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

Life: It's been a busy few days, and I should have been blogging every evening in order to keep up.  (But I didn't, because I was busy.)  I've been packing and getting ready for GCDS and trying to finish off some things before I leave.  I did find time to go swimming with Rio one evening, and yesterday we all went to the fair.  I won a fluffy penguin playing darts.  (I was playing darts, not the penguin.)  Thanks to Alex for the photo on the right.

The future of Metacity: It is fairly clear that Metacity will be replaced by its fork Mutter in the near future: Mutter is effectively Metacity 3.  Although I have some loose ends to tie up in Metacity, it doesn't seem worth continuing hacking on Metacity 2 when the life is in the other fork.  In addition, there are over five hundred bugs open against Metacity, more than I (as the only active maintainer) can humanly deal with.  Mutter has far more contributors and the bugs will be far more easily dealt with.

CADT: However, this raises a problem.  I can't just close the bugs because there's a new version: that would be repeating the GNOME 2.0 mistake which jwz called "cascade of attention-deficit teenagers".  Therefore I will have to go through several hundred bugs and decide whether they are reproducible with Mutter, and if so reassign them.  This will be a long and dreary job, and if anyone wants to help out I'd be happy to assign them a block.

Nargery: There is also a discussion about whether windows should be able to indicate to compositing managers that they are still working on drawing a window, to save the compositor diving in and drawing the existing pixmap, which may be uninitialised garbage.  Some people question whether compositor-specific hints belong in the EWMH at all, or whether they belong in some separate spec.

Meme: Someone is asking "What was your first word?" Mine was "gone." My grandfather used to play a game with me when I was a baby. He would take an object, like a building block, and then hide it and say "Gone".

Links:

• freedesktop.org is in bad shape.  We can all help.
• The building that fell over.
• Giant dominoes: Symbolic toppling. I keep reading that as "symbolic topping", which must be good on representative cake.
• The longest known word in ancient Greek.

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.

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.)

We went to help smreigner break up her shop tent and it took four hours, which is less than we were expecting. plexq bought dinner at the cheesecake place. I haven't written up a day in Welsh for ages. Apologies for the mistakes in this, though I'd like to hear about them: Mi aethon ni i'r siop smreigner yn y fforest Shupp's Grove fel mae'n amser clirio ei phabell hi. Ac mi brynodd plexq cinio ar y bwyty teisen caws. Mi gaes i pizza cig iar campus.

How do you say "it took four hours"?

Also: now you can view websites in Shavian, if you want to.

Alex is driving and playing baroque music on the radio; Marn is coding on zir laptop.

Marn: Well, this is how every day should begin. Lots of coding and listening to Bach.
Alex: I do that all day. Well, not always Bach. But often Bach.
Marn: What, like Orpheus in the Underworld? ... Wait, was that deliberate?

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.

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.

Fin had a pretty good birthday, I think. Alex and I were going to make a cake for her, but her mother came over and made her a birthday tea which involved steak and ice-cream (but not both at once).

From Neil Gaiman's blog we learn that the Uncle books are to be reprinted at last. Uncle is an elephant who wears a purple dressing-gown and lives in a castle as big as a city that has never been fully explored. The company which owns the publishing rights would not reprint them because they thought they were classist or something.

I had a strange dream where there was an orange ferret loose in our kitchen (but it wasn't the kitchen of any house I know) and we had to chase it out. Later, in another dream, I was told there was an exciting adventure holiday that Rio and I could go on together, and it happened to be in Gwent. I went and looked at the details but they had a map of Glamorgan. (The only word I remember reading from the brochure now I'm awake is "Chwefror", February, so possibly it would have been a rather cold holiday.)

Uruguay to be the first South American country to have civil unions.

"It's all a conspiracy that people won't fix the bugs we ask for, for free, and it's just because they disagree with us politically." I don't think I ever enquired as to the political leanings of anyone raising a bug before...

