Go forward in time to August 2001.
So we are back from Ottawa. Ettore's talk was pretty good. Alex's was very interesting; I meant to learn something about Soup anyways. Miguel gave a good overview of the goals of Mono and why it may be a good idea to indeed clone a new ass-kicking platform for development, just like GNU did with Unix a long time ago.
The Ximian party rocked. Pretty much everyone ended up drunk, as usual. It is good to see some of the Ximian hackers again. Nat and Ettore took care of blinding everyone with the flash units on their cameras. Nat has this really cool Sony digicam with a Zeiss lens. I stuck to my Rollei because I had not bothered to find a charger for my Nikon's batteries.
It was especially good to talk a bit to Cameron. I had not seen her for a long time and she is a good friend.
My 25th birthday (goddamnit) was on Sunday, when everyone else had left. Oralia and myself had lunch at a *very* good Italian restaurant where I had a delicious dish of linguine in oyster sauce. Oralia had penne in with spicy sausage in tomato sauce. Mmmmm. At the end of the day we went into Chapters, a pretty big big bookstore there, and indulged ourselves.
The flight back was uneventful and fortunately there were no delays of over 20 minutes. Got home, left our stuff, and went out to have some tacos al pastor for dinner.
Implemented some niftiness in the Wombat to maintain a set of the categories that are present in a calendar's objects. That way the views can always keep their drop-down menus of categories up to date without having to do any work.
First day of talks at the conference. Gave my talk on the use of the GNOME libraries in Evolution. It was OK, but I completely forgot to make jokes and so it turned out a bit bland.
Magicpoint sucks a lot, as usual.
While we grabbed a quick lunch before my talk at the mall's food court, we watched a motorized and talking garbage can. You walk near it and it opens and says "thank you for bla bla bla...". Then it closes slowly. Wonders will never cease.
Sightseeing day. We woke up late-ish, had lunch at the Marche in the shopping mall next to the conference center, and went around the Ottawa parliament hill. There are some very nice buildings and we took a bunch of pictures.
Some of the Ximian hackers arrived later. We went with the Gimpnet crowd and some of the Linuxnet people for dinner at an Indian place that was extremely slow. They took about an hour and a half to bring our food, and everyone was getting cranky. The food was good but a bit too spicy.
Flight to Ottawa. Mexico City -> Chicago was at an ungodly hour of the morning; uneventful flight. I think we both just slept through it. However, we were stuck inside the next plane for 3 hours in Chicago due to bad weather, waiting in line for other airplanes to take off. Suck. Fortunately it was a small plane and so there were not enough people to become annoying. Our single flight attendant was very talkative and funny all the time.
Arrived to Ottawa at around 10:00 PM. We left our stuff at the hotel and went to look for food. Found an Ethiopian food place that was almost closing, had a very good meal. Oralia found it a bit spicy, but it was delicious.
Wheeee! We have new passports valid for 10 years.
If you do not feel something when watching through this, you are not a human being.
Oralia made a wonderful breakfast of potatoes with chorizo, eggs, refried beans, and string cheese from Oaxaca. Mmmmmmm.
Emacs 20.7 seems to be highly buggy with respect to faces. Reverted to 20.5 and the world is pretty again.
More bug fixing. It is fun to be a Bugzilla bitch.
Big rain while having tacos for lunch with Luis and Ángel. The wind blew some of the rain inside the restaurant from time to time.
Made a totally kick-ass bean soup. I love our pressure cooker.
Made pancakes for breakfast. Wow, my ancient recipe still seems to work pretty well. Oralia decided to add some shredded apples to the mixture and they turned out pretty well.
Evolution bug day!
Finally got around to perfecting my elisp script for typing activity logs. Grab it here.
Oralia and myself were going to the bank. I had just parked the car and we were crossing the street. Some fucking moron in a minivan rushed past and threw an egg at us. The egg hit Oralia's leg and stained her skirt, and the fucking moron in the minivan just hammered it and fled. We were too far away from our car to get in and chase them or something.
I love this world.
More hot bug fixing action. Also, tried to see why the Evolution shell is so slow when switching folders. The individual components don't seem to be the problem; the shell takes up a large chunk of the CPU when switching folders. Strace showed a lot of activity on the X connection. Next to try: some hot xmon logging action.
Plus, if I run the shell under gdb and hit C-c at random points while switching folders it always seems to be stuck somewhere inside ETree. Perhaps ETree is doing too many round-trips to the X server?
It seems that #gnome has several Shostakovich fans. Very cool.
Mutopia hits the newspapers. Now if Lilypond were not so painful to use, people may actually transcribe more music and submit it. I hope Cody finishes Ludwig Van soon.
I am an Inscrutable Drama Queen. How cool is that?
More bug fixing action.
Thursday: Got married. Oralia and myself are very happy!
Saturday: Big dinner party at my mom's house, which she kindly organized. Many family members and friends were there, and the food was delicious [note to self: have to learn how to make that chicken curry]. Thanks to everyone who could make it.
Today: Bug fixing day, making good progress.
Filed a bunch of bugs. Fixed some bugs in the calendar. It is nice when you can fix a little bunch of related bugs by adding a virtual method to an abstract class and then a few implementations thereof.
Today is my last day as a single man. I am nervous and excited.
Picked up Gina, Oralia's cousin, at the TAPO bus terminal at the ungodly hour of 6:00 AM. What a fucking mess it is to get to that place by car.
Very productive hacking day. But what a pain in the ass it is to make dialog boxes even with Glade and a bunch of utility code.
I am still amazed at the overcomplicated mess that RFC 2445 is. I wish the IETF working group would schedule one of their interoperability-a-thons, take the intersection of the subsets of iCalendar features that each implementation supports, add any basic stuff that may have been left out of the result, and trim the fucking RFC to reflect that. I wonder how much of the current stuff would be deemed too exotic to ever use.
Case in point: why are durations not reduced to the lowest common denominator time unit? I.e. if you want to specify 1:30 hours why not just reduce it to 90 minutes? A full implementation of the RFC would bloat the user interface to unusable levels.
Judith, a good friend of Oralia, came by for lunch. She is a very nice person. Lots of talk, had a good time.
Got a Shaft poster from JRB and Zana! It kicks ass! Thanks, my dear dudes.
Very nice lunch at my grandmother's sisters' house. It is good to see the old ladies. They were very happy to see Oralia and myself and wished us the best for our marriage. Woohoo!
Go backward in time to June 2001.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Wed 2001/Sep/26 15:03:19 CDT