larissa in Harvard Square. I had not seen her for about four years now since she went to Mexico; it was nice to talk to her again. She just came back from Portugal and had many things to tell.
Spent 5 minutes starting to write a GNOME replacement for xmag. Then Miguel told me that Larry had already written one, which is much nicer than my 5-minute hack. This should be finished, polished a tiny little bit, documented, and put into gnome-utils. Any takers?
Of course the name needs to be changed from gnomag to magnifeye, but that's another story.
And of course the world's ultimate magnifying glass would use a Bonobo control exported from EOG and hydrated via the PersistStream interface. Or perhaps not, since you may also want it to display gridlines for the fat pixels and whatnot.
iCalendar is pissing me off. I really want to be done with this.
Cleaned the bathtub, toilet, and bathroom sink. The world is a better place.
Too much mail. Way too much mail.
Go backward in time to Jul 2000.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Mon 2001/Jun/18 17:26:39 CDT