The December push-up challenge

Yay, finished early. We had a challenge running at Canonical to do 2000 push-ups during December. I've just done my 2000th push-up for the month. It has actually been quite good. I've found that the most important bit is just to do a set regularly, and really try for four or five sets a day.

Also I've finished work for the year. Another yay! It has been a good year, with much good stuff getting done. Even more interesting stuff is due to come out in the first six months of next year.

With another year heading past, the girls are a year older. Jessie is starting school in February next year at the start of term, and Maia is now old enough to go to playcentre by herself (and she has done so at least once).

It seems time to start thinking about new year resolutions...

Cambridge, MA

Well, my body is now almost completely adjusted to US east coast time. I do find myself waking each night between two and three in the morning. I'm thinking that this might be due to me expecting to hear Jessie or Caitlin waking, but here it is only Joey.

The rest of the Launchpadders arrived tonight. I ended up meeting so many of them it isn't really worth me writing them down for fear of forgetting someone. We have the agile training tomorrow, which should be quite interesting.

Cambridge, or the small bits of it that I have seen, reminds me of London. But perhaps that is just because they are digging up the roads all over the place, and the pavement is made up of concrete slabs and bricks that have been laid for so long that they are no longer flat.

I thought the USA was supposed to be cheap, but so far the meals out in the evening have been about the same that I'd pay back in NZ (converting the dollars). However generally books and DVDs are cheaper. I've put through an order to amazon.com and getting it delivered to the hotel.

Trivialities

Well the laptop has been running mostly well since I upgraded it. Just a few times when it really had problems. Most of those seem to have been solved by making KDE start a fresh session every time rather than trying to use what I had running last time. It means a bit of manual tweaking each time I log in, but I tend to just leave it on most of the time.

I have Jono and James here this week working with me and we are attacking both features and usability issues with Launchpad and Bazaar. I feel that things are coming along nicely.

I've just joined a squash club, but yet to organise my first game. I know that I'll be really stiff after the first smack around.

Going gutsy

I upgraded my desktop machine to Gutsy (Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu 7.10) several weeks ago, and it has been going reasonably well, so it is time to upgrade the laptop. The distribution upgrader application happily told me that I needed to download around 1.4 gig of updates that would take around 2 days 7 hours using a 56K modem. I'm happy that I have a decent ADSL connection, although it is still saying that it has got between 4 and 7 hours remaining depending on the current download speed.

The official Gutsy release candidate is in about a week or two. If you feel so inclined, you too can upgrade and help report bugs.

I just wish I could figure out how to use my favourite window picker that beryl has that compiz doesn't seem to (or at least I haven't found it yet).

Rediscovering stuff

When we left for the UK we only took a couple of suitcases. After a number of years away we sold our house and put much stuff in storage. This stuff has just been delivered to our house.

There is much cool stuff there. As I was helping the guys get the stuff out of the van, I grabbed a box that said "Glass, Fragile" and it was somewhat squashed and at the bottom of a pile. Yes there was a broken glass vase in there, but I haven't gone through everything yet.

I did find a copy of "Ferdinand" that was given to me back in 1975. It is in quite good nick given its age.

More unpacking to happen this weekend I guess.

Crap at blogging

I can't believe that it has been almost a month since my last post.

I'm sure it is because I don't really think that much I've what I'm doing is really interesting to anyone :-)

CVu time again

Every couple of months I end up with a busy time for ACCU. This is the time when all the articles need to be with the production editor, and the period just before making sure that they all get there on time (or not too late anyway), and the period after when reviewing all the proofs.

ACCU is great in that it gets developers writing articles for other developers on all sorts of topics, and this month is no exception.