Cuteness

Apr. 22nd, 2009 11:01 am
jbailey: (Default)
This morning Leif and I were playing and I looked at him and said "I love..." and point at him.  He looked up at me with bright eyes and said "DOUBLE-YOU!"

It's his favourite letter at the moment. =)
jbailey: (Default)
Dear Ubuntu Technical Committee,

Please consider the following proposal to both delay the 9.10 release slightly, and also to deviate the naming sequence slightly to use a previous letter that was skipped.

I propose that the next release of Ubuntu be 9.11, and be called "Bumbling Bush"

Sincerely Yours,
Jeff Bailey, Ubuntu Core Dev. 
jbailey: (Default)
On our move down to California, Angie, Leif and I stopped by the Creationism Museum. I mentioned this a couple of Augusts ago. Unfortunately, I didn't want to post about it without having the pictures, and I've only just finally got around to uploading them. I suck, news at 11.

http://picasaweb.google.com/kaladron/CreationismMuseum

We went with Stephanie, and had a great time.  We got there a bit late, so didn't get to see the floor show and stuff, but we did get a chance to see the exhibits.  The people there were a little reminiscent of the TV show Circle Square, where the people were just a little too friendly, and blinked just a little too rarely.

How we heard about the creationism museum was from an Interview on CBC, where the guy who opened the museum talked about how they were trying to show a different interpretation of the results of archaelogical digs, and how they saw this as a religion, and that science is just another religion.  We were a bit shocked when we got to the US to discover that the guy is somewhat less rational there, claiming that what they're doing is good pure science, etc.

The premise is an interesting one:  They start with the literal truth of the bible and then interpret everything against that backdrop.  The argument is a vaguely reasonable one: Scientists do this all the time using what they've learned in school.  They've learned that the universe is billions of years old, and therefore will do carbon dating a certain way, etc.  If you start with the bible saying that the universe is 6000-odd years old, then results wind up getting interpreted differently.

The key to most of how the world wound up the way it is is apparently tied up in two major events: First, the story with the apple (Sorry I'm a little light on details, I didn't grow up Christian) caused people to start eating meat and wearing clothes.

Aside of the moment, my in-laws have a great fridge magnet from restoringeden.org: "God's original plan was to hang out in a garden with some naked vegetarians"

The second big event was the great flood, which killed all the dinosaurs, caused turbulence, moved continents around, and some other stuff.

Amusingly enough, when looking for a link to the CBC review, I found a review of a complaint about the interview: http://www.cbc.ca/ombudsman/ombudsmanweb/39.htm

Anyhow, had a great time.  Enjoy the photos. =)

jbailey: (Default)
  • Leif slept through most of the night most nights last week. Then was sick this week. We haven't got back to that space yet. I'd say "I have faith", but I think that's when god looks at the little Unitarian and chuckles to himself with an "aren't you cute".
  • Apparently I have thousands of photos that I hadn't uploaded. This is going to be more work than I thought.
  • What sucks is waking up at 4am not because Leif woke me up, but because I was hungry. Taking until 5 to figure this out. Until 5:30 to fall asleep, to have Leif wake me up at 6.
  • We get communauto tomorrow. I'm so excited! First trip: Ikea. And of all the exciting things I could want from there? I want kitchen knives. At 5, I put the margarine on the toast with the back of a fork.
  • I really hope I can get to the gym today.
  • In 4 minutes, I will wake Leif and Angie up and we'll start our day.
Showtime, synergy!



Citibank

Mar. 21st, 2009 08:17 pm
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Apparently Citibank doesn't even trust Citibank.

Citi Mastercard took my minimum monthly payment out of my account despite me having paid the account down to zero, so had to issue me a refund check. It's drawn on the Royal Bank of Canada.

Awesome. =)
jbailey: (Default)
As an Ubuntu core-dev (although a lazy one. I really should hack on something again. I blame having a toddler), I try to at least do a run of testing around beta time on my machines. So far I'm really impressed. For the first time wifi, suspend, sound, 3d, and youtube all work out of the box. Usually at beta time, I expect that none of those will. Playing a DVD kills X, though. (Well, if I do it twice. The first time it'll kill the app, the second time it'll kill X) Tried with totem-gstreamer, xine and mplayer so I'm pretty certain that it's X. Luckily it's an Intel card, so hopefully it's early enough to file bugs and get them fixed in time for release.

