My walk was the walk of a human child, but my heart was a tree.

The people who were born after the Apollo pictures of the Earth seen from space represent the first people who will fully inhabit a new consciousness. Those of us, like myself, who took this amazing picture in as someone already living on the Earth, had to learn this consciousness; for those born after me it is their birthright.

The recognition of the civil rights of lesbian, gay, transgendered and bisexual people is part of the broad shift in consciousness towards which we are moving. Same-sex marriage in California is an important vehicle in the on-going work of making sure all American citizens enjoy the same rights in civil society.

This shift in consciousness, including same-sex marriage, is a move towards the good. I affirm this from a spiritual, religious point of view. As a Christian, I view the trajectory of history as moving us towards global reconciliation and global justice. The Gospels tell us that Jesus said that God's love is pervasive. He used the idea of rain and sunshine, both of which fall on all the world, irrespective of people's prejudices about who is deserving or who is not.

If Proposition 8 passes, which I hope it does not, those of us committed to civil rights for all will simply continue to hope, and continue to work. Perseverance, knowing that God continues to travel with those who are disenfranchised, is a path we know. I trust, however, that the great Californians with whom I live will continue their tradition of forging ahead towards what lies before our whole great country.

• Abstinence-only drivers' education.


• The most sad slogan on tech show swag ever


• An overview of The Perishers, an underappreciated strip, I think.


• Explaining death to toddlers these days (triggers: death, obviously)


• There was a website about prison art but it had to close down; some of its contents are at the link. You might be able to help.


• Not the Nine O'Clock News sending up every eighties music video ever (yes, it's old, but it's still excellent)


• Ms Pac-Man, Feminist Hero.

• I fell asleep and dreamed that there was a mysterious shining blue and white figure in my embrace, and the figure's name was my Destiny. Then I fell asleep again and dreamed that there was a memory leak in Metacity's compositor. I woke up and spent the next hour looking for the leak, which did not turn out to exist. Maybe I should have been looking for my destiny instead.
• I forget I have psoriasis sometimes. This is difficult, because it dries out your skin so much it hurts to move or lie down or bend over, but sometimes I can go for days on end just ignoring the pain. Tonight, when I got out of the shower, firinel put the lotion on me that the dermatologist gave me, and suddenly for the first time in days I'm not in any pain. Look! I can bounce around like a springbok! *bounces*
• I gave an impromptu talk today on Template Toolkit, amongst other things, to about five people. I think it went quite well. Also I implemented an idea of desh's about Bugzilla. Hacking Bugzilla makes me happy.
• Here's a news article about The Benefit Bank, where I work.
• I went to St Mark's, but for the first time in months, the door was barred. I also went to McD's to buy lunch (having $1 in cash on me) and looked up to see, instead of Fox News or CNN anchors on the screens above me, a cathedral and organ music. Amazing, thought I, cable has evidently launched Episco-vision. But no, it was just Ford getting buried.
• Some process somewhere is eating up my laptop's memory. I actually had to power down today, because swapping was making things so slow. I shall save up and get more memory.
• Firefox has decided that, every time it starts, it wants to download my diocese's guide to becoming a priest. I have about eight copies of the PDF on my desktop. No, it's not my home page. It's got stuck in the session somehow. No, Gareth, this is not a Sign.
• I am apparently a C-list blogger (C-list blogs are 260 days old? ha! this blog is fast approaching its sixth birthday). I suspect that I'm not any higher because I just post about my life, and not about any particular subject; that's fine with me, though. However, since you're all lovely people, and because I haven't done it in a while, I'm doing one of those "ask anything you like and it will probably be answered" posts; comments are screened, and you must say if you want a comment to remain screened.

• It's been a happy weekend shared with our beloved moominmuppet who came to spend a few days with us. It's always good to see her. We didn't do very much other than snuggle up and watch films together, but that's a good way to spend a weekend in December!
• New version of DateTime::Calendar::Liturgical::Christian up: this just fixes the prerequisites, rather than adding any new code. If you know much about the calendar of the Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Lutheran churches, I still want to hear from you.
• BBC News has had a lead story up for most of this evening about the decision of two Virginia congregations to split away from the Episcopal Church, ignore the Windsor Report, and publicly join the über-homophobic Church of "we encourage prohibiting the legality of homosexuality" Nigeria. I don't see why this is such big news, really. Everyone knew they were going to vote that way, and it's sad that they feel the need to ally themselves with people with such opinions, but it's not like they're anywhere near a majority in the church. Heck, it's not like they're anywhere near a majority in that diocese. It's happened a thousand times before: they will leave, and there will be arguments about it, and then the rest of us will get on with living out the good news in the world.
• I picked up my knitting needles for the first time in months. I thought I'd start again with something easy, so I'm making a scarf for Riordon's doll Tiffany.
• We went with SaraMae and Sis to get their Christmas trees, from a Christmas tree farm out in the middle of nowhere somewhere near Collegeville. You have to ride in a wagon pulled by two draught horses to get to the trees, and when you ride the wagon back they give out hot chocolate or (what Americans call) cider. It's lovely.
• Someone posted to d-d-l requesting a compositor in Metacity! For those who don't know, Metacity has had most of a compositor for a while; Sören wrote a lot of it, but he's since been reassigned to other duties. I am turning over the idea in my head of disabling most of the code, just leaving in (say) drop shadows and minimise/restore animations, and then releasing it with that turned on. Then we can re-enable new parts as we ensure they work. Who thinks this is a good or bad idea?

