So a week ago, I got my green belt in modern arnis. Through hard work, practice and persistence I earned this honour. This semester has been one of learning, of growth. Of awakening.
I took on a group project, and although it was in many ways not quite what I’d hoped for, it turned out all right. I found myself joining another project, and that one was more fun – and stressful at times. :) I started the semester with a workload I knew I could handle, piled on more things until I was feeling overloaded, scaled back to what I could manage – and then loaded on more again and found a way to pull it all off. I’ve discovered things I’m quite good at, and some I’m really not. I’ve made mistakes, and hopefully learned from most of them ;)
I feel as if a whole new world has been opening up before my eyes. It’s scary and tough, but I feel like I finally have the strength and desire to face it and show that world what I can do. :)

I was a lot calmer for my green belt test than I had been for my yellow a year ago. It’s hard to believe it’s been only one year. Four other students had their yellowbelt test the class before, so on the day of our test (me, G and L) it was a sea of yellow – just one white belt there. :) Quite a change from most semesters I’ve been there – being on-campus there’s a lot of churn. L has left for another university already, actually. Anyways, the test went all right, and next semester we’ll probably get started on the blue belt requirements. Plus working on the weak areas of our green belt stuff, of course. It’s a really great experience being part of that class… martial arts with a good teacher teaches you so much more than just self-defense and exercise. :)

As for the robocup project… I have mixed feelings about that.
Most of my initial fears turned out to be groundless, but motivation was a real problem. I found out I kinda suck at research – but that was soon irrelevant because the base code never did what it seemed to do. We ended up spending most of our time trying to understand and fix it, which wasn’t much fun. I’m still not sure whether starting from scratch would’ve actually been faster…

Everyone in the program was a good student (however the teachers measure “good”) so there were no serious issues with group dynamics, but it still wasn’t perfect. One group member dropped out just after the initial code sprint, and that combined with the infeasibility of building AI on top of a buggy base threw a lot of confusion in. I have a feeling the experience was much closer to that of a real job – we were all competent with at least *some* experience, but our motivation went down steadily, the project goals got revised considerably, nothing was as it seemed on the surface, and all the code we had available was strange and underdocumented (what few comments there were were just as likely to be german as english). The project wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t a clear success either. :/

Then there’s the maemo project. I ran into my friend’s teacher at Qt Dev Days, and he convinced me to help with their project – I got to borrow an n900, how could I resist? ;) So I spent some time building the UI for that project with my friend, and we got to show it off at a nokia event at the end of the semester. I got some good experience from that, too – communication was difficult at times, and we were having trouble understanding what each other’s requirements were (some other guys were writing a c library that our c++ code would use) but we got it sorted out in the end – or didn’t, as it turned out, but the misunderstanding simply made integration easier anyways. :)

At some point in… er.. november? The git migration team started having weekly meetings, too. ohhh, meetings. We had bikeshedding galore… confusion everywhere… I’m pretty sure I contrubuted to the confusion even when I was trying to reduce it. :P It’s been an… interesting… experience, and I gained a new appreciation for the term “cat herding.” ;) We’ll get there in the end, but we’ll be sure to argue over every single bikeshed along the way (and several we passed ages ago). :)

So many other things have happened this semester – some good, some bad; some big, some small. I certainly can’t write about all of them, nor should I. It’s been fun, it’s been painful, it’s been everything in between. I’ve made new friends and met lots of interesting new people. (There’s someone I’m forgetting to call again, isn’t there?) I seem to have lost a friend, too, which really sucks. The semester is over; my exams are done. It feels more like a beginning than an ending, though.

My reason for being in school right now isn’t really the classes – it’s learning how to deal with people. Learning about computers and math and stuff isn’t that hard, I can figure it out on my own if need be, but people are *hard.* Communication is hard. :P I think I’ve actually made some progress, though. Yay :) There’s so many things I still don’t get, and it seems the more I learn the more there is to learn, but still. Progress. :)

So now I’m going to take a few days to myself to actually relax (or more likely: spend half a day relaxing and then get sucked into kde things again). I’ve got plenty of things I’d like to do over the holidays, but if I start talking about them they’ll start to feel like obligations, so I think I’ll just let it be, and see what I find myself drawn to. :)

so I had quite a nice birthday this year :) friday I woke up in boston, and got to meet the other kde-north-america-gsoc students :) I’d left my sunglasses at home, so of course it was lovely and sunny. we spent most of friday chatting and introducing ourselves; there were snacks, and then expensive hotel food (but good food, and I was hungry… and wanted a nice drink on my birthday… the bill was not so pleasant), and then we went off to see star trek. yes, the imax theatre was in a furniture store. we got there over an hour before the movie started, and a line had already formed.

