Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 161

So I have an extra chair today at my office. Is that good?Some weeks ago, I started noticing some stinging and numbness in my legs, specially the left one. I went to the social security, and got a simple prescription: Two weeks having a certain medicine whose name I don’t remember by now. But the timing was not the best, as this happened exactly during my vacations - After finishing with this medication, I still had a full week before coming back to work. And when I came back, things seemed to be fine. But still, this does not tell...

Hmh… It’s hard to get to a decision on this aspect, although I’m mostly sure I’ll vote for a “yes”. I have read most posts on this subject on debian-vote and on the planet, and I’m still not too much at ease… Anyway, one of the most relevants so far is Joerg’s - And not because he is so involved with the NM process, but because he drives me to what I think is a very important point few people have addressed: For long, we have been saying that you don’t have to be a programmer to help Debian -...

Every now and then, I see somebody who -just as Russell did today- talks about the advantages of water heating systems not being tank-based, but tankless! Sounds kewl, hah? Shiny, new?Well… I live at a house that is slowly but steadily started to show its age. Built in 1955 and owned for almost two decades by the very renowned phycisist (of course, my father’s mentor and teacher) Marcos Moshinsky, my parents bought it in 1974, and it has been my home since 1976. And, at least since 1980 (I cannot be sure about earlier events for reasons that might be...

There have been many (too many) social networks coming and going out of fashion in the last years. I got quite excited when I first learnt about them. Advogato was as cool as it could be, and having somebody label me master (even though most had me as a journeyer, IIRC, and that was my level as far as I tracked it) was really inspiring. Then came friendster, and then orkut. I spent far too many hours in them, and was really happy (and surprised!) to find the many ways to my friends, some of them have been out of...

Russell argues (when talking about Mark’s proposed high-end Free Software-based laptop) that laptops are hard (or expensive) hardware to modify and repurpose - Maybe your laptop will one day go to your child or something like that, but it’s hard for it to be a server.I disagree.One of my most faithful and most beloved home servers was my old laptop, a Compaq Armada 4120 we originally got (used, for that matter) in 1998 and that was my main laptop until 2002, when I got my first Dell. 120MHz Pentium, 16 MB RAM (later upgraded to 32), 2GB hard disk.From 2002...

Following Zack’s and Lucas’ posts regarding group maintenance of packages: Do I have to AOL with you guys? Yes, I also agree with Zack’s both 1 and 2. And I also want to share the bit of experience we have got in this regard in the pkg-perl group. In our case, group maintainership has often saved our collective butts. We have also debated somewhat which way should our packages’ maintainership be handled. In the end, our packages’ maintainer will (most usually) be the pkg-perl group itself, subscribed through an alias that reaches all of us. Then, every group member that...

I’ve gradually become happier and happier with Ruby on Rails. I’ve got mostly past the constant “WTF?WTF?WTF?” phase that’s so frustrating when you try to understand the magic behind the scenes (after all, I like understanding what happens inside a framework - the bang and the bling are not what lured me into Rails).So I’ve tried to become a more idiomatic, more complete. In the last project I started, I decided to -gasp- stop declaring my schema structure in SQL, and use migrations instead. All fine until I reached migration 008… The first one including a table modification (adding a...

Following Liw’s initiative, yesterday night Nadezhda and me joined the distributed pancake party. With a nearby restaurant’s hotcakes, anyway, not as fresh or as great as they could, but you can still smell the spirit:(artwork by Nadezhda)And… Well, it was not until this morning that I checked on the Wiki just to discover that Damog took part of the same distributed party, just ~15km away from us. Shame - I had just met Damog that very morning at the University :)

It seems that I’ve held up -at least for half a year- what I stated back in January - I come by bike to work almost every day, and really enjoy the time spent on two wheels. My times have -of course- improved, as has my dominion of the bike - I make ~10 minutes each way (must be a bit more on my way to work than on my way back, as it is uphill). My city’s government seems to be seriously promoting people to consider using the bicycle as means for regular transport and not just as a...

Ok, I’m officially back. Yup, when you have a meeting just over your regular lunch time and are suddenly seen as the guy who will fix the institute’s video needs just because you worked manning cameras with the amazing DC7 video team, it just means you are back home. Lets see how several projects that have sprang up in the last couple of weeks (both at DebConf and at work) start materializing.Anyway… DebConf was great. Just great. This time I had time both to feel I was useful and productive (mainly doing video-related stuff, although on some other points as...