Index of /log/2005/Nov

Yesterday was my last day at my old job, Perl programmer at Dot TK (the .tk ccTLD registry).

After 1.5 years I got bored of being the only "coder" person in the company (which means nobody to test crazy ideas on, and as a consequence, lots of "design document bugfixing"). The huge stack of inherited unmaintainable (and unreplaceable, because time is money) code was also one of the reasons for me to decide to leave the company.

I'll be starting my new job at XS4ALL (the ISP) on Thursday.

This weekend we had the DutchTeamSpurt, where we've done a lot of translating (this was supposed to happen before the Breezy release, but a few things got in the way). We translated a lot, including a large chunk of the website, into Dutch.

A few people agreed to have a "moviegotchi" made too. I have 23 now!

After a year of planning, forgetting about it, planning again, considering it unnecessary, thinking how it could be done sanely and finally implementing it, my photo gallery now has an RSS feed.

(actually there's one for every directory, but most people will probably want the main index RSS, which will contain all new pictures that I'll add in the future).

Warning: Posting a picture on your blog may result in bandwidth over-use if that blog is on a planet ;)

Oh well, I signed up for that myself, and bandwidth isn't too expensive here...

After a weird day of airplanes and a weird sleeping pattern, everything seems to be back to normal. The washing machine is running at full capacity, the printer has been upgraded—a Postscript-SIMM for my Laserjet 5N arrived during my absence—and all bills have been paid.

I also installed a new shower head (the old one was a solid block of deposited minerals) and a new mirror in my bathroom. The old mirror was a composition of "mirror tiles" so I could never quite see myself without a seam somewhere in the middle, so this gives me a whole new perspective on myself ;)

Also, did you know that pre-assembled 500GB USB-2.0 disks are €200 more expensive than an USB-2.0 case and a separate 500GB IDE disk? For that price difference I'll do the assembly myself (which means I'll have a place to put all of my raw DV video from the end of next week, as both were out of stock today :))

Yesterday we went sightseeing in the old part of Montréal, and the old port. The buildings here are really beautiful, and are a nice change after (almost) only seeing the high-rise concrete jungle that is downtown for a week. After walking for a long time, we decided we'd go to the Olympic park to see the Biodôme and the botanical gardens.

The Biodôme is nice, but small and quite boring. It's basically just a zoo divided into 4 parts (tropical forest, temperate forest, the oceans and the antarctic). In every zone, you'll see a few plants and animals native to a place like that, and lots of small facts (on little signs). It's a GREAT place to take pictures (which I will post when I'm back home).

UPDATE! Thanks to the very generous (or just very stupid) neighbors of the hostel, the pictures have been posted.

Yesterday was the last day of UBZ. It was a lot of fun, and lots of things got specced, ready to implement. And of course we made a group photo:

I've made a lot of pictures (which I can't currently upload, as I have about as much bandwidth as an ISDN link from this place), which I'll upload in the next week, when I get home. Watch the feed for updates!

When Mark saw me walking around taking short movies of the people here at UBZ, he asked me to record the lightning talks (we do these every evening) and the morning group sessions.

I have recorded one set of lightning talks, and this morning's morning session. They will be uploaded to Ubuntu servers the moment I finish editing them, so people who can't be here can still get a bit of a taste of what's going on.

Also, the moviegotchi page has an RSS2 feed now (thanks [email protected]). I'm a video podcaster now! Ride the hype! :)