I spent both friday and saturday night reading, so I was kinda tired in hte mornings. oops. :) still, I made it downstairs in time for breakfast.

at MIT we hacked, and talked, and talked some more… US customs had given me a stern warning about not doing work, even though gsoc hasn’t actually started yet, so I figured I was better off looking at Something Completely Different: scripty, the set of scripts that automate translation-y stuff. I’ve been wanting to look into it for a while now, if only to understand why amarok hasn’t moved to git yet ;) the code is kinda scary and a few people have suggested I just throw it away and write something new. I’m not certain I’ll actually have the time to redo scripty, but it’s worth a shot.

satuday afternoon I heard singing in hte hallway, and found an anime karaoke group :) I went back to kde’s room and tried to persuade them to go, but then I got distracted by my computer and they ended up going to dunkin donuts, and by the time I went back to the karaoke room they were packing up :/ another karaoke fail. :P but I still got to chat with some students, and two of them took me down through the basements to a secret little hacker space :) MIT has twisty passages. much cooler than SFU.

eventually we went out that evening, too late to really see the city – especially since it was pouring rain – but we had delicious indian food, and then delicious ice cream even though we were pretty full already (jeff bought mine as a bday present – yay :) :) and then we reached the bowling alley half an hour before closing – just enough time for one game :) candlepin bowling is a lot harder to score points in. I like the small balls, though – much easier for my little arms ;) which reminds me, now that I have a wii I’ve got to get wii fit or DDR or something so that I can play games that’ll trick me into getting a little exercise ;)

as for sunday, it just kinda… vanished. we had to leave MIT at 3:30, because my flight was at 6:05, and a couple of the other students had flights shortly after that. I do remember having burritos on sunday – boston has the most awesome burritos ever. and they sell horchata too, a yummy drink that I’ve only found in one other place so far – the mexican restaurant in china. I took an extra burrito with me on the plane, and ate it in minneapolis, and it was still pretty awesome despite being cold. :)

I remember trying out my new mouse, too. I bought one in the airport on the way over, because it was 50% off and I’m a little tired of the trackpad, but it’s an ugly brick and the defective usb port on the right-hand side of my laptop won’t work with the mouse, so I have to plug it in on hte left and fully extend the cord, which is kinda silly… and I just keep forgetting it exists :) in fact I could be using it right now… if I can find it…

I really wish I could’ve stayed there longer – one weekend is far too short a time to spend with fun kde people. still, it was nice to get home too. I got in late sunday night, and on monday pete cooked a nice dinner and one of the roommates made cupcakes, and they sang happy birthday n’stuff :) there are some nice things about not living alone. :) and I expect cory and devon are still planning to drag me out and get me horribly drunk…

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. No more assignments, but suddenly there were a million little things to get done, travel arrangements and so on that i’d been too busy to deal with. And there were those pesky exams, too. ;) monday evening i thought i was finally really done… Then found out the TA who was so behind on marking assignments had actually lost a bunch of them somehow (good thing they were digital), but we weren’t told which ones were lost and which just weren’t marked, so i had to re-email a bunch of my stuff, and then there were more problems… I spent most of tuesday emailing him and checking for replies, so i couldn’t get any code written.

By tuesday evening that was finally over. I thought i’d finally get to sit and hack on wednesday, but suddenly i had to book flights, and found a decently priced wii. Good things, but distracting. In the evening i went to a friend’s place for a crafting night, but ended up hacking instead of sewing :) i just couldn’t leave the code alone any longer.

