Spending the weekend helping my grandparents move into a big planned elderly facility. It’s a nice campus on a former farm, with nice medical facilities, apartment-style housing, and regular support groups for wives of Alzheimer’s patients, which will be great for my grandmother. It will be a hard weekend for them- they’ve lived in this house for a little over 40 years now, and I know it will hurt my grandmother not to have her little gardens to tend to. They’ll get by, of course, but I don’t think it’ll ever be the same, and they know it, I’m sure. I’m already physically and mentally exhausted from travel and work- I fear this weekend will not help at all. But I have to do it- have to say goodbye to the house and help my grandparents through it.
In better news, generally 2.6 is looking pretty slick. Everyone who wants to know how UI design can work in free software should take a look at what Marco is doing. I’m sure the serious usability people can find holes in his process, but Marco is as usual really leading in what GNOME can and should do. The file selector still isn’t finished, but it is coming along, and it’s good to see that people are addressing showstopper bugs even if there are still many more showstoppers to go. Oh, and if aes finishes the bugzilla upgrade, he’s my total, utter, complete hero. Bugzilla is generally thankless code to wade through (getting better in 2.16 and 2.17) and he’s driven through the last bits to really get it going. Big, big thanks are due to him. When he finishes it, of course. ;)
I thought it was pretty cool to see that ejchang, skvidal‘s GF, was hanging out in #bugs yesterday. It’s always pretty nifty when someone new contributes to GNOME, even if it is in the small, incremental way that bug work is.
I’m also pretty excited about what Novell is doing- I just saw the first demos of Groupwise IM and GAIM (which will be open source) and the iPrint team wants to open the client for iPrint as well, which is pretty neat.
Oh! And I nearly forgot- mibarra has done studly work and we’re nearly ready to release xd-unstable for suse 9. Pretty sexy, I think, worthy even of a Very Big Release Announce. :) We’ll see, of course :)