Riordon, Alex and I played Mao last night; it was Rio's first time playing the game, and she got a bit frustrated, as anyone does their first time playing Mao. We decided by mutual agreement to call the game off after about ten minutes, but I overheard her saying to herself later, "Penalty cards aren't penalties like at camp where you don't get sweets or something, and it's just really like Uno but you don't talk." Then she came over where I was working and asked me what you say during a point of order when you're not allowed to say those words, and we had a discussion about how Mao is a formalised representation of learning anything-- a way of learning about learning, really, in the form of a game, and how learning anything new can be a frustrating experience too.

I love PostSecret. This was my favourite card this week. I think anyone who is good enough to introduce you to Borges deserves really good beer, just as anyone who is good enough to introduce you to Nesbit deserves really good tea. But on that note, I was contacted the other day by Professor Christianson, who taught me years ago, telling me amongst other things about his new book, and when he heard about Riordon he is apparently sending her a copy. I will post more when it happens.

I haven't been posting so much recently because not much has been happening that's worth talking about. Either things have been too trivial to post publicly, or they have been about work and so I haven't been able to post them (much as I'd like to keep the log; I keep it in emacs instead), or they've been about GNOME and so have gone on the Metacity blog, or something. Maybe I should just post every day whatever happens.

I suppose I could give you some links: here's an interview with Alan Moore (who is, as always, fascinating); here's ringing from the point of view of a non-ringer (thanks, jezebel_z). But I doubt you want to come here to read links. What do you want?

Actually, today was quite an interesting day. I woke up early, and ate breakfast; Sharon honked as I was eating and I scrambled into my clothes, forgetting to wear a jumper, and so I was cold all day; I got all the code written that I wanted to write, but not all the tests finished, and I'm working on them this evening. When I got home I walked a mile in the darkness along the side of the road with plexq to the chemist's, and another mile back. I went up to read Alanna to riordon (which dimethirwen sent her) and found a pile of blankets with a sign saying "SIT ON ME!" Giggling was to be heard from under the bed. All very odd.

Emacs's longlines-mode is hugely useful.

With the cold weather coming in, I am thinking about writing stories again...

Oh yeah, I remember something I wanted to talk to you all about. I've said before that I've been thinking of moving my day-to-day public blogging (anything with a "day" tag, really) off of LJ and onto somewhere else. I had previously thought about moving it onto marnanel.org, since most of my public LJ is already mirrored there anyway. But jdub has suggested that I could move it onto blogs.gnome.org; I am seriously considering it. (I might keep it automatically updating to marnanel.org and LJ as mirrors so that posts would be in all three places.)

Updated: Oh, and another thing: I don't like talking about this, but I feel with today's events I should. I have mild Asperger syndrome and I've been on medication for bipolar disorder for about ten years now. As they say, you get busy living or you get busy dying-- but sometimes you're dying alive inside. Times like that, it's difficult to get anything done for a bit, at least until they sort your medication out, and at the worst times, in the past, especially when I didn't have health insurance, I've had difficulty keeping jobs and relationships going. I'm pretty much stable now, but if Jeff is a "paranoid psycho", so am I, and so are



more people around you than you imagine.

On Friday I was going to go to a party at work, but all my people were feeling under the weather, so we all came home and vedged instead. The network connection has gone flaky, and although a certain phone company beginning with V have said they'll come out in the middle of next week and perhaps think about dealing with it, until then we're having to deal with it disappearing for minutes on end.

Saturday began with driving to Shupp's Grove, now closed for the season, to help SaraMae take down the tent on her stall.

Later, after dark, Alex drove me to the gallery where they're starting an open mic night. I sat at the back while a man who smiled and showed his teeth a lot played semiacoustic, sang NIN covers and promoted his new CD. I would have linked to his myspace page, but when he told us the URL it included the word "backslash", which distracted me. After a while I realised I'd have to leave in order to be home to read Rio a story; as I was leaving a man jumped up to talk to me, asked whether I was planning to perform anything that evening. I said no, but asked whether there would be others, and he said there would. I think I'll go along, because things like this should be encouraged, and they need people to come and sit in the audience.

On Sunday we woke up later than we intended and tried to decide whether to go to Alex's church or ours. In the end we went to ours, and hurried to get there, only to find a building empty except for the verger who told us we were an hour early. Yes, summer time has ended. Later we sat around a table and planned the week, and we were going to play a board game except that we didn't because Rio had to go to bed. And that was the weekend.

