J5’s Blog

All in all pretty good for a last minute event.  It ended up being a night at the good life bar as it was too much fun to leave.  People ended up rotating in and out all night and we all had a blast.  My dinner was pretty good.  The spinage was amazing but the steak was a little overdone.  The vodka martinis were also good but I would stay away from the mixed drinks as they didn’t seem to be of the same quality.  I still prefer Om for martinis and cocktails but overall Good Life was pretty good.  Dancing was fun on such an intimate dance floor and we even had a show of the local hip hop dance crew showing off their moves. Well it is 4 o’clock here - a bit late for this old man. I need to pack for my trip to Aruba on Sunday and am meeting someone for dinner tomorrow night. I will be mostly absent for the next week as I try to relax and soak in some sun and beach but I will be checking e-main every once in awhile and my phone will still work for emergencies.

Well perhaps not but I am taking off this weekend to a place I have been in spitting distance of but have never crossed the border. I find it strange that I have been all around the world and to almost every state in America and still have not bothered to visit our kind neighbours to the north. So with my roommates Bryan and Chris leaving this summer for far off jobs we decided to take a trip with a bunch of friends up to Montreal. I went down to NY last weekend for mothers day and to swap my car for my parents van just for this trip. It should be fun.

Oh and Les Halles, Anthony Bourdain’s home base, is fantastic. If you are down in New York City and in midtown I highly recommend it

Getting in touch with my Italian roots while running around Florence was great fun.  Thank you Dorothy and Karl for getting married and sharing the moment with all your friends and family.  I’m busy uploading all of the photos which I managed to save after my camera started corrupting the memory card.  More on my time in Italy later. Now it is time to go and check out buzzgrinder.com - a music blog one of the guests at the wedding maintains.

I’ll be in various places other than the Boston area for most of November.  Starting this coming Friday I will be driving down to NY where I am catching a flight to Florence, Italy for a friend’s wedding.  I’ll be there for a week and then am going to work from Atlanta, Georgia while visiting my best friend who is getting married next spring.  To round things off I will be working from NY through Thanksgiving.

The Italy trip is pretty booked but I should be visiting the ATL and NY Red Hat offices to say hi since I will be there anyway.  If any Fedora or GNOME folks want to grab a beer or just meet up let me know.

Just thought I would chime in on Dave’s post since I had the oposite experience with Facebook.  Ever since I started using it, it has been immensely useful, mostly in keeping track of friends in a spam free environment.  I first checked it out in order to see the integration with Mugshot.  I quickly found a friend I had in High School and started messaging her.  Then someone I took a cooking class with friended me and sent me a message asking about the other classes I had taken.  I’ve ended up gathering information about a dental office she works in and will be making an appointment when I get back home.  From there I was friended by someone I had met in Thailand who’s family was friends with my family.  We used Facebook to meetup in London before I flew off to Amsterdam last weekend.  I was also able to find a Swedish friend who I had worked with at E-Trade some years ago.  Not to mention I can see what my brother is up to.

For people who have a very centralized life, Facebook isn’t really that compelling but for someone like me who has good friends all over the world but am often only in a place for short periods of time it becomes the ideal tool to keep intouch and plan.

BTW - The one thing I found interesting in my travels is the progression of contact information which people ask for.  First it was address to send letters, then it was phone number when cell phones became prevalent, e-mail and AOL Instant messenger were big the last few years and on this trip it’s been almost exclusively, “do you have a Facebook account?”

On Friday night a bunch of us went to a Birthday party some random people staying at the E-Tap hotel were going to. It was loads of fun to hang out with some locals, discuss politics, play some guitar and generally get smashed.

The next morning I barely met up with Richard for a ride back down to London at 2:00. I apparently just passed out in his car and I have no idea how he made it to Heathrow in a little over 2 hours. At this point I owe him a whole keg of beer.

I ended up stashing my bags and hanging with one of my friends from Thailand who just graduated her masters program in London. Her friends had a BBQ which was a bit more mellow but just as fun as the last party. After the party I caught the last train up to Heathrow and spent the night there until my flight into Amsterdam for a bit of holiday.

On the Dublin to Amsterdam leg of the trip I was nodding off waiting for my flight due to the lack of sleep. When I came to there was a guy with an OLPC tee walking by. I stopped him and started asking him questions. Turns out he is doing the port for sim city to the OLPC.

I’m in Amsterdam for the next week. GUADEC was great but now I just need to unwind. Tomorrow we are going to catch the Mike Bikes tour to check out some windmills, a cheese factory and other landmarks both in and outside of the city.

I just found out my bro has put down his deposit on North Eastern Univeristy. Last time we spoke it was between that and Loyola, Maryland. I was a freshman dropout of the Univeristy of Maryland* so I was worried about him going to Loyola. At least in Boston, if he needs to unwind he can always take the T to my place to decompress for a bit. It is also far enough from New York that he can feel independent but still go home when all of his friends aren’t around.

As a graduation gift I am taking my brother to Amsterdam the week after GUADEC.  Anyone have suggestions of where we should stay?

* I later graduated Hofstra which in a winding path finally led me to Red Hat, so no regrets

Had an awsome day in London. It reminded me of why I loved living there some years ago. I ended up going to see the Blue Man Group. Remind me to go get their albums when I get home. Tonal rhythem kicks butt.

I haven’t been able to get in touch with my friend which is a bummer. I hope she is ok. Losing my cell phone on the beach at GUADEC has made it hard to coordinate with others. I’m off to the other Cambridge tomorrow to meet up with some of the people working on various aspects of D-Bus. I’ll be back in my Cambridge on Monday in time for the 4th of July celebrations.

It has been decided and I will be skiing at the Val Thorens resort in France around the New Years. Ski in Europe - Scratch that one off the TODO list.

With the weather being really bad and me having acute bronchitis all I can say is thank you for dextromethorphan.

So as I sit doing relatively nothing, bored out of my mind, I am lifted by the fact that Loveland in Colorado is opened for skiing. My adopted mountain for the season Killington, the first to open on the east coast, will do so next month around the 12th. The season is almost upon us.

On top of all that I got news from my good friend Helena that she and her friends are looking at resorts in northern Italy for a trip around January. I haven’t seen her in five years since I went to visit her in Brussels after I had finished up school in London. I’m a bit worried that my skiing skills won’t hold water to her friends. I’m pretty good but we are talking about a bunch of people who took a week of vacation to learn kite surfing and then went out and bought the equipment so they could do it at home. These are hard core extreme sports enthusiasts. They are even going out and getting data on the resorts for the past 12 years and figuring out if Italy will have good snow by January. If not they plan on finding a resort more up north. I’m debating on if I should buy an inexpensive pair of twin tip ski’s as I am unsure if my 99cm skiboards will hold up. Luckly the Boston Globe SnowSports Expo will be happening on November 17th.

D-Bus

I’m looking to get a bunch of patches in next week and do a release. Along with this release I will post a schedule on how much time I think it will take to get to 1.0. Look to see the 0.90 release happening after this next release.