After terrible coffee experience after terrible coffee experience in Americaland, going to Mojo was one of the first things I did when I got home.

With the upcoming trip to Americaland in October, I'm thinking a lot about how much I love Mojo.

So here's some photos:

The left side of the board. Ordering coffee in Americaland is confusing because everything is named differently





The right side of the board





Long black. I didn't manage to find an Americaland equivalent of this





Beautiful shiny





Milk jugs. I do not drink milk in coffee





Mojo also do tea! This is my peppermint tea

I've blogged before about how now that Catalyst is on 4 floors, we're increasingly using irc as our communication medium inside the office.

We have an irc bot that creates links to the Work Request Management System out of certain phrases (eg WR#xx)

So, today:

17:23 <@karora> When networks go pear shaped I usually disable all the VPNs, get back to basics, and then build the whole house of cards back up again :-)
17:24 <@Mjollnir`> you're a house of cards
17:24 <@karora> Mjollnir`: wr39195
17:24 <@wormy> WRMS Link: https://wrms.catalyst.net.nz/39195 (and so's your face) - Finished
17:24 <@Mjollnir`> heh
17:24 <@Mjollnir`> oars

Pretty funny.

Seem to be mostly, "Hi, I haven't updated for ages because I am busy". Here's another one:

Hi, I haven't updated for ages because I am busy. I've been doing lots of stuff.

Google Summer of Code finished. I was mentoring! It was a cool thing to be involved in. I actually have a lot to say on this matter, mostly about the things that I would do differently as a mentor next time. I hope there will be a next time! Next year I'd like to get Mahara involved as well as mentoring for Moodle again.

Speaking of Mahara, we've been busy. 0.8.3 is the latest stable release, it has support for MySQL and also single sign on with Moodle. We're doing lots of usability improvements for the 0.9 series, big UI work. I am knocking things down with wrecking balls.

Completely unrelated views into two different couple's relationships over the last few weeks have turned my ideas about relationships on their head and then back again. I wonder if we learn the most about our own expectations of relationships when we're single and able to evaluate them from a mostly theoretical point of view, out of the way of being overly biased by messy emotional stuff.

I am currently recharging after a few weeks of too much partytime. This means that the axiom of the last few months, "there is no food, only vodka" relating to the state of my kitchen is no longer true. I went to the supermarket and bought healthy stuff. I have recently been treating my house too much as a place to sleep and nothing else, and I'm consciously trying to change it back into a calm place where I hang out and recharge. The fact that it's getting warmer helps because I'll be getting back into sitting on my back deck and reading.

I miss San Francisco! I've been thinking a lot about it since I got back. I'm hoping to go over for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit in October. There are a few people I'd really like to see again.

That's enough. Gotta finish my timesheets for August.

A few weeks ago, I ordered the Nokia e65 from a parallel importer. I was super excited about getting it. After about 5 days of waiting, and it hadn't arrived, I emailed them. They told me it was because I ordered it in mocca rather than red and it wasn't in stock and would take about a week. I was pretty disappointed, but ok.

A few more days passed, and it was after the time they said it would arrive I emailed them again. They assured me that the courier had in fact picked it up that morning and I would get it soon. I had chosen the 1-2 day courier delivery option with tracking number. I waited 1-2 days and still no phone, so I emailed them, asking for the tracking number. They didn't reply, at which point I called them and they gave me a tracking number. I then called the courier company, who said that it had been picked up the day before (not three days earlier as the importer had told me) and that it had already been delivered.

Wait ... what ? It certainly hadn't arrived at work... so I asked them where it had been delivered, and sure enough, it had been delivered to my home address, and left outside the front door.

Fury ensues.

A few packages of candy later and one of my motorbike enabled colleagues drives to my house to fetch it for me. I gleefully open it! Finally! To find not only that they have sent me the red phone afterall, and that the charger is not a New Zealand one.

More fury ensues.

I decided to keep the red one, as it already took two weeks to arrive, but write the importer a very very angry email, complaining about all the things that went wrong and demanding a free NZ charger.