Firework night tomorrow!

It has been a busy fortnight; sorry I've been so quiet. On Wednesday we drove to pick plexq up from the airport, and on the Saturday we went to another airport to pick up ghoti and Benedict who were coming over from England to stay with us while cjwatson was doing something important Ubuntu-related. ghoti is someone I've known longer than almost anyone else who isn't a blood relative; I first met her through Monochrome about ten years ago, and then we were in Poohsoc together, but like most UK friends of mine I hadn't seen her in real life since I moved out here five years ago. B is around Rio's age and all she previously remembered of him was that he poured a bucket of water over her head when they were playing together in a pool at the age of two, so they had a lot of catching up to do. It's been lovely having multiple children in the house running round after one another.

On the Sunday ghoti and plexq took us to a Catholic mass, which was a first for me, although liturgically it really isn't all that different from an Anglican one. I took the Tuesday and Wednesday off, and on the Tuesday we went and fed horses, and then we went into Philly and looked at books and ate cheesesteak. We ate Taco Bell for dinner, which became quite a recurring theme of the week (fast food that you don't have at home has novelty value, and besides I took the free plastic glasses and gave them to the Buddha; I'll post photos if you like). At Dairy Queen there was a sign showing orange soup, green soup, and red soup; ghoti claims that these are the soup forms of me, firinel, and plexq respectively, and that the headline "Fresh! Hot! Delicious!" must therefore apply to all of us!

On the Wednesday there was going to be a Halloween parade but it was cancelled due to persistent drizzle, I think (no, doesn't happen where I come from). Instead we went to Chuck E Cheese where the others won ridiculous amounts of tickets and I played air hockey with ghoti. Before that we had been to the craft shop where we bizarrely ran into jadegirl and holzman who I thought were in a different state, and have never even met before. They said, "Oh, we knew you must be marnanel because you were tall, wearing orange, and speaking Welsh."

On the Thursday, ghoti and firinel picked me up from work and took me to the KoP mall where we wandered around looking at things for a while. When we got home we ate chilli that Fin had made (which was lovely-- thank you, love), and played board games after the kids were (allegedly) asleep (I think all kids stay up until 2am talking, really): there was some kind of word game, and the game that a lot of Cambridge people seem to call "cards", and Mao, which I had never played before (although I knew about it) and was consequently very bad at, because as a programmer when I figure out a rule I try to break it to test boundary conditions.

On the Friday, everyone went to New York except me, because I didn't take the time off and there wasn't room in the car, so I came back to an empty house for three hours; I ran a hot bath (it is rare that I have enough time and alone-ness to take a long hot bath) and read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance until they returned. The later happiness of being with them for the evening far outweighed the temporary loneliness of the empty house, though.

And then it was Saturday and they had to leave. We took them to the airport and discussed spodding. After we came back, Rio said, "It's strange how quickly you can miss people."

floatyfish and onib dropped in for a couple of hours this evening; it was excellent to see them.

The signed and completed application form for a chiark account has been sitting on my desk for over a year, and I need to get on with sending it off.

Someone has been putting political signs in my garden for a candidate I've never heard of...

plexq has decided to help in shortening the alarmingly large metacity bug queue, and has submitted his first patches and had them accepted. Hurrah! I shall buy him a pint or something.

Does anyone know anything about ACEN Welsh courses, good or bad? Would you recommend them? Would you recommend some other distance-learning type thing? Is it better or worse than getting up to speed on your own?

I walked a hundred metres barefoot in the sunshine through the fallen leaves to buy my lunch and a hundred metres back again as I ate it.

It was riordon's and plexq's and Sharon's birthday, and we all went out to eat together. And congratulations to rethought and ybunny who got married: I wish I had been able to be there.

I am still trying to balance my time between family, sleep, work and code. It has not settled down altogether yet. Also, ghoti and armada are coming to see us very soon! Yay! We have been tidying up and I spent a lot of Saturday scrubbing floors.

Some links: Test your sexual health knowledge with the use of every kung-fu film stereotype ever (courtesy of the Canadian college of obstetrics, according to whois). Gorey meets Trek. And is this really news? My grandmother used to give my mother one ring on the phone when I was little to tell her she was walking over to her house, and not get charged anything for the call.