Despite all the craziness it’s been a fun time, though. Having more control over my own schedule again is pretty nice. When classes ended i was a little worried because i didn’t feel motivated to work on kde much, but that’s gone now – it seems i’m still quite addicted. ;) The trip to boston will probably be a lot of fun, and just in time for my birthday too :)

it kinda seems like one big long birthday in some ways – my mum gave me bday money last week, and yesterday i spent it on the wii. pete got me a microsdhc card with adaptors, and took me clothes shopping, and is generally spoiling me rotten ;) i think we’re both glad my classes are over and i’m more relaxed. This weekend is LFNW (i really need to plan my presentation) and in two weeks i’m off to boston! :) :) Even the weather is being awesome, it’s a lovely sunny day again…

I doubt i’ll have much hacking time today – planning for LFNW takes priority now – but pretty soon i’ll be back in action, trying to get as much as possible done before the feature freeze :)

Jamaica is beautiful. Relaxed, no pollution… things aren’t *always* as clean as I’d like, and service is iffy, but what surprised me is that the people look noticably clean. Lots of youth in crisp uniforms. Religion is quite obviously an important part of the culture over there. Prices are about the same as america, which is disconcerting because it feels like china somehow. Old buildings, perhaps, and the street vendors in the city, and people on the road always trying to sell something. There’s a strange mix in the city… I saw some stone walls that reminded me of ireland. lots of little remnants of britain there, too. They drive on the left. The driving reminds me of china, though. ;) I overheard something about a bus carrying 400 people, and another bus that hit a pedestrian and people got upset and shot the driver.
o.0
oookay then. moving on.
I found Jamaican accents really really hard to understand. Sometimes it’s hard to believe they’re speaking english. The cars talk with their horns, too… daskreech can tell you about that. :)

as for the conference… I can’t remember if I blogged about the talks, but other people have said enough there. no need to repeat it. unfortunately I missed most of till’s talks, trying to get homework done. In retrospect, maybe i should have skipped the homework.

I did get some hacking done, though… there was that post I made about the victory calendar, and I worked on keyboard shortcuts for a while. I really should have written something down sooner, because I can’t remember much about that now. just that I wish I’d started on it sooner, because it was so easy… oh, yes: keyboard shortcuts have changed in 4.3 – I think I’ll wait for the 4.2 celebrations before blogging about that :) I considered backporting, but decided that if I end up needing to change them again it’s best not to break everyone’s memory twice. by the time 4.3 is released they should be configurable, too, so it won’t be such a big deal.
there is one downside to this, though: 4.2 has no keyboard shortcut for “add widgets”. ctrl-a was causing conflicts too much, it seems, and nobody thought up an alternative when they removed it. finding unused keyboard shortcuts is hard, even more so when you don’t know what you’re sharing them with… this will be solved properly in 4.3.

something I don’t recall anyone else blogging about is our karaoke attempts in the evening… there was a karaoke place nearby, but their machine was broken that week. then daskreech got his hands on some home karaoke dvds, but couldn’t find a working mic. the next night we tried again, with some online flash karaoke thing. the karaoke played just fine… but the mic did not. sound from the mic went into the computer and never came out. nobody had one of those old crappy sound cards that echoes the mic (making skype unusable). :( nobody even had an option for that on their sound card. I tried arecord | aplay but there was far too much static. so, no karaoke :( we tried our best, though.
next akademy, there will be karaoke. somehow. it will happen. :)

there was also the rum tour on thursday… I’m sure other people have blogged about that in more detail – most of what I remember is drinks, sugar, more sugar, and more drinks ;) it was funny when they got me and ade to be the “ass” and crush sugar cane. mmm, sugar. the cane itself didn’t taste so great after it was crushed – not sure why the real donkey was so happy to eat it. :)

and the beach… the beach was unforgettable. :) I now understand why people go to such places for their vacations. fine sand, mild water, the relaxing atmosphere…
well, the water wasn’t always so calm ;) one night mid-week it rained, and the water changed… the rest of the week there was seaweed being washed up on beach, the water looked grey and choppy, and the waves were a fair bit bigger. daskreech persuaded me to go into the water anyways, and I’m glad I did. :) those big waves are fun! if you jump at just the right moment, the wave catches you, and for a moment it’s like you’re suspended in midair. :) or you can dive under the wave, which ade seemed to prefer.

