california trip brain dump
Monday, September 19th, 2005(this was written mostly on my plane ride to “home” to NYC from CA, so it may be all sorts of cracked out without me realizing it)
Well, I’ve just arrived back in NYC after spending a week in california. Had my first week of work at the new job, and good times were had. All the folks at MedSphere are great. I spent quite a bit of time just getting oriented and doing other move related stuff, but I did find time to dive into some code, and even found and fixed my first bug on the client I’ll be working on. I’ve yet to receive my gold star or cookie that was promised to me for fixing a bug in my first week. I’ve also yet to receive my new laptop yet, but it’s supposed to arrive sometime next week.
In the failure department, I was unsuccessful in purchasing a car while out there. I’ve got something going on a nice VW, but it seems nobody wants to give an out-of-stater (apt. stuff to be described next) with little credit history a considerably side used car loan. The car situation will obviously take some more work to get jiving.
The apartment situation is *much* better. My co-worker/immediate higher up and I found a place this week, which is going to be about as pimp as apartments can get. First, let me introduce you to my patio. It’s actually less of a patio, and more of a… well… dock. There’s no railing, it’s just open on this huge man-made pond. There’s paddle boats. Paddle f*cking boats. We were told that fishing was not allowed (there’s fish and turtles), but upon inquiring if catching fish with your hands was permitted, I was not told no. The apartment itself is huge, and Todd and I have pondered getting a ping-pong table for our living room. On the complex’s premises are also a gym, pool tables, a sauna, and a *theater*. First order of business is figuring out how to hook up a) a laptop/computer, and b) a gaming console of some sort to the system, for grossly oversized gaming, and watching movie rips.
On Tuesday I went to the Mono BOF in LA with Todd, Anthony, and Brad. Had a great time and got to meet Rodrigo, Miguel, Gonzalo, Joseph Hill, and many other notable mono/.NET folks. Rodrigo turned out to be taller and scarier than I imagined. Scored a hot mono t-shirt while I was there, as well as Joseph’s great MonoLive CD. I will probably try to find time soon to hack on the MonoLive CD to add the boo addin to the list of things he has on there. Seeing Miguel’s talk gave me a few more idea on fun boo, etc projects to work on. In particular, he showed off the integration of mono into OpenOffice.org, and it got me thinking about doing a boo shell/scripting thing for OOo just like the commercial app FIXME written in boo for MS Office/Excel. When I’ll find time to hack on that is a whole ‘nother story.
On the Gentoo front, I finally got the *-sharp-2.3.x stuff out of package.mask, meaning people wanting to put things like f-spot and beagle into portage will have an easier time of it. I’m leaving the *-sharp-2.5.x stuff in package.mask for now, as upstream has been pretty adamant about folks *not* packaging that. Of course, certain individuals from the mono upstream are convinced the hardcoding of $(prefix)/lib shouldn’t be changed to $(libdir) for our packages, even though this is *necessary* in order to support the various multilib configurations available on amd64. Somehow the fact that a binary RPM based distro has different packaging needs than a source based distro hasn’t really sunk in. I wouldn’t even mention it if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been seen certain folks call gentoo’s packaging broken, even though I can say with fair certainty they’ve not really investigated all the factors involved for *us*. I’m sure what they have going is perfect for the RPM/binary packages, but it just doesn’t cut it for us.
ok, i’m whooped. time to find a PB&J and crash.
NP: Soulive - Shaeheed