Poetry With Marnanel: hitchhiker asked me for Tarantella by Hilaire Belloc, so there it is. More soon (Neth's is next).

My email has slowly started coming through again, so you can send me things. I suddenly had forty mails in my LiveJournal comments notification folder.

I took the rubbish out in the dark, barefoot through the rain and the thunder.

Yesterday: Fin has the car today because Sharon's away, so zie drove me into work. That meant I got to sleep in a whole two hours and get up at seven. Despite this, I have been feeling crappy and not terribly with it most of the day. Fin also came to pick me up in the evening, having gone to the bookshop and bought me a copy of Un Lun Dun. I felt a lot better in the evening and finished something for plexq.

Today: floatyfish and onib met us in New Jersey and we went and spent the day on the naked beach. At first the state troopers weren't letting anyone near the beach because it was full, so we found a grassy place a while away and sat and ate lunch. When we came back an hour or so later, the traffic cones were gone and we drove onto the beach. I spent most of the day just lying there getting some sun on my skin, and my psoriasis looks a whole lot better now-- almost invisible in a lot of places. It was just the right mix of sunny and windy (I think you don't really get the full effect of wandering around outside naked unless the wind is blowing and you can feel the air around you all over). I didn't go in the sea much, though, because psoriasis hurts when it's drying. floatyfish brought us some amazingly good chocolate-chip biscuits. Afterwards we went back home and watched fireworks and wandered around the fair for a while, and lay on the ground looking at the stars (did you all know that the British and American names for Ursa Minor differ?), but we didn't play any games at the fair. Then it was late, so we all went home.

(I did eavesdrop a bit, with some surprise, on the conversation of the two women sitting about six to eight metres away from me who were saying that they really wanted to watch two men getting intimate but they were afraid it would never happen because they were female, so what they wanted was to find bisexual men for a threesome. I was surprised because I have often heard straight men say all this with the genders reversed but never the other way around. I had vaguely assumed it was a straight male thing.)

I want to tell you that Fin drove all the way there and all the way back, zir first time driving out of state, and it was awesome.

Saturday was a day when I wrote a "to do" list on the whiteboard at the start of the day, and had it all done by the end of it. I'm not sure whether that was because my expectations were more realistic than usual, or because I was getting better at getting things done. Anyway, I got quite a bit of washing up done, and some patch review for metacity's RTL support, and I experimented a bit with Facebook's application platform, and I wrote two new *FX MARNANEL articles: a writeup of my experience with Facebook's application platform, especially considering I was using Perl rather than PHP, which all the examples are in, and also my history as a programmer. Lastly, I ended up playing battleships on a ewtoo talker for the first time in about five years. It was a sudden surprise to realise that my entermsg has been the same on all talkers for almost fifteen years now.

Someone said they would like *FX MARNANEL to be syndicated in the places where this journal is syndicated, but I think it's a better idea that when I write a nontrivial article there, I'll just briefly mention it in a post here. That way you can keep up with both if you want to just by reading this, and if you don't want to, you can just skip over it.

Grammar nargery: I was shopping with plexq (who is also English), and we saw a sign that said "If you would prefer our cashier scan your item, please let them know", which got us discussing the use of the subjunctive in American versus British grammar. (A commenter on Feministing, who from other places I think is American, was complaining about the use of the subjunctive in some (British) graffiti recently.)

Here's hoping that today will be as successful as yesterday!

I have had a quiet weekend in which I only went out of the house once. 5eh and plexq came over for food. Crocuses are growing in our front garden. I made chilli, and it was not a disaster.

I rashly attempted to upgrade to feisty last night— rashly because feisty isn't due out for weeks. It mostly went well, but then the computer wouldn't boot any more. Instead, it said Kernel panic- not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0). I asked on #ubuntu+1 and they said it was probably an upgrade problem and I should do a fresh reinstall. I wasn't too happy about that, because it would have taken the rest of the night, I already hadn't got any bugs fixed that day, and I didn't have anything to install from. However, mjg59 was awesome and told me to boot from a CD, chroot to my root partition, and apt-get install linux-generic, which worked. So I have my computer back.