After a weekend with the phone, I am totally in love with it. I even love the red. I love:

- the screen is completely beautiful. It plays videos beautifully. It renders photos beautifully.
- I have just got ssh working and a series of scripts all around the place so I can ssh into one machine, run a script and land over about 4 hops to my work machine. From there I can get anywhere and do anything. Also t9 over putty rocks SO HARD.
- Google maps. Is. Beautiful.
- Tiny twitter works well.
- The installer is amazing. Just bluetooth the file to it and it'll just install whatever I want.
- Did I mention it has wifi? Considering the amount of time I'm within range of the work network or my home network (zomg I can use it outside when laptop would die in the sun!), this is infinitely useful.
- I had to download an iSync plugin but that worked perfectly.

Things I don't love:

- Vodafone's exorberant data charges. Honestly, $20 per month for 15mb! W.T.F.
- As always, large amounts of fury with the supplier.
- I haven't figured out how to make it play a video ringtone for a contact. I selected one and it played the audio but didn't display the video.
- Getting ssh set up with the right keys and stuff was a bit of a headache but SO worth it.

-- edit

I just remembered another thing that drove me nuts. I was creating keys in debian with ssh-keygen and puttygen and then bluetoothing them to the phone, but the autohandler for the Inbox decided that they were "Notes" and put them somewhere deep within the Office suite stuff and I couldn't find the files to tell putty where they were. In the end I just mounted it over usb and copied the file directly.

I find this review of Gimme Fiction particularly relevant, especially:

How good is this album? Good enough to make you sell your home, live out of the back of your car, follow Spoon from show to show, start the First Church of Spoon, sing "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine" during morning vespers and eventually head to court to fight Britt Daniel's restraining order. This is just a glimpse at how deep and abiding your obsession may become!

is that it's boozy... on Sunday night...


You'd think I'd learn.

Since coming home I have

- had dinner at the Matterhorn
- watched my mother receieve a Festschrift at Te Papa
- been out to breakfast with my parents at Bellagio in Hataitai
- driven around the bays
- had a very boozy mischief bad group pot luck dinner. Girls only daquiris = vagaquiris.
- been to the Affordable art show
- had lots of good coffee

It's starting to feel like home again. Maybe the fact that I finally unpacked yesterday helped.

& now it's time to sort my shit out, get up and go out for Sunday roast at the 'Ho.

Day Four of OSCON

Day Four! Started with keynotes, by far and away the best one was How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps by Steve Yegge.

Then the lightening talks, then Wez Furlong's PDO talk, in which I was grouchy about the example of using WHERE 1 in sql, which doesn't work in postgres.

Then lunch. After lunch I missed one session to prepare for my own talk, which was sparsely populated, but other than that, ok. Then Brenda's talk.

Then the day was done, so we had a quick dinner with a bunch of people and then raced back for the Google Summer of Code BOF, which turned out to be less BOF and more beer and pizza! Silly us, we didn't realise we were getting fed. Stayed there for awhile, then back to the Doubletree for Nat's speaker party which was ace until the kiwis got cornered and everyone demanded we do the haka. Luckily, at that point the Hotel security decided we were being too rowdy so we all departed for Schwern's. I didn't last too late, I was home by 2.

Day Five of OSCON

I made keynotes! I think I was the only one of us who did. The keynotes on the last day were all excellent. Nat's in particular was hilarious, but they were all good. After that I went to r0ml, which I was rather confused by.

After the closing keynotes, we were all a bit wiped out so we got books and leapt on the train and went out to the park near the zoo, drank a few beers in the sun and read our books and ignored eachother. Thai for dinner. Actually really amazing thai. I had a dish called 'death by asparagus'. Grease was playing in the square and we made it, no thanks to two wrong trains. Then whiskey with the rails guys, but I was starting to feel pretty sick by this point, having caught Sig's devil cold, so it was early hometime.

Weekend

Checked out of our nice hotel and into the Worst Hostel in Portland. Saturday was mostly spent stomping around exploring Portland and more books in parks and dinner and beer and I finally got a bloody mary! Our hostel was terrible. There were fleas and a crazy guy.