…

not everything in jamaica was so wonderful, though. there was one thing that kinda soured it for me…

it took me a while to clue in. I’m pretty oblivious to social things – computers make far more sense to me. so I was at the airport, checking my bag, and the guy who took it wrote his email address and phone # on a luggage tag and stuck it in my passport. when I reached the front of the boarding line he was there again, and I can’t remember what he said, but I got a weird feeling… and about a minute later my brain finally started putting two and two together.
I realised that many of the guys in jamaica had been acting… not quite right. They look at women a different way. :/ If I’d realised it earlier I probably wouldn’t have been hanging out in just a bathing suit. even in such hot weather.
I remembered another odd thing… on the way back from the rum tour we stopped for coconuts. they chop the top off a coconut, you drink the juice, and when you’re done they chop it in half and give you a wedge of coconut shell to scrape out the jelly with. well, when I was done mine, our bus driver took it and had it cut up and scraped out the jelly for me. everyone else got to figure it out on their own. I was annoyed but didn’t make a fuss… I actually thought he was going to eat it himself or something, and was glad to get it back at least. but later that evening he wanted my phone #.
also, when we were on the bus, him and dmitri were surprised to hear that I don’t listen to R&B. I didn’t mention it then, but the reason for that is most of what I have heard of it is violent and/or sexist. or it just makes no sense.

it’s hard to describe how I felt, sitting on the plane, as I realised that at least some of these guys saw me not as a person, but merely a woman. I’ve never felt such an.. uncomfortable, sickening feeling. it really shook me up. :(

it also bugs me that when people act that way, I don’t react. even though I didn’t see the meaning behind the coconut incident until the next day, I didn’t like it at the time… but somehow I didn’t react. perhaps my english/canadian upbringing has trained me to be nice and not make a scene. :P

I’m glad I live in vancouver. I’m glad nearly all the people I know, my friends in RL and the KDE community, are respectful and treat me like a person, seeing my code before my breasts. I’m glad I have guys who love me for my mind and want to talk to me as much as, ah, other things. :) I’m glad there’s a beach in vancouver where everyone is naked and it’s just no big deal.

I now understand, at least a bit, just how horrible it was for women before feminism became strong enough to change our culture… funny how strongly religious places tend to have such unhealthy cultures. Jesus tried to teach tolerance, forgiveness and understanding, and what did people turn it into? homophobia, sexism and oppression. :(

It’s probably a good thing I didn’t figure this out until I was leaving- it’d be awful to still be there and be aware of it. I feel pretty uncomfortable as it is, even now. I’m really glad the kde community is so mature (it is, right? I find a corner of my mind doubting all my impressions of people now), and that I have friends I’m comfortable with. I just want to be myself and relax, and I can’t relax if I’m worried about what people think of me, or if I’m wearing too much clothing in warm weather (my skin’s kinda weird, so sometimes too much clothing is really *really* uncomfortable).

sorry this blog post isn’t as happy as most of my posts, but… I had to write about this. for my own peace of mind if nothing else.

despite spending my whole damn weekend at school, i’m feeling much happier recently. maybe it’s the sunshine. maybe it’s knowing that the seester is nearly over. maybe it’s the fact that i’ve been carefully not thinking about all the things that could go wrong and all the things i’m not getting done. maybe it’s that for the last 2 weeks (not counting this weekend) i’ve been making sure i spend some time relaxing in some way, not always being on the computer. maybe it’s other nice things ;)

but i think at least part of it is that i’m writing code again, lots of it. not only that, today i had my whole group with me coding too. i could help them debugs things, i could get code written while they helped each other, i could hear cheers go up when something hard started working, i could bitch about the insanity of this course with them… :)

slowly but surely our system is taking shape. by most reports we’re well ahead of the curve. today i spent a bit of time helping someone in another group – he’d essentially been writing procedural code in java. heh. the complete lack of code design experience among the people in this course is pretty unfair, really.

and speaking of design, it’s pretty cool to see mine coming together and working :) yay! naturally there have been changes along the way… i’ve learnt that designing classes for other people to implement requires much more planning and detailed explanations of just what is responsible for what. i should’ve started the class diagram earlier (or not gotten sick :P ) – it’s amazingthe number of ways a design can be misunderstood. especially when the generated code doesn’t include the comments from the diagram it was generated from. :P
i also would’ve had more classes if i was doing this over again. some stuff seemed small, so i lumped it together, but i would’ve had a much cleaner system if i’d pulled all of that out into separate classes.

