Author archives: Mike

This was the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in Canada. Had the family over on Sunday (yay!), worked on Saturday, but today was just for relaxing. Went through my OpenGL folder (well, the last 100 or so messages) and fixed a couple of small bugs. I want to release a 3.0.0b1 this week, so if you have ...

From about 2pm through to just now I've been up and running. Meeting with a new client, picking up the B2 machine, meeting with a volunteer project manager for the OLPC, trying to re-recruit a sub-contractor for various projects, then off to see a friend play at Free Times (a cafe).

The B2's screen was ...

Sitting here working I find myself reflecting on the fact that messy jobs are never "finished." By messy I mean jobs that are complex and multi-faceted and have no particular "right solution". In contrast, the clean jobs, the ones where you just need to solve a problem and know that you have the correct answer, ...

Someone mentioned yesterday an old "truism" that you have to choose any two of "work, family and friends". I know you don't have to, but it takes a bit more time-management than I've been applying lately.

So, I finally got the "get a calendar and todo list started" task off the todo list. Started off ...

Three of our house guests (a father, young daughter, and pregnant mother) were to have headed home this afternoon. They wound late due to various delays getting out and navigating Friday rush-hour traffic and got to the airport just over an hour before their flight.

Obviously that's a bit late. It often takes 20 or ...

We're going to visit some of our oldest family friends today, way out on Wolfe Island (near Kingston, Ontario). We're told the islands are gorgeous. Probably no time for a boat tour, but at least we should be able to see some trees (Ilir loves trees).

I'm thinking we should also try to get to ...

Building a machine on the side out of the broken laptop for my brother in law, decided to go with Kubuntu (which Soni uses on her laptop) instead of Gentoo, as he doesn't have a connection to the internet, and doesn't have any interest in learning how to administer linux boxes (also, not sure the ...

Only got a few small blocks of maybe an hour in today, rest of the day was spent in little tasks that were so small I often didn't get around to recording them in the time-tracking file. Just so many simultaneous projects going on. On top of that, yesterday's all-day meeting seems to have left ...

I was asked in email to elaborate on the need for project managers, so I'll write up my thoughts here...

We need people to "own" various cross-cut topics. That is, to monitor the project, advocate for needs, and remind people of those needs during meetings (those are mostly online), in the mailing lists, etc.

In ...

Met with representatives of a group at the U of T this afternoon (they are a group set up primarily to promote commercialization of (medical) technologies, but they have a new mandate surrounding promotion of "social good" and the "triple bottom line" (environmental, social, fiscal), and it was that group that invited me in). Peter ...