Nice work!
jbailey: (Default)
My coworker scares me. He wants 70's wallpaper. From the gallery that he's looking at:

OMFG

Anniversary

Mar. 9th, 2009 08:19 pm
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Hey [livejournal.com profile] auzure_skies, Happy 7th wedding anniversary. =)

I love you. =)
jbailey: (Default)
It's crazy to think that this is just past the one-year anniversary of my surgery. A year out and I can lift about 12kg (25lbs for the Americans and Iranians), I'm not on routine or regular pain killers of any sort. I still have to take it easy and need to make sure I get to the gym more often - when I don't I start to get pain and have trouble keeping up with Leif. I have discovered that I can't sleep on airplanes anymore, even in Air Canada business class. So, no more red-eyes for me. It's hard to shed a tear over that one. =) I suppose I have a lot of little limitations like that, but a year in I don't notice them so much anymore.

I shudder a bit to think that at this time last year, I was just home from the hospital. A long walk for me was a trip to the mailbox: I was only up for it every couple of days, and it took me about 30 minutes, including stops for sitting.

Thanks for your love and support, everyone.
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I'm going to post pictures and such later, but we celebrated Leif's second birthday yesterday with 20-or so of us. He had a great time running around and dancing and seeing everyone.

As a fun side-effect, it was our first big house party. The place is finally setup enough that it feels like most things have a place to go. Yay! Sandy and Angie did a wonderful job with decorating while I was in California last week.
jbailey: (Default)
I think it's funny how the weather here drizzles snow like Vancouver drizzels rain. There's a light dusting of it coming down now, and this seems to be able to happen for weeks at a time at the beginning and end of winter.

I know so many people who are so sick of winter by the time March and April roll around. I suspect growing up in 200 days of rain per year and really liking Vancouver weather makes me a little more resistant to this than most.

Wa[t]com

Feb. 5th, 2009 09:30 pm
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You'd think that sometime before today I would've learned that Wacom and Watcom were not the same company.

And that I might've learned it from someone other than a non-geek friend who was bored in her Japanese business class. =)

BSG

Feb. 4th, 2009 10:50 pm
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Everytime I see people talking about "BSG", I think of the Brotherhood of Saint Gregory.

It's all Thomas Bushnell's fault.
jbailey: (Default)
According to the Service Canada website:
If you are using a Linux operating system (Red Hat Fedora Core 8 or Ubuntu 7.1) with Firefox 2.0.0.6 or higher we recommend using the Sun JVM 1.6.0_03 or higher.

Too cool!

Folic acid

Jan. 25th, 2009 09:27 am
jbailey: (Default)
Going to a party where the host is an obstetrician makes for some interesting conversations.

I learned last night that the reason flour is all enriched in Canada is because the government required that folate be added to the flour. Apparently the reason we don't have more births with neural tube defects is because everyone eats Cheerios for breakfast, and the 40% of pregnancies that are unintended have a base of folic acid in their system already.

I know that the US has these types of things as well, but coming from a place where it seems like everyone loudly wants the government to get out of the way to a place where good government is something we explicitly value is one of the many reasons I'm happy to be home.

... 2008

Jan. 2nd, 2009 11:02 pm
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I try to practice Inbox Zero, and this past year has been brutal far staying on top of my Inbox. When I started pruning the home email a week or so ago (having just gotten my work email box down to zero). It's giving me a pretty good review of 2008. And, umm.. wow:

Spinal tumor, surgery, hating Mountain View (the place, not the job there. My coworkers are pretty uniformly awesome), having a toddler, not being able to lift my toddler, crazy mood altering drugs, visa renewal, a funeral, unexpected pregnancy, weddings, buying a house, mid-term miscarriage, Angie's hospitalisation from that, pneumonia, a move home, having to withdraw from my Master's courses 3 times over the course of the year for medical reasons - eventually causing me to withdraw from the program. Extend it by another 3 months into 2007 (because while I'd love to believe that stress reset at the start of a calendar year...), and we have another wedding, a move to the US and a new job.