i’ve also learnt a bit about group dynamics. working with people isn’t one of my strengths… i needed to teach them gui programming concepts and had no idea how. still don’t really have any idea how actually, but in the end we all figured it out somehow. :) i also have this tendency to make people feel stupid when i try to explain what they’re doing wrong, and i haven’t quite figured out how to tone that down… but i seem to have not really pissed anyone off at least :)
in the end, i stiill feel fairly lost on how to work in groups well when people don’t have the same grade expectations as me… but at least i’m a little more confident that it can actually work :)

i’m also happy that some of my group members with the least experience have been catching on quite quickly and writing stuff that does in the end actually work. :) it’s kinda neat to watch people make the same standard beginner’s mistakes that i remember making in the past… and reminds me just how much of programming is learnt from making and fixing those mistakes. somehow it still amazes me how valuable experience is.

anyways, it’s very very late now – i had to catch a nightbus and then walk a dozen blocks home, and then decided it was such a nice night i should sit outsiide and blog…
i’m gonna go inside and defrost now ;)

wow, it’s technically friday again already. thursday night really, but i can’t sleep so i might as well blog.

i had a deliciously irresponsible thanksgivign weekend (yes, canadian thanksgiving was on monday). after over a week of no code, i spent my friday evening coding and chatting with geeks, then spent all of saturday on code too. i’m working bugs and bad code out of plasma-overlay, slowly but surely.

sunday i tried to do some math homework, but it seemed to expect me to know a bunch of trig identities i’d forgotten years ago, and i wasn’t so keen on memorizing them… so i finally installed anki, and started entering identities and formulas into it so that it can make me memorize them. all i have to do is actually remember to keep using it. ;) it’s a pretty neat pyqt4 flashcard program, and pete’s been using it for a while for chinese with good results.

i also had thanksgiving dinner sunday, and then went off to a birthday party… by midnight i was actually starting to want to get homework done. :) guess i’d had enough relaxation for one weekend. surprisingly i found out it was still possible to get a bus close enough to home… set out at about 1am, and got home somewhere between 2 and 3. i like the journey home after a good party… everything’s so quiet and peaceful. the weather’s nice at this time of year, too- cool, but not too cold. just right for a relaxing walk, and i had a nice warm bed waiting for me at the end. :)

anyways, that late night did make monday kinda unproductive too. i do remember getting some more math stuff entered into anki, but then there was an incredibly delicious thanksgiving dinner… mmm… such wonderful food. :)

i think i got sucked back into the black hole of homework on tuesday. i don’t remember, so it probably wasn’t interesting.

but thursday i took the morning off. :) and,”morning” ened up running until nearly 4pm ;) i went back to homwork after that, but i had lots of fun debugging screensaver stuff… never quite finished the problem i was working on, but found and fixed some small stuff, and now i know what to do to finish- i just have to find time to do it.

so, the curren state of plasma-overlay… there’s only one thing left that breaks things enough that i need to drop to a tty and kill a process. i know why it happens, but i’m hoping i can find a better way to solve the issue instead of adding to the current hack. crashes are no problem any more; both krunner_lock and plasme-overlay behave sensibly if the other vanishes. if the screensaver starts to come up and you wave your mouse, it’ll vanish promptly again now.. but a few seconds later plasma-overlay flickers by as it finishes loading and dbus finally gets around to telling it that it should’ve quit. that’s what i’ll be fixing soon.

once those two bugs are worked out, i think i’ll be able to work on something worthy of a screenshot…. ;) actually, more than one. we’ll see.

huh. typing a whole blog post on my n810 hurts my thumbs :P

whee! :) I got home friday afternoon and my laptop was here waiting for me. it’s a dell xps m1330, and so far I’m fairly happy with it. I installed arch on it last night, and now I begin the long process of installing software and tweaking settings and so on… :)

the hardware is almost all intel. the screen brightness fn-keys work even from a terminal, and the bios lets me choose default levels for AC and battery. there are two audio-out jacks as well as mic in at the front; I assume one of the two is better quality, but they sound the same to me. there are only two usb ports, but they’re on either side of the laptop so at least I can still choose what side to put things on. there’s a capslock led. there’s a slot-load dvd drive (why don’t all laptops have that?) and a fingerprint reader (maybe I’ll try to get that working sometime) and a webcam and it’s shiny. :)

the keyboard is standard size, unfortunately, which means it’s just a bit big for me. the trackpad, otoh, is tiny. blah. there’s no volume knob, but there are volume buttons that are producing keycodes, so I should be able to hook those up. I hope there’s a kmix plasmoid soon :)

along the top there’s a row of shiny buttons that don’t look like buttons: you press on them and they glow. :) whee, shiny. there’s a eject button, music controls and volume there.