One thing that didn't work was that, because /dev/hda* have apparently been renamed /dev/sda*, my swap partition in /etc/fstab didn't get mounted. I spent a few hours thinking "gosh, I expected feisty to be more memory-hungry, but I can hardly run two applications" before I noticed that I had no swap. So I won't need to rush out and buy more memory just yet. [Update: mjg59 says that this is because I edited sources.list, and if I used the upgrade tool it would Just Work. So maybe I should do that next time.]

While I'm giving out props, I should mention that I renewed one of our domains this weekend, and tierra.net (aka domaindiscover) are lovely people. The site doesn't get in your way and they have very helpful phone support. (These are the people we use now we're paying in USD; when we were paying in sterling we used Black Cat Networks who are also very helpful people.)

Netvibes is currently impressing me by pushing my information overload limits. Also, I have got around to setting up a facebook profile, so friend me there if you like.

Also, thanks and hugs go to our brave admins who so ably upgraded all the GNOME servers last night.

The victory of spring was brief, and winter is back all around.

plexq came over on Saturday, and drove us to a bookshop where we bought Rio some books; then he drove us out to the King of Prussia mall, where we drank milkshakes and bought some doll clothes for Rio. (The KoP mall is a mall near here which is possibly the biggest in the US. People from Minneapolis might disagree, mind.) Then we all came home, and played Give Me the Brain.

Apart from that, I've been doing housework and shovelling snow most of the weekend. The law here is that you must clear the snow from the pavement/sidewalk/whatever you call it outside your house within 24 hours of it falling. This is harder because we had hail followed by snow followed by more hail, so it was an ice and snow sandwich which couldn't be scooped up.

Google is showing me an RSS headline which says "Scientists: Trying to Change Earth's Climate is Tricky". Also, math is hard.

Congratulations to Benjamin Otte on making it possible to view YouTube videos using free software. Awesome work.

A number of people have asked to have 399373 fixed. I am moving it to the top of my queue because it will make a lot of people happier when it's working, and it doesn't seem like it would be very hard to fix. More news on this soon.

Here's a question I'd like to ask you all. I was talking to a good friend of mine the other day, and zie said that zie feels like zie has no personality of zir own, but only picks up the personality of the people around zir like a chameleon. I said I thought it had a lot to do with self-esteem and self-deprecation. Zie said that because of this, zir personality was a copy of other people's, and that zie was determined to find a personality of zir own. So we got to discussing what actually made up an independent personality, and how to go about not being a clone of everyone else, and neither of us had very many ideas. Then zie said that I have a lot of people reading my journal, and perhaps some of them would have ideas. So, any thoughts for my friend?

Time for an update. I am feeling low-level murky, not bad enough to stay home, but bad enough to stop me concentrating on work as well as I'd like. I hope this will stop soon.

On Thursday night we stayed up quite late talking to hatter, and then walked home in the dark. I set the alarm wrongly, woke up late feeling very rested, and decided to take a personal day; we went back over to have breakfast with hatter and see him off. The rest of the day I worked on tidying the house.

On Saturday firinel, 5eh and I went to a Habitat for Humanity house and I cut floorboards to the right size all day. I had to cut them at a funny angle, because the stairs weren't quite on a square with the rest of the house. When I asked why, I was told that the house was A Hundred Years Old, and they hadn't invented carpenters' squares in those days.

Other people talking about watching Doctor Who made me think about my own history as a fan. I think the US experience of Doctor Who is rather different from the British experience: theferrett's joke about doing fund drives at Doctor Who parties is one example of this, but another and more important one is that those of us who watched it in Britain watched it in order. I worked out last night that the first Doctor Who I ever watched was Paradise Towers (Update: I must have watched something in the Davison era (thanks, rysmiel)); anything later than that I know, and anything earlier than that I just haven't watched all the way through, or in most cases, at all. Shocking, eh?

Next metacity bug to fix is 408904, merging in the last Linus patch, and then looking into 414113.

Having followed the recent events in Copenhagen with some interest, I wanted to share Schnews's lego interpretation.

Today's film clip: Millie Small. Riordon loves this song.