Sunday morning Sam had rented a car so we went on a roadtrip and somehow ended up in Seattle at about 9pm with no place to stay, we sorted out a motel that would let 5 of us sleep in one room, had an amazing dinner on the water front (paella and New Zealand wine!) and then went dancing. There was tequila and I got the drink on me. Sam took photos. Monday morning we all piled into the car after finding bacon and drove back to Portland in time to have a quick stop at Voodoo donuts and Stumptown and then on to the plane. About 15 hours later, we're home.

I didn't feel home until yesterday, when I walked into Espressaholic and The Phoenix Foundation were playing.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

reading that in the closing keynote at oscon was a bad idea, it's just too funny

I went to the following talks:

- Postgres Performance Whack-a-Mole
- Who gets to decide what Open Source means?
- Who am I? The age of Digital Identity
- Ending Rails envy with PHP5

In between, I was a total swag whore and gave a git tutorial to Erik/Hank.

After Sam's PHP5 talk, we had a couple beers and then went out to the Google dinner, and then the Sun party. I played on a car:

Morning: I wanted to go to Technical Management of Software Development but somehow accidentally ended up in Higher Order Perl, which was really interesting. At breaktime we caught the max two stops to get coffee and then went to the talk I was supposed to be in.

I must be pondering symbols after the ruby talk, because one of the presenters was talking about rather than wasting memory storing the same tasks over and over again, you should optimise it by creating a routine and sticking to it (the example was always doing the tape backups at the same time) and it reminded me of using a symbol in ruby like :red vs "red" if you're going to use it again and again.

I like it when geek and non geek blend.

Then lunch in weird lunchboxes.

Afternoon: rails tutorial. I took lots of notes on this although when he got to 4:50pm and said that he had the last quarter of his presentation to do and it was the 'infrastructure' part I was a bit disappointed. Infrastructure was really the part I was most interested in. There wasn't a "get up and started howto" either, which would have been good as I had my laptop right there, apt-get install rails'd and ready to go. Although I had to leave at 5 though, so maybe it happened in the running late part.

Then to the phpmysql party, where I fully expected to get into a mysql vs postgres argument but instead just had beer. Then to the Meet & Geek and awards, then off to Ground Kontrol for Dance Dance Revolution, which I still suck at. We totally need to have DDR at Catalyst.

A coffee snob is someone who is a snob about coffee.

A coffee wanker is a tounge-in-cheek coffee snob. That is, they call themselves a coffee wanker because they know they're being an asshole about it.

Coffee wankers are much less annoying.

(This entry brought to you by the Americaland Does Not Understand Me Department)

Morning: Ruby tutorial. It seemed to go extremely slow and basic for the first half, and then the last half hour he raced through the slides, I missed something at one point and got lost. I think I finally get symbols.

Lunch: weird fast food mexican and then failed squirrel mission.

Afternoon: pro postgres tutorial. Really good, I took lots of notes.

BOFs: I went to the beginnings of the keysigning and then Open Source in Education, which was more about teaching open source than using open source tools for teaching. Then Linuxchix BOF, then out for dinner and beer with Catalysts, Silverstripers, Val, Matthew and Dave.

I can't be bothered googling trying to find urls for those people. I wanted to ask Matthew Garrett about laptop stuff but he looked like his head was going to explode so I restrained myself.

Holy shit I'm tired.

Since last update:

- San Francisco State University visit. Lunch with SFSU geeks, talking about Moodle and Mahara and ninjas vs zombies

- We walked over the golden gate bridge and back

- We visited the Castro and Haight & Ashbury and bought stuff

- o & s5 took us to the best coffee in SF and we were happy.

- I queued for Harry Potter with them and played Dance Dance Revolution which I must procure.

- We left SF. I had a serendipitous moment half an hour before we left, which made the leaving on a good note, but then we got to the aiport to find that one of the airlines had flagged as us 'inspect these people' so they searched our bags and then put us through the new stripsearch xray machine thingos. No idea why.

- And then the plane had been over booked by 50 people so we thought we weren't going to get on. I think we were the last people on the plane but we made it. Fellow Wellingtonians and silverstripers were at the airport and then Sam met us off the plane.

- In Portland so far we have had a pub meal complete with excellent beer and the obligatory version control system argument. And tater tots! Bizarro.

- Now I must read Harry Potter.

This post authored by slightly more sober brenda.