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

Six years ago today, Fin and I stood together and pledged our futures to one another. I'm still so glad we did so. I love you, sweetheart. Here's to many more. ♥

Written for Fin, because I miss zir very much.

My health needs are few,
but water comes first.
I tell you, it's true.
My health needs are few,
And water is you.
I'm aching with thirst.
My health needs are few
but water comes first.

Woke up at a good time, around seven.  Promptly and stupidly decided to go back to sleep to see what the end of the dream was; it turned out to be a nightmare.  Woke up again at about eleven and went to the gym.  Continued the run of stupid mistakes by forgetting to get lunch for Rio.  Sharon came by and brought her lunch instead.  I hate getting up late. :(

Later, went to the diner for dinner.  Talked to Alex about a shelving project he's working on.

Did a little tidying, but not very much.  But I've got some way towards Inbox Zero: I'm now down to four emails.

Today I learned that cd - changes to the directory you were in before the current one.

Fin gave me an old notebook of zirs to use as a logbook.  It's lovely.

It occurs to me that the simple system I built a while ago which mostly allows Ubuntu to come up in Shavian would also work to get Deseret, Unifon and Tengwar.  I wonder whether there's much of a market for Ubuntu in Tengwar.  Possibly good Slashdot fodder, anyway.

Joule-for-Dreamwidth is edging closer.  I also need to implement a per-day view with a paging system to get around this problem.

Five days until GCDS starts.

Things people asked on the "ask me something that should be obvious" post:

Where do you work? I work for a British open source consulting firm called Collabora.

Who are you currently dating? FSVO "dating": I don't really do dates as such. My partners are firinel, plexq, xugglybug, who are all lovely and wonderful people.

Just got back from Cambridge, where I spent an all too brief time with many wonderful people, such as the Collaborans, and Katie, and ghoti and family. I'm very glad of all of you.

I found Fin's twenty-four hour comic from 2006 again today. Worth re-reading.

Also, what Maemo 5 needs is robotfindskitten. Definitely.

Happy birthday to John, who is wonderful.

Yesterday was not the most productive day. First of all, I overslept, and when I woke up I found it didn't matter so much because the heavy snow had brought the net connection down and there was no bugzilla or IRC. So I hung around the house a lot and didn't do much, although I did find a way to save a quarter of the time it takes to register a window's properties. On the other hand, that's only an average of 44μs saved. On the gripping hand, it makes the code cleaner. Anyway, a friendly bloke from Comcast just turned up and climbed the telegraph pole to fix it, so we're all back and lovely.

I was also so annoyed at the CPAN module Lingua::Phoneme requiring a database installed even just to test it that I rewrote it using Berkeley DB. It turns out to be less portable than I thought, but Adam Kennedy has explained to me three ways this can be fixed, so I'll get on that soonish.

Someone bought me a copy of Gareth King's Intermediate Welsh Grammar addressed to "Thomas Happy Birthday Thurman". Thank you, whoever you are, and I would like to know who you are!

Fin has been painting watercolours of Katie and other people: Katie in a corset, Katie again, Sandra, and bifemmefatale.

Someone I know who is friendly has started an interesting blog about Bolivian politics.

"No, honestly", said God, "I really do want you to play Free Bird."

And finally, Nerd Merit Badges. There should totally be a GNOME badge.

It's been a rather good weekend. Today Amy and John came over and we spent most of the day wandering around the town. We went to a bookshop where there turned out to be a signing by a local author called Tamera Lawrence who had just written her first book. I talked to her for a bit and she told me that the important thing is to write every day: I think this is good advice and since I won't be able to spend spare time on the Welsh course after all it seems a good thing to put some hours into. Anyway, Rio found herself some books, and then we went to a comic shop where she bought herself an Emily the Strange comic. Later we went home and played Mao: Rio is a formidable opponent and won three against my one. I really am very proud of her. Then we went to the diner and had dinner together and played Apples to Apples.

I've also built the first version of a unit test suite for Metacity. There's only the one test at the moment (for reparenting) but it's scriptable so it'll be less difficult to add more tests as we go along. Next I want to test all the keypresses and as many GConf keys as possible. (Whoever had the idea about including a private DBus daemon was absolutely correct. Thank you.)

