I just bought, for what I think is the first time in my life, an umbrella.

And it's totally necessary in Fribourg. There's rain, and there isn't always awnings to walk under on my way to work (in fact there isn't, more often than not), but throughout the process of shopping for one, buying it, and taking it home, I felt extreme guilt.

Probably my Wellingtonian readers are the only ones who will understand this, but for everyone else: It's completely ridiculous, as a Wellingtonian, to own an umbrella. Wellington is so windy, that if it's raining, you're pretty much guaranteed to have your umbrella turn inside out and optionally break, within five minutes of stepping out the door. So I have this internal block about umbrellas. It doesn't occur to me that I should use one, or own one, and I experience surprise when I see other people walking around with them, before I realise I'm not in Wellington, and it's quite reasonable, sensible even, to own an umbrella.

So what is my problem? Well, I feel like I'm betraying Wellington, my Wellingtonianism, if such a word exists, by owning an umbrella.

So what can I do? Assert my Wellingtonianism in ways other than the scorn towards the umbrella owner: continue to wear black, whinge about the quality of the coffee, and the lack of hops in the beer, and steadfastly refuse to believe the Matterhorn is anything other than my favourite bar.

Turning twitter off has immediately increased my desire to blog. This is not surprising, but it's far more pronounced than I would have expected.

This possibly means that the quality of what I blog about will decrease, to meet the lower-quality twitter standards somewhere halfway.

Anyway. Here are some things.

- I cannot figure out whether I like Goldenhorse anymore or not. I'm leaning towards Not. Funnily enough, I used to love Kirsten Morelle's accent, and now I find it rather irritating.

- Using git again (albeit with the eventual target of cvs) is beautiful.

- I've completely given up on using Mac OS X and will buy a Samsung X45-A00D this week. There's just no point keeping mac hardware if I'm not going to run Mac OS X on it, and besides, I have someone who wants to buy the Macbook from me.

- IKEA is terrifying. People are terrifying. This was not helped by Sara's desire to "stand in the model kitchens and think about what our future lives would be like had we those kitchens". 99p cooked breakfasts are terrifying.

- I am going to Exeter tomorrow to talk about Mahara at an ePortfolio conference. From what I hear, the train ride from London is worth looking out the window. Not sure I'll be able to pull focus from my laptop, but I will try.

- I managed to figure out how to register myself as an overseas voter, which means that elections will allow me to stay in the Wellington Central electorate instead of forcing me to vote in Kaikoura which is where my parents live (and what I told NZ Post to forward mail to). This makes me happy, I have voted in the Wellington Central electorate since 1999.

- I've been thinking again a lot about the amount of personal information I put on this blog. I know I've written about this in the past but I'm thinking about it again. I think the amount of personal information I put on here has vastly decreased over the last 2 years, and I partially wonder if my audience has subtly changed in that time... but also I think the increase of the other tools I have been using (twitter!) have led to this. Twitter was much more personal than this blog was, partially due, I think, to the fact that I knew who was following me on twitter, and I really have no idea who reads this blog. I find myself wanting to write more personal things here and stopping myself, which hasn't happened for a long time. Maybe this is also a reaction to moving to another country and having a lot of things going on in my life right now.

Today looked like:

New Samuel Flynn Scott & Bunnies on Ponies CD -> abcde -> cd drive anger -> try usb cd drive -> still cd drive anger -> remembering recent dist-upgrade -> split:

a) go to another machine to use cd drive -> fetch abcde.conf -> no cdinfo in cddb -> enter cd info -> get it wrong -> retag oggs

b) do another dist-upgrade -> hit #477194 -> flail about -> find debian bug -> use workaround -> continue dist-upgrade -> cups problems -> bang head on desk and start drinking beer

remerge -> try again to use the cd drive -> epic failure -> fury -> more beer.

For the lazyweb purposes, dmesg is full of

UDF-fs: No partition found (1)
hdd: command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdd: command error: error=0x54 { AbortedCommand LastFailedSense=0x05 }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
ATAPI device hdd:
Error: Illegal request -- (Sense key=0x05)
Illegal mode for this track or incompatible medium -- (asc=0x64, ascq=0x00)
The failed "Read 10" packet command was:
"28 00 00 00 00 10 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 "
end_request: I/O error, dev hdd, sector 64
isofs_fill_super: bread failed, dev=hdd, iso_blknum=16, block=16


Multiple other people with same problem found, but none of them seem to have a solution. Sysadmins say: who cares, you're leaving, don't bother spending too much time on it.

