still alive

wow, whta has it been… two weeks since I blogged? two and a half…

life’s been busy. the end of that conference was fun, but it kinda burnt me out; I still plan to blog about the rest of it eventaually. since then, it’s been a mix of important RL stuff (yes, there do exist things more important than kde), racing to beat the feature freeze, and then racing to fix bugs in those features before the first beta is tagged. oh yeah, and there was a birthday in there somewhere too ;)

I’ve found some good restaurants in my area… enjoyed the sunshine.. watched crazy wind-storms outside my window… gotten horribly drunk.. had a great time without any alcohol… and other things.

and then there’s the code – feature freeze has a way of showign up at times that are reallly damn inconvenient to me personally, so I did something I really hate doing – committed code I knew was buggy and not very well-written, to meet the deadline. since then I’ve been fixing those bugs and cleaning up that code – with help from aaron and ivan and fredrikh and others. :)

I think it’ll be worth it, though – in trunk right now we have an activity manager for plasma, and some basic activity association code in kwin. it’s still got some rough edges, but it generally works, so I’m gonna do a screencast showing off the new features soon. :)

right now though… I’m not sure whether I’m more exhausted or starving… I think I’m gonna go crawl into bed :)

degrowth, day 3

Saturday’s presetnations were much better. :) The first one was actually done over videoconference, which worked surprisingly well. There was talk about the unsustainability of what we’re doing to the planet right now, and how this growth that we take for granted is actually quite a recent phenomenon in human history. Peter Victor has been running simulations of various economic models, and again there seemed to be a relationship between lowering emissions and working less :) (and lowering unemployment and poverty somewhat, too).

We had more videos, both about sustainability and about how movements grow – I need to find one of them annd post it but I don’t have time right now. We had a talk on happiness, and more history lessons.

Yeah, I really don’t have time for a proper blog post. suffice it to say that there were several good talks, a panel discussion, and then more great circle discussions. alternative currencies, transition towns, how to change things…

There was a party in the evening too… most people were still talking or had gone to bed, but someone showed up with hoola hoops and we had fun dancing :) and whizzing around on carts after we’d packed up the chairs and things (we’ll be in a different building today).

degrowth, day 2

Friday we had several presentations. They were…. not so great. A ton of doom and gloom – peak oil, population issues, how incredibly fucked we all are even if we were to turn things around right this minute. :/

I don’t much like that sort of thing. It’s depressing. It makes me want to give up. I got the impression that a lot of us don’t even believe in peak oil any more, anyways. One of the presentations was just a half-hour parade of graphs. *yawn* Good thing I had a book. ;)

Oh, but there was also an impromptu presentation by Village Vancouver – they’ve been building sustainable communities right here, and they seem to be running a lot of workshops. Neat. Maybe I’ll go to one of those sometime. :)

Afterwards, we split into discussion groups, and that was great. I ended up in the politics circle, whose topic actually wandered all over the place. we talked about apathy, about how few protests there are in north america these days, and how little they accomplish… about how we might get power back into the hands of the people. Someone reminded us that municipal governments are actually fairly open, and we can go to those meetings – but what they really need from us is metrics, numbers to back up what we’re saying so that they can justify their decisions. I got another history lesson: back in the 60′s, most people could actually afford a house and an education. In many ways, their standard of living was better than what we have now – despite, or because of, their economy being stagnant. We talked about the need to build community and connect with nature, about local currencies, privatization, how participatory government does and doesn’t scale… I’m going to have to sort through my notes later and find out what conclusions we actually arrived at, because this just scratches the surface. :)

The discussions went late, and then smaller discussions went even later. :) Someone told us about how the little redneck town she grew up in has become the local-food capital of the world – change *can* happen. :) We need more success stories like that, more examples of solutions, of what we can really do.

Today there’s another lineup of speakers – hopefully they’ll be a bit more optimistic than yesterday ;) But really, these conferences, it’s about the *people*, the discussions, meeting and connecting and finding out what other people have been doing and that you’re not alone. It’s not about those few people giving talks, it’s about everyone coming together to make things happen. :)

hello planet sine!

well, planet sine can’t see the title ’cause it has the same bug as planet kde. but oh well.
*waves*
so, um, yeah. I’m on two planets now. yays.
does this mean I’ll have to go through the cycle of reviving one of my freetures projects, rewriting a bit of it and dropping it again? ;)

obligatory totally-offtopic-comment: I had an exam today. the last one is tomorrow. that means I’m almost done. I think it’s gonna be confusing for a while, being done with the chinese stuff. will probably take a few days to unbreak my mind and actually start getting things done.

snipped posts

the internet is behaving like a yo-yo today, and it reminded me that a fair number of people on planetkde still snip their posts. considering the overwhelming number of comments last time I brought the subject up, I expected everyone would stop snipping, but that wasn’t the case. so I’d just like to say that if you could let the rss feed show your entire post, I’d really appreciate that while my internet connection is down. :)

I’ve actually almost caught up on all the planetkde posts from my vacation, since a lot of my other feeds don’t include anything at *all* in the rss. I suppose I really should have spent the time doing something a little more productive… oh well. :)

to snip or not to snip?

poll time!

when I post long rambling posts, should I show the whole thing in akregator or just the first bit? obviously the people who read my blog are the ones who are affected by it, not me, so I wanna know what you think.

The Standards Council of Canada needs some education

There’s a proposal to adopt Microsoft’s Office “Open” XML as an international standard. Yep, the big nonstandard “standard” that is full of contradictions and confusions and patent worries. the “standard” that was created as a response to the Open Document Format. We should be standardising on that instead: ODF is already an ISO standard, is truly open, unencumbered, and is already used by at *least* two Free editors that I know of, plus there’s a plugin for MS Office. There must be at least one Canadian reading this blog; let’s let our government know what this “standard” really is. they’ve provided a forum for responses; let’s hope they actually listen to them. …just remember that they’ll listen better if the posts sound like they’re coming from a calm, rational adult and not a crazy linux fanatic ;)

[for the record: in the end, canada voted no. yay!]

settling in

I’ve been in hangzhou for a while now, and I feel like I’m starting to get used to it. still haven’t figured out some things, though – like why the store across the street sells ketchup but not vinegar :)
I’ve been updating my makeshift blog fairly regularly lately. haven’t got around to setting up proper uncensored net access yet.

I’m in China!

Well, I’ve been here for a while. spent about a week in zhenjiang, and I’ve been in hangzhou for a couple of days now. wordpress is blocked, and I couldn’t remember my password, so this i hte first chance I’ve had to post here. I’m using links, and the textr has run off the end of the scvreen, so I don’t know what IU’m typing. my makeshift blog is at http://chani.ccdevnet.org/blog/ – it’s not much, but it’s the easiest way to update from internet cafes.

odd

I just noticed that my blog was off by an hour. does wordpress not adjust for daylight savings? o.0