something weird about the drive, though… it can boot a kubuntu cd just fine, and other computers can boot the arch cd, but the laptop can’t boot the arch cd. o.0 I ended up using the usb-boot option.

installing arch was fun. it’s like gentoo without the compiling. :) I spent far too long trying to decide how big my partitions should be, which ones to put in lvm, etc… eventually I finished with the base install, then spent hours trying to get wireless working – only to discover that I was running commands in the wrong order. :) pretty much all of my problems with arch today have been like that – audio was silent, then I remembered that I’d upgraded kernel stuff, so I rebooted and it worked again. network profiles didn’t work – because I’d got the wrong values in the config files. :) so now I have working sound, and a nice little dialog that lets me choose my network profile on boot (hooray for avoiding NetworkMangler!) – and arch boots amazingly fast. :) that might have something to do with the 2.1ghz processor, though. :)

it might be a while before I get around to installing kde on it, because I have math homework I really should start – but, wheeee! shiny new laptop! :)

whee! it’s been a bit more than a week, but yesterday i handed in my first assignments. far too much of my time this week was spent on those. iirc i did math all weekend :P and now i have new assignments, oh joy!

somewhere i have a list of thoughts about the n810 that i’ve been meaning to blog. let’s see how long it takes me to get around to that. i don’t like how little computer time i’ve been getting; school is too darn busy.

anyways, good news: first, my group for cmpt 275 seems prettty awesome. not a lot of experience, but lots of enthusiasm, everyone seems smart and has their own strengths. :)

second, my laptop may arrive tomorrow :D yay! i’ve burnt an archlinux cd, and started learning how to install it… that should be fun. :)

third, i managed to repair my backup and got some files off it. yayy! i have my calendar back at the very least… basket files are there but i haven’t got basket installed… i think some files have damage but haven’t run into them yet, so hopefully it’s just unimportant ones. from now on i test my backups after creating them :P

oh, and somehow i got talked into being exec at large for the csss (whose website is indeed down atm). doh.

anyways, i have to go back to getting school stuff done. blah. i hope i can find some time to write code this week…

well, i had my first day of classes today. it wasn’t my first day back at school, though – yesterday i spent the day standing in lines for things like texkbooks and lockers and free ice cream. :)

anyways, today was spent sitting in lectures as well as standing in lines. i’ve got two math classes, which seem like they’ll be fun (yeah, i like math), and the dreaded cmpt 275, a project course that nobody likes – group work and “deliverables” and we don’t even get to choose the groups, ugh.

it was a bit disconcerting being reminded of how windows-centric the world still is. i spent the summer in a nice happy kde bubble and now i have to deal with courses where it’s assumed everyone uses windows… i was somewhat relieved to find out the cmpt 275 teacher will accept assignments in .odf format as well as .doc. *sigh* most of these people don’t know what kde is. i don’t think i’ve ever seen anyone use it, despite the reasonable percentage of CS students with linux installed.

i miss kde. i miss having a laptop, too, although this n810 is really handy on campus. i haven’t had time to install ssh or anything like that on here, the default software’s not so good for following mailing lists or rss, and my desktop comp is being weird (plus there’s a guest sleeping in the computer room), so i’ve not got much idea what’s going on in the community lately.

the good news is, i have ordered a laptop (dell m1330, dunno when it’ll arrive), and since i have no class tomorrow i’m planning to spend the day dealing with software and data recovery n’stuff. :)

so now I’m in ireland, whee. my sister picked me up from the airport tuesday night, and spent three hours driving me back to her house. I was sleeping before we even got there. then I got woken up at 7:30am by my nephew shoving books in my face. :P
I shouldn’t spend too much more time blogging; we need to go out and buy food. good news is that she has a nokia phone, and her charger fits my n810, so I can use it again. yay! pete’s also got a nokia phone, so I might be able to use his charger when I finally get home and not need to buy one at all :) I’m considering buying the usb charger, since it’s nice and small, but it’s fscking $40! damn you nokia and your weird nonstandard gadgets. :P I suppose that is a small fraction of the cost of this nice free n810 :) but it’s gotta suck for the people who *bought* n810’s.
oh, and the xo is charging just fine here (I still have my uk adaptor) but it continues to piss me off. the ctrl-sticking issue is happening too often for it to even be useful for irc. :P