Thursday, November 11, 2010

On Achieving Goals ...

*blows the dust off his blog*

It's been quite awhile since I last wrote anything in this thing, so I guess its a good time as any, off the tails of UDS-N, to finally sit down and write something down. Since my last blog posting in May, I've been travelling around the world, attending conferences, and trying to represent both Ubuntu and Debian itself, and Canonical in all my travels. I was recently posted to China for a full month where I lived and worked out of an office, made friends with fellow Ubuntu users, and tech enthusiasts, had a wonderful time meeting with people with the Beijing Linux User's Group, and worked hard within my team at Canonical, and the legions of Ubuntu Developers to help make one of the best releases we've ever had.

As I was writing specs and drafting work items, I came to the point that I was reflecting on my own personal goals and growth in life. Two years and change ago, I was a struggling junior at Rochester Institute of Technology, a little less than two years ago, I started working full time with Canonical, and this year, I've gone and traveled to many places I've only dreamed about; Anchorage & Barrow, Alaska; Tampere, Finland; Prague, Czech Republic; and Brussels, Belgium, just to name a few. I packed up and lived in China for a month (an amazing experience, and I look forward to going back and visiting again sometime in the near future). Had you told the me of two years ago what I would be doing now, I'd probably think you were smoking something good.

One thing I've discovered in my life is that if you want to do something, you need to get out there and just ****ing do it. This may seem simple, but I think of the dreams a lot of people have that never seem to come to fruition. When I have an opportunity, I take it; going to Alaska was a dream I harbored for many years, especially entering the arctic circle, and heading to Barrow. That entire trip was booked on roughly four days notice, and the side trip to Barrow was planned the day before it actually happen. I don't regret any of it; it was one of the best things I ever done.

It brings me to what I consider the flux of this blog posting. For those who know me, I've had a goal of visiting every state within the United States. At this time last year, this map looked like this

As of two weeks ago today, this map looked like this:



Now, by the end of the day today, it will look like this:



The point I'm trying to make is if you want to do something, do it the first chance you get, or just don't do it; I say this because you never know when you will be able to do it again.

As for completing a life goal, well, it feels pretty amazing :-). I may write about that in a future blog posting ...

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Mailing Lists and Newsreaders ....

So for awhile, I've been questioning on why very few FOSS programs use newsgroups (or USENET on moderated groups) as their primary means of communication between developers. I personally find email to be a clunky way dealing with mass-mailings, and while switching to alpine and mutt have helped, I feel newsgroups would work better in place of mailing lists.

In this spirit, I'm going to try to replace reading most of my public facing mailing lists with Gmane and see if my opinion actually holds true; if newsgroups are superior to bog-standard mailing lists, and post back in some time. I'm currently looking at various GUI and console based newsreaders to see which works best to meet my needs.

I also need to blow the dust off the memories and remember how to setup leafnode so I can mimic OfflineIMAP. Any suggestions are welcome.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

1984

It's been awhile since I last posted, but I felt the need to do so after my recent flight through ATL. While I was waiting for my connection the loudspeakers announced that we were at threat level "Orange" and that we, the people, had to be on guard for threats to our country.



Does this remind anyone of anything? If your answer is 1984, then you win. When did we get to this point that our government is feeling more and more like the Party; I am just waiting for the day when we have telescreens constantly watching for terrorism and other threats ...



I hope this day never comes but given the path we have been on since 9/11, I fear for the future ...