April 2004
Well, my mother’s birthday was March 31st. We didn’t really do much for her birthday, but my parents went out to dinner and spent some time together, which was cool.
Other then that, much hasn’t been going on. It’s been a quiet week on the gentoo front, and the same with freenode. I braught in a new dev yesterday for gentoo, and I have a package I need to commit today for app-accessibility. That’s the extent of it all really.
I ordered a pcmcia modem, a wireless card, and a braille watch yesterday. I don’t really have the money for either, but I’ll need them when I go get my dog. I’m looking forward to getting bills paid, I’m getting closer, but it’s still taking a while. I won’t have it all paid off when I go to school, but gateway will be done at least. I’m so sick of that stupid bill.
I’m so excited about going to oregon state. I’m still waiting to hear about my financial aid stuff, but the rest of it is going well. I need to call the disabilities office soon to discuss accessibility issues, but for the most part things are done. I’m guessing that I will hear back from financial aid soon about how much I’m going to get. I really hope that I can get enough money from financial aid, because if not I’m going to have to seriously look for student lones. This is going to be a very expensive year for school I can see. Oh well, at least I have a job waiting for me when I get there.
I need to go call osu before I forget again. I need to get this disabilities stuff straight.
I’m getting more and more excited about going to get another dog. I miss a lot of the freedom etc that I had with my dogs, and I’m really looking forward to getting another dog. 49 days and counting down. The next 7 weeks till I go get my dog are going to drive me nuts. I don’t have much to do till then, and that makes the suspense worse. I half wish someone would cancel in the april/early may class so I can go in early. Even if they did though, I suspect I wouldn’t get in that early. There’s probably other people on the waiting list who have been there just as long as me, if not longer.
I don’t even have recruiter bugs to do now, bleh. I do however want to exercise as much as possible, so that I can lose more weight. I cheated a bit on my diet. I had a small bole of icecream, and a giant capachino this morning. A little every now and then doesn’t hurt, but too many snacks aren’t good for me, and I know that.
The accessibility stuff is going ok, though quite frustrating at points. We’re slowly working at getting the speech-dispatcher stuff into gentoo, though it’s not always easy. I’m trying to test the speakup interface to that now, but that’s not very easy either. I’m having problems on getting it to detect that /dev/softsynth actually does exist. Along with that, I’m having problems trying to get the speakup modules to load and unload right with out causing the kernel to panic. This is a bit frustrating to, because I really had hoped to have software speech on my laptop by the time I went to get my dog. sigh Oh well, I have another 7 weeks to try and figure out what the problem is with the stupid thing.
No friends here is a frustrating thing as well. I don’t know anyone my age really, and that’s frustrating, I don’t go out really accept with my mother, and while her and I have fun, there’s still a difference there. Oh well. Time to go find something to do.
Well, the accessibility stuff is going a bit better. I got the speakup softsynth thing working, but the interface to speech-dispatcher to speakup needs a lot of work still. It is nice to see that there’s progress though. I don’t think that it’s going to be good enough to use with my laptop, but it’s a nice start.
Other things in gentoo aren’t going as well. The last week or so has been very frustrating. Two developers got into a nasty disagreement, and it’s resulted in a lot of stress and misunderstanding. I was gentoo ombudsman when it all started, and my attempt to help try and correct things seemed to make things worse. I never intended that to happen, but I guess sometimes things don’t go well dispite our best intentions.. I feel very bad about all of that.
I was elected devrel operational lead for gentoo last week. I’m happy about it in some ways because I love devrel, but I’m also now seeing all the bad sides to gentoo. I guess that’s what happens with any project though, when you’re one of the little people, you don’t see all of the bad things, or rather you don’t see as many of them. But the higher up you go, the more things you see you may or may not like. This job involves a lot more stress to. It’s ok though, just is going to take a lot more getting used to.
Freenode stuff has been going ok lately. It’s actually been insanely quiet. No major routing problems, and no major kiddie problems. That’s actually a good thing, it both means we’re doing well, and it’s given me a chance to back off from things a bit. I love freenode, but I’ve needed a bit of a break from it. I guess some of the reason is that I’ve worked so hard to help the network, but I pushed myself too much in doing so, and that’s tired me out a bit. I think part of that being tired out thing is that I feel like I have nothing to really show for it. I mean, no job, and I’m not exactly making any money from doing this. and I think that’s the problem.
Drobbins braught up a good point in the gentoo managers meeting yesterday. People have their normal jobs plus family, and other things, and they get burned out while working on open source projects sometimes because they just don’t have the time. That’s very true, and I think it’s more true with people who love projects and put a lot of time into them. Then, one day they realize that this isn’t helping them, and they move on. A bit sad in some ways, but I don’t blame them either..
Oh well, off to find food, find a new samba dev for gentoo, and argue with mailing list managers:p
Where to start…. Well, I haven’t written in a while, partly because I haven’t felt like it, and partly because I haven’t really cared much. A lot has been happening lately though, and some of it has been wearing me down quite a bit.
Freenode has been going ok on one hand, but in another sense it’s not. Lilo is a good friend to me, but some times I have the urge to strangle him. Like for example: we have a few staff who tend to cause problems. He and I have talked about this a lot and we’ve both agreed what needs to happen, but he won’t do anything about it. And while he puts it off and puts it off, the things get worse. It’s frustrating because I really love the network and what it does but at the same time, the thing has me very frustrated. Oh well, I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens. It’s more then just the staff thing though. There’s a lot of things that frustrate me about freenode lately, but I don’t quite know how to put my finger on it either..
Gentoo stuff has been….odd lately. Drobbins finally pushed things through to set up the nfp, which is a good thing. He also stepped down from gentoo, which has everyone a bit surprised I think. I like drobbins a lot. He’s been very nice to me, and I have a lot of respect for him. I also think though that he’s very burnt out on things and could use a vacation. I guess we’ll see what happens there to.
Along with drobbins and seemant leaving, some other gentoo developers have decided to leave to. It’s very disappointing to see friends leave, but, I can’t make them stay either, and I’m not sure I’d want to make someone stay if they were unhappy, friend or not.
I think that the gentoo nfp board will do well, but I think there are others who don’t think so. Some how I’ve ended up on the gentoo nfp board, and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I love gentoo, but I haven’t been involved in gentoo for real long, and I think that my inexperience is going to be a big disadvantage, but, we’ll see I guess.
As for me, I’ve been ok for the most part. It’s hard on me not having a friend that I know I can talk to a lot who can put up with my frustration with things and who understands where I’m coming from. Sure, I have friends, but not many that I can seriously talk to. I’m also going insane where I’m living currently. I want to get out and do things, but this area sucks for accessibility, and that drives me insane. Oh well, only 4 or 5 more months of this and then I go off to oregon. It’ll be nice to be in an area where I can get around and do things.
23 more days till I go get my new dog. I’m getting excited about it now, and a lot more confident then I was before. I miss my dogs, and I don’t think I ever realized how much I depended on them till now. I need to go shopping saturday to pick up some stuff I need to take with me.
Money. There’s one of those things that never seems to change for me. I guess the good thing is that I’m finally starting to get my bills paid of, though I’m still going to end up going to school owing way too much money on my stupid creditcard. It’ll be nice to have a job where I can finally get my bills paid.