Boring news about Federico - October 2001

Go forward in time to November 2001.

Still working on #6150, argh. I hate debugging this kind of stuff.
Got a little, cheap Korg electronic metronome; my brother kept the big, old, beautiful, mechanical Taktell at my mother's house. Hmmm. Thoughts of writing yet another computer metronome with all sorts of bells & whistles for weird/composite measures.
Wednesdays are 2x1 days at the theater, so we went to watch The Others. Another kick-ass movie by Amenábar.

Our landlady lives on the ground floor of the building. Every time she grills something on her back yard, the odor fills the whole building and makes me hungry. This is just not fair.
We have been on a big bug-fixing rush for the Evolution freeze. It has been fun to watch the bug count go down for 1.0. The only thing remaining on my plate is a tricky Bonobo key-forwarding bug, which sucks.

Cloudy day, quite different from the absolutely clear days we have had.
More bug fixing, finally took care of the annoying #780.
Went to the weekly OFUNAM concert. My friend Raúl Herrera played Ponce's piano concerto, and it was pretty awesome.

Veggie Vision.
Cooked a delicious penne pasta with artichoke hearts, Bratwurst, capers, tomato, parsley, and spices.

Released gdk-pixbuf-0.13.0 upon finding a really stupid bug in the ICO loader. Again we fall into the cesspool of cut&paste code.
Fixed the annoying little bug in ETable where it would not initially give focus to any ETableItem. Now you can Tab to a table on which you have never clicked before, and get proper focus. Wheee!
Oralia is moody yet happy to be in school again and I love her very much. It is good to have someone to hug and to talk to.

Am I moody myself? Most likely, yes.
Magnum-brand ice-cream popsicles are yummi.

Added timezone support to the alarm daemon. It seems that the Wombat also has some bits that need to be updated.
Released gdk-pixbuf-0.12.0.
We decided to use our bamboo steamers for the first time and made some delicious salmon with ginger over rice and vegetables. Mmmmmm.

Went to do some car-related paperwork in the morning, and it turns out that they use Linux boxes with GNOME to enter the license plate data. This was a pleasant surprise.
Oralia started her new semester at school today!

Happiness is knowing that you can still be friends with the GNOME session manager.
Sadness is spilling hot chocolate on your laptop's keyboard.

It seems that only the keyboard is damaged and the rest of the machine works fine. I can plug an external keyboard or log in remotely with no problems. I will call the Dell service center tomorrow... I hope this thing is not expensive to get fixed.
Finally, this is a link to Nat's page just so he can be at the top.

Oralia went with her friend Enrique to polish some wooden planks to make a bookcase, so I went to have some coffee with my friend Michelle. She had an operation but fortunately she seems to be doing fine. Had a nice talk, as always.

In the morning, found a bad bug in the Wombat that made it trigger an assertion. Crap, we'll have to re-make the tarball.
Been reading more of Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony. I've been doing some of the exercises and it feels good to understand this stuff again. It is painful to realize how much music theory I have forgotten.

Between the sporadic and highly opinionated rants, Schoenberg is very interesting and comprehensive. So far I'm liking his book on harmony a lot more than Walter Piston's, who is extremely rigid, concise, and... boring. I like ranting geniuses, and Schoenberg makes for good, if dense, reading material.
Started making the new Evolution tarball; left it distchecking while we went to the movies. Saw Croupier, which at last opened in Mexico. I first saw it last August in Boston. Excellent movie.

Oct 9 11:53:53 guanabana sendmail[22079]: f99GE1J09769: Losing qff99GE1J09769: unsupported qf file version
This scares me.

The U.S. and U.K. attacks started today. It is obscene that these days they can pick out a target, push a button, and have a GPS-guided missile do all the dirty work by itself.
And while we were watching the news in the evening, there was a small earthquake in Mexico City.
The world is a bizarre place these days.

Went to the park and marketplace for breakfast in the morning. Some icky stuff was flowing along the street by the sidewalk, and it made interesting eddying patterns as it went, and then disappeared through a sewer. I guess I don't want to know what it was.

We also went to get some sewing thread for Oralia. The sewing machine that she borrowed from my grandmother just got fixed, so she is going to start using it. Display cases for colored thread are very pretty!
The moon was beautiful in the evening. Below, 1/125 sec. at f/6.3, ISO 400 sensitivity, using the 2x teleconverter for the Nikon 990. It is a shame that you would need a looooong lens (1000+ mm?) to get a full frame of the moon.

Bleh. No network in the office because we forgot to pay the phone.
Still more ETable hacking. I cannot see how grouping and selections can work together unless you add subsets for the selection model that are parallel to the ones for the data model. Maybe for later...
About two months ago Oralia and myself went to get some plants for the house, and we also got a very nice plant for the office. It is called concha in Spanish; please tell me if you know the English name. New leaves grow beautifully out of the center at a constant angle. They are thick and fleshy and have a slightly fuzzy texture. The oldest leaves, near the bottom of the plant, gradually dry out and die. The plant seems to have a mood of its own; sometimes the leaves close in a bit and sometimes they open out making it look bigger. It is about 35 centimeters in diameter and it keeps growing...

We switched out of daylight savings on Sunday, thus ending up out of sync with the rest of the world. So I made it half an hour late to the GNOME board meeting. This sucks.

So now we are in what would be U.S. Pacific time or something. Switched Evolution to that timezone; was too lazy to switch my entire machine. Maybe I should install Ximian setup tools.

The right thing, of course, would be to download a new timezone definition from a central server. A single, nice timezone definition. But Unix sucks and then I need one for Linux, one for Evolution, and who knows what else.
Posted the new version of the gnome.org Account Policies document.

Saturday: coffee in the park and pleasant chat with Luis and Edurne while Oralia visited her parents. Luis has some pretty cool ideas for doing time-lapse photography using the digital camera; Edurne was helpful with some music notation stuff. Later in the evening we all got together at our place to watch 8½ Women. Pretty crazy, very good movie.

Tried the new Pepsi Lime thing, which seems to be Pepsi with lime juice in it. It tastes a bit weird but not bad. Plain Coke is still better, though.
Sunday: Watched Welcome to the Dollhouse. Awesome movie; it painfully reminds me of my junior high school days.
Today: ETable hacking; dealing with editing. Ugh.
Kromlech rehearsal in the evening, practiced the new piece for the album. It turns out I'm not a bad composer. This makes me very happy.

Go backward in time to September 2001.