Yesterday we went down to Philly and Fin got herself a tattoo at No Ka Oi. On the way some guy appeared and started asking me (in rhyme) whether I would buy his hiphop album. (Fin, to me: "But you don't even listen to hiphop." Me: "I do sometimes. Specially if it's in Welsh.") I had lost the captive bead of my nose ring while I'd been away: I'd tried to put it back and dropped it, and heard it bouncing away for ever along the floor. I went over to Infinite and asked them to put another one in, which they did, but there was such a queue that I missed most of the tattooing, which I was rather sad about. I was reading Ender's Game while I waited and didn't realise how much time had passed. When I came back they were pretty much done. We didn't get to go to the Shoe, nor did we get to go and eat somewhere, because it was getting late and the snow was coming on quite thickly. So we went home, and Fin unveiled her tattoo. I think it's lovely, and I wish I could get some of my own (the psoriasis makes it impossible).

And a link for you: The weather forecast, chanted.

Current music: Super Furry Animals - Y Gwyneb Iau (I am amused that that could mean both "liver-face" and "the surface of Jupiter")
Photo © MikeLeone, cc-by-nc-nd.

Yesterday was an awfully rainy and blustery day, reminiscent of the one that sent Owl to live in Piglet's house. When I woke up there was no milk and I had to go out and get some; then I went to the Y for the first time, but I couldn't think what to do other than track, so I did that for a mile. (Today, my legs ache, which means I should do it more often.)

Later, my body kept wishing it was back in bed and my mind wouldn't co-operate in sympathy. But after a while suddenly things came together beautifully. In the evening Fin and Alex went instead, but when Fin and Alex left Rio in the childcare room which was always free before, the childcare people sent her away to look for them because apparently there'd been a charge of $1/hr imposed. Rio turned up crying. I am not impressed.

And I also wrote Fin a triolet.

Fin made chilli for dinner. (I've always seen chilli in the UK and chili in the US. Isn't it a Spanish word? Is one of them more like the Spanish?)

Someone told me I should record my day posts and post the audio file along with the text post. Maybe I should.

There will be a post about last weekend soon.

As the drawing shall tell
and the paper responds,
some enchantment just fell,
as the drawing shall tell...
in a paper for spell
with your pencils as wands,
as the drawing shall tell
and the paper responds.

On Monday evening we went to the YMCA and signed up. We haven't actually done anything there yet, but it does mean I can go swimming again. (I used to swim like a fish and I had a lifesaving qualification, but I've hardly been in water in five years.) To the right is the photo they took of me for my ID card. I think the moral is that I need to lose the beard after Halloween.

Later we went to the diner. Fin asked for soup. The soup had a maggot in it. The manager told her it was just a piece of cracker. This is the same diner which once served one of our party a plate of stir-fry with a fly half-fried in and struggling to get free. I think we should stop going to that diner.

O'Keeffe and Rothko have disappeared twice since I last wrote, and both times we found them hidden in a different part of the house, once under the bed in the spare room, once under a chest of drawers. Apparently this is a cat thing to move your nest every so often in case of predators, but I was really rather worried when I couldn't find Rothko anywhere around. He's walking around independently now, but he's not weaned yet.

The Metacity blog is now appearing on news.gnome.org, a planet for projects. (I know some of you are going to comment saying you want it on p.g.o, but it's not up to me.)

And I've saved the most interesting piece of news for last: three pieces of Fin's art are going to be in a show between noon and 5 p.m. this coming Saturday in the Director’s Conference Room in the Luce Foundation Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and F Streets NW, Washington, D.C. 20004. Fin will be there, and so will the rest of us, so drop by and say hello.

My partner Firinel is an artist who works in watercolour, among other mediums. I thought I'd show you some of the things she's been working on recently. You can see these and many more of them, thumbnailed and fullsize, at her art journal (which contains painted nudes, so may not be worksafe).


Katie


Shay


Barack Obama

Yesterday Fin and Alex and Amy and John and I went to Philly. We went to Chinatown and then we went to see a film called The Fall. It's about despair, mostly, and about stories. I think you should see it. On the way there we found a flag shop with hundreds of flags in it! The clerk knew a whole lot about the history of each flag (even why Hawaii's flag has the British flag in the corner, which I didn't know). Then afterwards we went and ate curry and came home again. It was a good day.

Today the tree people are here and they are fixing the oak tree that wanted to come into our house.

