Mon, 03 Oct 2005

If you are in Finland, you are needed in the capital tomorrow to protest against a new copyright law.

I’d kill for a breezy package of the new deskbar applet. Hint. Hint. ;) Am glad to see that it can launch arbitrary apps and autocomplete on .desktop files- conceptually, at least, this would make a very nice replacement for the current run dialog. Still have yet to see how it works in the real world, sadly.

Glynn: You don’t want to be a Luis, trust me. :) I do hope I’ll have time sometime before law school to sit down and finish off my sketched out free software QA whitepaper, which should include some ‘how to be Luis’ tips, I guess. One big key is not to worry too much about mistakes- make up for imperfection with volume and overall impact on the database. If there are 1/3 as many bugs and it is 3-5 times as easy to find things (because there are many ways to improve discoverability besides closing other bugs), they’ll forgive you any small mistakes that were made along the way. Remember that the goal is not to have a perfect listing of all bugs (which helps no one), but to have a listing (however imperfect) that actually helps developers and managers get work done. Compromises in the first taken in the name of the second should always be acceptable.

Am done with standardized tests, hopefully for the rest of my life. I think I did well but won’t really know until three weeks from today. Discovered the night before the test that the paperwork I had to print for the test (1) didn’t display correctly in evince (2) had the same display problem in OS/X Preview and (3) caused old (but not new) versions of windows acrobat to barf on printing (displayed fine). That was a little stressful to find out so late, but I was glad to find out evince was in good company.

After a week of mental detox and summit I’ll start on applications.

Took the test in Miami to have fewer distractions; as a nice plus I got to raid my Dad’s wine rack for dinner on Saturday night. Yum- Penfolds and Caymus. As usual, am depressed about the difference in weather between Miami and Boston. ;) Saw my step-sister Deblois for the first time since her divorce; she looks happy and is about to start recording an album. I wish her luck. Other step-sister (Lucinda, no web page ;) is getting married in November and preparations are in full, insane swing- much discussion of the proper fabric for ribbons, planting of flowers (ceremony will be in my step-dad’s back yard), etc. Glad I’m not in any hurry to do that.