I haven't rebooted yet, I'm too scared.

Today I was whinging about how hot it was, and David helpfully came up with the following:

13:12 <lurbs> Menopause?

and then:

14:19 <Mjollnir`> HOT
22:21 <Mjollnir`> that was HOT
13:39 <Mjollnir`> FUCK ITS COLD
22:55 <Mjollnir`> it's COLD
14:57 <Mjollnir`> why is it so FUCKING COLD
09:22 <Mjollnir`> it's COLD
18:57 <Mjollnir`> HOT
19:28 <Mjollnir`> it's HOT
21:54 <Mjollnir`> COLD
15:51 <Mjollnir`> lurbs: HOT
10:26 <Mjollnir`> COLD COLD COLD
10:31 <Mjollnir`> why is it so FUCKING COLD
11:25 <Mjollnir`> TOO COLD
11:30 <Mjollnir`> COLD
11:31 <Mjollnir`> why is it so fucking COLD
14:22 <Mjollnir`> COLD
16:21 <Mjollnir`> it's COLD ffs
09:31 <Mjollnir`> why is it so COLD
13:56 <Mjollnir`> HOT
12:44 <Mjollnir`> SHIT HOT
15:42 <Mjollnir`> HOT
12:12 <Mjollnir`> HOT DOG
15:48 <Mjollnir`> HOT
20:26 <Mjollnir`> HOT
20:32 <Mjollnir`> HOT
13:33 <Mjollnir`> HOT
14:03 <Mjollnir`> did anyone else notice that it's fucking COLD
18:54 <Mjollnir`> HOT
10:11 <Mjollnir`> HOT
13:12 <Mjollnir`> TOO HOT


I maintain it is the air conditioning. I know I just had a birthday, but I was only 28, ffs.

Some friends of mine have just launched their new company.

At first I was a little bit sceptical - forums are just another communication method to add to the already far too long list of ways people bug me (yes yes, I am that busy and important), but there are a few I do participate in (hh ♥). Even so, I'm not sure I'm really their target audience.

Having said that, I'm sure leforum's interface will be extremely slick and user friendly, but what really interests me is the fact that they're hosted. It's never occurred to me, but of course there are so many hosted blog systems out there and have been for ages, but I don't know that I've ever seen hosted forums in the same way. I think the only thing I have encountered that comes close is forums to support software projects on SF and, more relevantly for me, Eduforge.

For ever and ever it seems, the thing to do if you want a forum is to find some tech savvy friend who can set up (shudder) phpbb for you. Why haven't there been hosted forums in the same way?

Anyway - good luck to lefora. I'm sure you guys will kick ass. Now everyone go create forums and have a play!

I used to really hate verbed nouns. The practice seriously offended my inner grammar nazi sensibilities. But these days I find that I am warming to it.

My favourite verbed noun at the moment is "fiend". I saw someone write on twitter, referring, I think, to being hungry, "fiending for dinner" or similar. I can definitely relate to this particular use of fiend as a verb, but at the time I was still a bit nervous about verbing nouns in general, so I asked my mother, she who keeps a dictionary in every room of the house as well as in the glovebox of the car, what she thought. Initially she was not convinced, but then we found that the noun "fiend" actually started out as a verb which meant "to hate".

Since then, it has grown on me, and the other day I realised that "Merchants of Soul" from Spoon's Gimme Fiction, which any reader of my blog will know to be one of my favourite albums evar (sic), has the lyric "The fiends are fiending outside".

Being completely unable to argue with that level of serendipity, I have totally embraced the usage of fiend as a verb.

Right now, I am fiending for a beer.

I'm really struggling to find the balance between updating this blog and updating all the myriad of other self-publication tools I use (mostly twitter, facebook and flickr). If you really want to stalk me, it's better to stalk me there, not here.

Anyway, I noticed this because I found an exploding dog I wanted to post this morning and went to twitter it, but then realised that I used to put those here. So here it is:

I am on an island, you are on a bigger island



Anyway, as usual, I've been busy and not updating. I went to San Francisco again for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, which was amazing. I met more fantastic people in SF and it was tearing, is the only word I can find to describe it, to leave.

Last night was the NZ Open Source Awards. NZVLE won a special award! That was ace. In general the whole night was seriously cool. So much interesting stuff going on in Open Source.

Also I have American Death Flu.

That is all.