Fin's post on the same is here.

l-r: firinel, plexq, marnanel

Rio and Alex and I went to St Gabriel's. The man who had served as the organist and choirmaster there for nineteen years died very suddenly the other week, and the place is still feeling shocked. Mother Donna Jean preached a rather interesting sermon on the parallels between the story of Abraham's call and the story of Nicodemus. I asked her about other Johannine uses of the metaphor of night to represent the lack of understanding and she joked that I should be preaching next week; I said that was possibly the scariest thing anyone had said for a while. I was a little frustrated that the last hymn was one I didn't know but the score for Cwm Rhondda was staring at me from the next page. (I am not responsible for that video.)

Later I finished writing a program to compile Metacity Journal entries: in other words, it goes around and finds bug activity, checkins of code and translations, mentions on blogs, and so on, and makes a blog post out of them. Here is the first output. I will be publishing the code, of course, but it will need a bit of tidying.

Later we all went for a walk in the park. Riordon stopped and said "I've got something in my shoe", and when she took it off, balancing on one foot on the towpath, and shook it, out fell a US quarter, a US nickel, and a British 5p. I told her that she must have swept her hearth particularly well, according to the old rhyme. She said that she had actually been cleaning the floor in her room, but that she had been keeping shoes downstairs, and the good folk were hardly going to be able both to see her floor and examine her footwear.

After that we came home and I closed a ton of Metacity bugs.

"When I get a little money I buy books..." I have been wanting for a long time to read three particular books to Rio that I loved as a kid. They are: The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler by Gene Kemp, Nothing to be Afraid Of by Jan Mark, and I Like This Poem, which is an anthology edited by Kaye Webb. Amazon in the US doesn't know TTTOTT, though it has the other two second-hand, which I don't mind at all and indeed prefer in a lot of ways. Tonight I thought I'd order all three from Amazon in the UK; I was quite pleased to find that most of them were available for prices as low as a penny in some cases until I saw that shipping would be £20 to me in the US and £8 even to my parents in Hertfordshire. I think this must be the result of reasoning in a weak currency, because $20 to ship three books, or $40 overseas, seems rather excessive to me. Is that really what postage costs, and do any of you have advice or even an old copy of TTTOTT that you can send me in return for postage, gratitude, other trinkets, love, bug fixes, sonnets written praising you...? Update: My sister Mandy tells me that the book is called "Tyke Tiler" in the US, for obscure reasons, and it may therefore be findable after all.

Software we'd like to see: I have always been in slight awe of IMAP. It does everything POP3 does, everything SMTP does (and a lot better) [1], everything NNTP does, and it does its own useful things as well. You even could use it, if you were monomaniac enough, for a ton of other things, including as a replacement for FTP, or as an RPC transport. If some Emperor of the Internet was to decree tomorrow that henceforth nobody was to use POP3, even the people who only want what POP3 does could run IMAP and just only allow or only use its "recent" mode. Really, I think there are two things that puzzle me about it:

• Why anyone is still using POP3, and more so, why they are still using SMTP.
• Why everything-but-the-wire-protocol of IMAP is still travelling over a custom protocol and not REST. It seems to me as though it would mean we could reuse existing and well-tested code, it would mean you'd get all the existing bonuses of the HTTP protocol like its ubiquity and gateway support and so on, and the IMAP protocol is very REST-like already: it would be a pretty simple one-to-one mapping.

I haven't seen anyone seriously suggest this, although Google showed me a thought-experiment as a teaching aid. If I was still working for an email provider I would suggest it, but I'm not.

[1] Ryan Lovett has pointed out that IMAP specifically doesn't allow for sending mail, and he's right: I misread the RFC and thought I saw something that wasn't there. I'm sorry. I do think it should be included into a system such as the one I discuss above: something which allowed access to a group of messages/files over HTTP in the style of WebDAV (although possibly simpler), so that you could read and write and sort them into folders, and then also have a way to send them and to search for ones with flags like "recent", would be a hugely useful grand unified protocol.

Webtoys
I fixed the "partlock" bug in Joule, which annoyed a small number of people a whole lot. Also, I thought you might be interested to see the usage of the cupid script:



The community was quite quiet this year compared to last, I think. I would show you the world map for just the script if I could figure out how to generate it. I can only seem to get Google Analytics to show maps for the whole site.