• Mostly a quiet day today. Slept in late, tidied the house a bit. Amy and John are coming over tomorrow.
• Yesterday, plexq came over and we played cards.
• vuntz, Elijah, Havoc: I need one of you to give me the okay to do this thing to libwnck as well as metacity, otherwise I can't check in the fix.
• A few days ago, a bunch of people marched from the Episcopal cathedral in San Francisco and protested against the war in front of a federal building, holding a requiem mass for all those who have died in the fighting and blocking the doors as a civil disobedience protest. Several of them were arrested and cited for unlawful assembly, including the bishop. (what the diocese said; what the ENS said; photo essay; flickr). The bishop has only recently been appointed; apparently, many people thought he would pacify conservatives by not being female or gay. How unexpected things can be. :)
  
  I wanted to mention one particular thing that one guy was saying on a blog. At the moment, some parts of the church are attempting to stop being parts of the American church and become parts of, say, the Ugandan church, because they disagree with the American church on various issues about whether gay people or female people can play an equal role within the church. Now, as I understand it, the way the law stands is that they can't just break away from the church and take buildings and land with them, because they belong to the national church: it's effectively theft. This person on a blog was accusing the bishop of hypocrisy because the blog person thought the bishop was both flaunting the law in civil disobedience and yet also wanting to uphold the law which says the buildings and land can't be taken.
  
  Well, you could make the point that most people will flout the law when it seems good to them to do so, and if this person lived in a country where it was forbidden to practise his faith, I'm sure he would break that law, and if he lived during the time of slavery I hope he would break the law to allow slaves to escape. You could make that point, but it would be shooting fish in a barrel. What I'm baffled by is the hypocrisy of the commenter: he accuses the protesters of wrongdoing in ignoring the law when it suits them, but from what he says he'd be quite happy to ignore the law when it means churches he agrees with get to take land.
• I released the first version of DateTime::Calendar::Liturgical::Christian, a perl module to figure out the current liturgical season, feast day, etc. I would appreciate help from anyone who has good knowledge of a church calendar other than ECUSA's.
• It is a bit sad when I realise my computer, a laptop I use for everything including all my GNOME coding, and which is only a year old, has a substantially worse specification (1.50GHz, 250Mb) than a computer that someone on planet is calling an old and slow machine. :)
• I really want to knit a sweater next year.

• Went along to St Gabriel's this morning. Fr Cal preached on "My kingdom is not of this world".
• bkor made some improvements to the patch I wrote and committed it to give us Bugzilla emblems. When you list bugs now, will appear next to gnome-love bugs. Bugs with unreviewed patches are marked .
• I made brownies. (fizaratan might like to know that they were called Fudge Supreme.) We watched Chocolat.
• Now I come to look over the day I find that I've been feeling vaguely low-level mopey through a lot of it. Not sure why.
• My father thuremund phoned. The town where I grew up is talking about putting up a wind farm to generate its electricity.
• A lot of good people are standing for the GNOME Foundation board this year.
• I have been thinking recently about how people say that happiness is a journey and not a destination. You can't be happy by aiming to be happy, but rather happiness is something that comes through doing other things. I think that's actually true about a lot of things. For example, a person might decide that what they really want in the world is a Wikipedia page about them. But if they actually were to go and create one, it'd probably be deleted because they weren't considered notable. The thing to do would be to go out and become a rockstar coder or something and then someone else would create the page for them. (Please don't, it's just an example.) What they wanted would be found by not aiming for it: it's a process. Similarly people talk a lot about the kind of society they want, but (unless what you want is an authoritarian society like Leninism on one hand or fascism on the other) it won't come about just by installing a new government. It's a process.
• These photographs of animal foetuses in utero are amazing. Possibly the best thing ever in the Mail, I suppose. :) Link from lizw.
• We went to Aunt Sis and Wendy's house and helped them carry their television up two flights of stairs (firinel did most of the heavy lifting, since zie's stronger than I am) and they gave us a jar of blackberry jam. It is so good. It's like the jam my mother and my Grandmama Lucy used to make that we used to eat for tea when I was a kid.
• I was interested to see the story of the Mapuche people threatening Microsoft with legal action because Microsoft translated Windows into their language, Mapudungun, in just the same way as the Tolkien estate might sue over an unlicensed Sindarin translation. On the one hand, I'd like to think that a language is just another kind of information, and belongs to the world, not only its speakers or its lexicographers or academies. On the other hand, it will be amusing seeing whether Microsoft defends itself by saying that information freely available should be freely usable.
• Today's Film Clip I Like: Strange to think that Noseybonk didn't seem so creepy at the time.

floatyfish

onib

riordon

dyddgu

Often in a child's Noah's Ark toy, there are two human figures, one male and one female. Obviously the male one is Noah. What do you call the female one?

marnanel_joule

firinel

shadowphiar

hatter

Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

d_m

riordon

plexq

riordon

plexq

• MONDAY: update patch for theme-2; review xinerama patch.
• TUESDAY: review workspace previews patch; see whether the SELinux discussion is anything I need to look at.
• WEDNESDAY: investigate why fusa's user-add code isn't working.
• THURSDAY: look into how gdm2 and fusa communicate with a view to bringing the question up on the gdm2 mailing list of how we can supply the login name automatically.
• FRIDAY: look into how to get gdm2 config from gdm2 rather than from reading its config files directly.

plexq

• As usual, a vast amount (≈40%) of memory-time goes to freetype. Am I doing something wrong, or is every app on my machine really supposed to be spending 40% of its memory-time on typesetting?
• A rather noticable 5% of the memory-time goes to storing icon theme data. All the filenames of the default icon theme get loaded when there's only a few we need, and we know what they are. I wonder whether there's a sensible way to access icons without going through all this rigmarole.