Seem to be mostly, "Hi, I haven't updated for ages because I am busy". Here's another one:

Hi, I haven't updated for ages because I am busy. I've been doing lots of stuff.

Google Summer of Code finished. I was mentoring! It was a cool thing to be involved in. I actually have a lot to say on this matter, mostly about the things that I would do differently as a mentor next time. I hope there will be a next time! Next year I'd like to get Mahara involved as well as mentoring for Moodle again.

Speaking of Mahara, we've been busy. 0.8.3 is the latest stable release, it has support for MySQL and also single sign on with Moodle. We're doing lots of usability improvements for the 0.9 series, big UI work. I am knocking things down with wrecking balls.

Completely unrelated views into two different couple's relationships over the last few weeks have turned my ideas about relationships on their head and then back again. I wonder if we learn the most about our own expectations of relationships when we're single and able to evaluate them from a mostly theoretical point of view, out of the way of being overly biased by messy emotional stuff.

I am currently recharging after a few weeks of too much partytime. This means that the axiom of the last few months, "there is no food, only vodka" relating to the state of my kitchen is no longer true. I went to the supermarket and bought healthy stuff. I have recently been treating my house too much as a place to sleep and nothing else, and I'm consciously trying to change it back into a calm place where I hang out and recharge. The fact that it's getting warmer helps because I'll be getting back into sitting on my back deck and reading.

I miss San Francisco! I've been thinking a lot about it since I got back. I'm hoping to go over for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit in October. There are a few people I'd really like to see again.

That's enough. Gotta finish my timesheets for August.

bitsey update:

- I am far far too overloaded right now and there isn't really an end in sight. Need to learn to say no.
- zomg. Brenda and I are going to oscon. Fucking yay!
- I wish so so so so much I was at debconf right now. There are millions (ok, exaggeration) of people I would love to see. Particularly madduck, who, even though I asked politely, Andrew declined to smooch for me.
- mahara.org is finally live.
- andypants is coming back to Catalyst soon! This is excellent news.
- I have a giant dark purple bruise on my ass from weekend debauchery. I need to get a photo taken.
- Mischief Bad Group has moved to Sunday Roast rather than Sunday Breakfast starting this weekend. This is good as I can't deal with Sunday Breakfast in winter, but sitting in the courtyard at the Matterhorn from the early afternoon and drinking red wine under the heaters is seriously appealing.
- Dysfunctional naming scheme. Total lack of ability to call people by their names because it makes them too real. Instead I have to create creative descriptive (and often elaborate) names for them. And then when other people refer to them by name in front of me it's shocking.

• Birthday week begins!
• Hacking on mahara
• Holy shit I love bacon
• House
• I am never going to the supermarket with Chris ever again

This game kills time.

Apparently green is good, and yellow is perfect. I have ten yellow. Go me.

- Diesel sweeties and coffee in bed with tehbeddernets
- No less than four mouse shaped presents from my cat
- A picnic in a tree
- A sundial
- Processed cheese (it's as disgusting as I remember it being)
- Monteiths summer ale in my back yard
- More diesel sweeties
- Monkey Bars by J5.
- Etch is out!

I've been thinking about what I was doing this time last year, and I found this entry, which reminds me of what I was doing this time last year, and how it was making me really miserable. Which is maybe why I dreamt about it last night. Fuck sometimes I wish my subconscious would piss off.

I've been on holiday! Not reading email, not reading mailing lists or rss feeds, hardly even turning on my computer. It's been grand. Today is the last day, I'm back to work tomorrow.

Other than that:

- Age Pryor album release party. It was ace. I bought the CD, that's ace too.

- Linuxchix install fest yesterday. It went well, although with a small turn out. I put Debian back on my powerbook.

- Matterhorn drunkenness and mischief.

- Another giant spider. Or maybe the same one. I think I need to do something about this.



Why is it that I'm such a sucker for having my hand kissed? Sometimes I'm such a giant dork.

On my way to work, I walk through a church which seems to have a community hall or something attached to it. Directly in my path, there's two hopscotch grids drawn on the ground facing eachother.

Every day, I walk over them, and try to inconspicuously place my feet in the squares without obviously playing the game. It's quite awkward, because I have to adjust my stride accordingly, but the idea of just standing all over the lines with no regard to the squares offends me.

But yesterday morning, I thought, 'fuck it' and jumped through the grid in the right order, even doing the customary twirl between 4/5 and 6, and 7/8.

And actually I didn't feel stupid at all.

can be found here

Thanks to Meredith