(Very brief) link soup:

• The story of an ekiben otaku. Ekiben is railway bento.


• "How to kill a transperson".


• Coincidentally, this also turned up: point-by-point refutations to a Fox FUD segment about trans kids in schools.

Valentine's day was actually quite quiet for the most part. Our company gave us a bag of sweets, mostly those little love-heart ones which say things on them like EMAIL ME and YOU'RE THE BEST and CLOSE MY BUG((Not an actual example, sadly. Maybe we could make some GNOME sweets for next year.)), and chocolate hearts with mottos inside. My team lead was told "Be your own Valentine!" which sounds like a polite way of saying something else.

When we got home, Fin had made an amazing meal for all of us, each with our favourite thing to eat. Some of them had tomatoes and things cut into heart shapes. It must have taken ages.

I also discovered a not terribly obvious problem with GMail. I wrote a script which would tell you who had left you Valentine's messages on LiveJournal, and it worked by turning on email notification, sending each LJ comment received to a GMail account, and every hour having a cronjob which read the account using IMAP, indexed them all in a Postgres database, and then having a cgi which could display search results. That was all very well, but on Valentine's day itself, something inside GMail decided that the account was being used for IMAP in some kind of inappropriate way, and shut it down wth the error Lockdown in Sector 4! I disabled the cronjob, but it meant that some people didn't see their valentine messages for another day or so.

On Friday it was pretty quiet again. I wrote a triolet.

I also spent far too long trying to remember the visibility rules in GNOME bug 509165.

Link soup:

• Carmen was the star of the whole Internet yesterday for posting her account of working the late shift in a sex shop on Valentine's Day. It is really funny.


• Santo Fiasco, the Patron Saint of Doomed Relationships


• When I was first dating Fin, she made me a tie-dyed sarong.


• Preacher explaining that the country's going to hell because the president urinates sitting down. I would think this is a parody, but the same church has all its sermons up. It is the weirdest thing.


• If Death came to Alan Moore.

I had a doctor's appointment on Tuesday; I told Fin and Alex about it on the Monday and asked them to drop me off there. On Tuesday they went to see this cat that I mentioned earlier, and came to pick me up afterwards, and as I also mentioned we decided to go out to eat. I'd thought that meant after the appointment, and I was so sleepy I fell right asleep. When I woke up, we were coming up to the restaurant, and I was faced with the dilemma of whether to say, "But we're missing my appointment" (and go back, have missed the appointment anyway, and have ruined the meal), or to keep quiet for now. I decided to keep quiet. Either way I'd have to pay for the missed appointment.

The next day I phoned the doctor to reschedule and they were very apologetic: they said, "Oh, we were trying to contact you: the doctor was off sick yesterday. We'll phone in a refill for you."

I didn't go to see the cat after all on Wednesday, because she behaves nothing like our cat did and doesn't respond to her name, and people were afraid I'd give a false positive because I miss our cat so.

I spent much of the evening writing about GMarkup instead of fixing bugs.

I also had a very interesting email, which I might tell you all about later.

This morning, the company has given us all bags of love heart sweets and teddy bears. Thank you to the people who left comments for me on valentinr and places like that! If anyone sent one of those mutual things where you have to send another of the same kind in order to see them-- well, I didn't send any like that, so I won't see them.

Fin, Alex: I am going to get you trees. But it is too cold to plant trees, so later in the year I will get them.

Link soup:

• Ande discusses why the current XKCD is actually hopeful. Well worth reading. "Love is not enough. In fact, that's not what love is for. Love isn't for curing people. Love isn't for fixing everything." Trigger warning: suicide, self-harm, etc.


• Fin's awesome curried chicken recipe. Warning: also contains a picture of my tummy, in case pictures of tummies are not safe where you work.


• That guy from Torchwood in an anti-homophobia campaign.


• What would happen if you bought 25 bottles of Nyquil?


• I hesitate to link to this in a public post because it depicts sexual activity, but this is one of the most beautiful illustrations I've seen for months.


• A discussion of the interrelationship between advertising and gender in western culture.

I have had a moderately successful day. I branched metacity for 2.22. (I wish I could write more about work here; it feels silly not writing about the thing I spend most of my time doing.) I made a list of things which need dealing with now we've branched, and as a diversion fixed up some map SVGs for Wikipedia (and another project). Someone came around with bagels.