I've just gotten to an email where I took notes on what the risks were for the angiogram before I'd told many friends. There's a small pile of emails and such from people wishing me well that I never managed to reply to. I also find myself thinking back to the people I didn't hear from, and the reevaluation of my communities and friendships that came along with that.

The lyrics from Counting Crows come to mind: "It's been a long December and there's reason to believe that maybe this year will be better than the last."

Here's to 2009. =)
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Launchpad's email handling is awful. Truly awful. I left a pile of teams I was on to reduce the noise, and vaguely considered leaving the core-dev team so that I would never have to see another "merge request" come through that I couldn't possibly ever care about.

But I have solved the problem!

I remembered that my email can cope with jbailey+FOO@raspberryginger.com and still delivery it, giving me something to filter on. So effectively immediately, all mail from launchpad now skips my inbox is tagged in case I do actually need it. The only thing I need to improve this is a feature to auto-delete emails after 30 days labeled with a certain tag.

What a lovely start to 2009.
jbailey: (Default)
We hosted a real live Christmas dinner this evening! We've done slight variations on it before. Y'know, invite people over and we sit on the couch and hang out. But this was a three-generational, guests-invited, have chairs to sit on, retire to the living room to hang out afterwards Christmas dinner!

I'm glad we got seating for 6, we'll have to do this again. =)

Date night

Dec. 25th, 2008 08:58 am
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Angie's mom is in town, and she sent us off for a date night last night which was awesome. The funny part is that we forgot we city we were in. This is the city where you starve for lack of open *corner stores* on Christmas Day. We tried to go to Chu Chai and then kept walking down St. Denis. When we walked past the Subway that was closed, we started to get nervous about finding food. Luckily on Price Arthur there was an Indian place that was open and a dep a few blocks down for some wine. Totally lovely. On the walk home (along Prince Arthur and up St. Laurent hoping to find a bar or something where we might hang out for a bit) we found 2 other places open: A Greek restaurant and some sort of chicken roasting place.

I love that we're in a city where people aren't scared to say "Hey, go home. It's the holidays" Next time we'll even plan for it!

Merry Christmas or whatever winter holiday you celebrate, all.
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Just saw the LF announcement:

http://video.linuxfoundation.org/category/video-category/-linux-foundation-video-contest

I love the effort, and I'm sure people will do great work, but there's a problem here. There needs to be *two* contests. The first, with the award that they propose, should be the serious one - The one that might get rolled out to suits and businesses everywhere, that we'd be proud to show off on our corporate web sites.

Then there's the second category. The "too honest" ones that get made for the equivalent "I'm a Mac" / "I'm a PC" ads and wind up on YouTube and email attachments. Not so much fan fiction as fan honesty. =)

I'm thinking start with a focus on a keyboard, crusted with Doritos and possibly an ashtray beside it, zoom out to a couple people playing Quake or Tetrinet or something that clearly haven't washed in days, zoom out, show that this is a dorm room. The room next to it (with cutaway walls and what not) has someone composing an email saying that either Gnome or KDE sux0rs. Further out, two floors, more rooms: Some people lit just by the glow of a CRT, decorated by Debian and Gentoo logos, maybe a vague outline of some porn on a monitor. The zoom out picks up to show ESR writing another book, maybe another ELER comic being written, someone "upgrading" their home wiring, various people arguing, one shower in the building total, and finish the zoom out and fade in the facade to the building: All shiny, glass and steel with a front door with a business person leading a tour past it saying "These are the Linux Development Labs, where all the magic happens. It's closed to visitors right now (points to goth in the back with a laptop who's probably running kismet), except you - you're welcome in." And then fade in the letters "We are Linux"

The soundtrack to this should be a background hum, just at the edge of what a TV speaker will play for volume. Queue in fifths and octaves during the zoom out, fade in some drum and base, some Simcity type of background talking and open up the chord as the words fade onto the screen.

(This is fiction, people. Noone expects another ELER)
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