Fin phoned and told me the SPCA had come by and told them they'd found a cat who looked just like our cat Zarate, who ran away shortly before Kirsten came to visit; Fin and Alex and Rio went to see, but the new cat (let's say her name is Zaratbee) didn't respond to her name or the feeding song, despite being about the right size and shape and colour. Fin thought it was her; Alex didn't. I will go along tomorrow and see.

It snowed a lot. I was told I gave the best hugs. I came home and it snowed a lot and Fin in her awesomeness said "Why not let's go to Los Aztecas?" So we did and the food was even better than it usually is, and almost nobody was there because of the snow. We talked about politics, and came home. I worked on some simple breadboard electronics on the dining-room table with Rio before she went to bed; she wrote up the findings in her lab notebook, which has a picture of Strawberry Shortcake on the front. Did I mention she has dyed her hair grape-soda purple? It really suits her.

I learned, or re-learned, about the __import__ statement in Python for a project I'm doing with the Metacity Journal (more will be revealed later). I asked jdub to move my public planet feed to blogs.gnome.org and I will automagically duplicate all content to LJ and blogo. I have not decided what I will do about comments. I also need to put some time into copying the stylesheets and formatting from marnanel.org to blogs.gnome.org.

Ande: I have started work on the river story. It is progressing nicely.

Things I wanted to share (because they were an interesting read):

• Lolcats who support Barack Obama (yes, I know lolcats are a tired joke: get over it. I still think All Your Smurf is funny.)
• You should probably eat more fruit. But if the nutrition won't sell it, maybe sex will (not remotely worksafe)
• sabotabby explains why she thought black-focussed schools in Toronto were a bad idea and why she changed her mind
• nhw shares his thoughts on the Treaty of Lisbon and why it possibly doesn't matter
• Andy Tanenbaum is running electoral-vote.com again this year, discussing the November US presidential election, with new analysis and discussion every day.
• Language Log provides a supporting example to ++Rowan's comments about religious courts arbitrating on civil matters.
• Template Toolkit (my favourite templating system) is now beginning to be available for Python.

Now I will make more tea and then go and get out of these clothes and sit in bed and fix bugs, which I can do because Alex has fixed wireless networking, so hallelujah, say I.

"if you could take the whole real world and stand far back enough it would not be a blue marble, it would be two figures lying embraced, top to tail."

Alex and Fin and I have spent the weekend visiting Amy and John, because Eric was flying up from Texas to see us and them. Amy made chilli. Eric brought us presents; he is really amazingly good at thinking of presents. He gave me a Super Furry Animals CD and a copy of the Mabinogion in English (I only had it in Welsh before, but he didn't actually know that, and an English copy will be really useful for comparison). Then after Rio had gone to bed we watched old Billy Connolly standup (very old, he was making jokes about the Berlin Wall) and Hot Fuzz.

On Saturday we met Joanna in Baltimore and went to AVAM, where Rio and I discussed poetry while sitting on the floor. They had an exhibition of PostSecret cards under glass all the way up the stairs, which almost made those stairs worthwhile (I have always had a dread of them). Later, over dinner at Paper Moon, Fin told Joanna that she and Alex were going ballroom dancing, which was good because I was never coordinated enough to do so. I said I was much more in my element at goth clubs, of which there is a lack where I live, so I hadn't been out dancing for four years or so. Joanna was quite excited and said "Oh! There's a goth club near here where we go, but people around don't want to go so much! You should come!" I was all happy for a while that I'd get to dance around in stompy boots again, and then when that had subsided I was happy all over again that I had a decent excuse to wear eyeliner. Paper Moon always gives you large portions, and nobody was hungry for dessert, so we left; some of us went home, and some of us ended up at Red Emma's, where I had never been before, and where we were all immediately made very welcome. Riordon especially spent a good while sitting on a barstool discussing the state of the world with other customers. We came home exhausted and collapsed into bed.

On Sunday we drove back to Philly and walked around the museum, where you can get in for whatever you feel like paying on a Sunday, and Rio and I talked about impressionism. We had dinner at a friendly place in the middle of Chinatown and then Amy and John went home, we drove Eric to the airport, and the rest of us went home.

A lovely weekend!