codergeek42

So, over the weekend my parents and I decided to head out of town for a bit, mostly on a whim. We came back to find that only about a fifth of our house's electricity worked: random outlets around the house gave us just enough for essentials: refrigerator/freezer, microwave, stove, some lights, one TV, and a couple of extra outlets for plugging in our mobile phones and other rechargeable portable electronics - and this was after being clever with the use of some extension cords. Apparently, one of the two main bus fuses to our house had literally cracked open due to the weather and the natural wear and tear of its nearly 20 years of loyal service to my family.

We were soon able to get the city's electric company to fix it all up nicely (and replace some of our outdated power cabling in the process); but this is such an antiquated part that it needed to be special-ordered. We ended up spending the past half-week or so just living on what we could power, and that amounted trying to stay out of the house much: dining at local restaurants and going out shopping or to the library, etc. It did give me much reading time though, so I finally finished Deathly Hallows. (!) When we were at home, there wasn't much to be done other than talk and read, or play Sūdoku on our phones, et al. (While I enjoy this abounding of quality family time, it just goes to show how much we've vested technology into the very fabric of our lives.)

Anyway, now that I'm back online, I see I've got a whole slew of updates to bake for my various Fedora packages. I promise I'll get to those soon but I'm going through them as quickly as I can (and this Midori build failure is still driving me nuts...) - please be patient! I should have them all bumped and building by the weekend, assuming no other show-stoppers.

I've also got a solid 2300 new emails to sift through too. Evolution's filters help significantly, but it's still a mess sometimes. :( It eems that no matter how much I love it, technology and I just can't seem to get along quite right most of the time. Sadness...

(Oh, and L'arc~en~Ciel's new single album, "Nexus 4 / Shine" is AWESOME. Let it be so known!)

As many around me have probably noted, I've been extremely busy with my new job and get-togethers with friends/family over the past week or so; and I've thus not had much time recently to devote to Fedora hacking. There have been prior times too where I've just up and vanished from the 'Net for several days at a time.

However, the comaintainers of my packages have gladly kept my various packages updated and working nicely in my stead. I'd like to give special recognition, then, to the following couple of maintainers who've been of great personal help in this regard:

Brian Pepple, aside from the awesome work he does on his own for the Fedora Project in many ways, has kept Empathy and other aspects of the Telepathy stack updated when I am otherwise preoccupied. Thanks very much!

Mamoru Tasaka, who consistently helps me squash nasty bugs in the WebKit stuff and in keeping it up-to-date. どうもありがとうございます！

I recently noticed this little gem post on Planet GNOME.

This is outstanding news. Congratulations to the WebKit developers on their hard work and continued accomplishments!

For some reason my blogging pattern and its frequency tend to follow a sine wave-like pattern: I blog a lot regularly, then stop for a time, then start back up, etc. Ugh. I really should stop that and just make it linear!

As to Fedora, a lot of really cool stuff has happened recently, including the gLabels 2.1.5 bump and the inclusion of WebKit into Fedora proper.

Also, classes have adjourned for the semester; and so far as I can tell it's half-As, half-Bs for the final grades. I'm quite pleased with these results. That introductory music theory class was incredibly fun, surprisingly enough; and now I want to take more music classes (which I really should have started with far earlier in life...). But, alas, Computer Science is a very high-unit major, so I won't have room in my schedule in the coming semester. Maybe a relaxing music class over the summer? I think I'd like that.

Next semester I'm taking 4 classes again but they're all a bit higher-unit, so it ends up being 17 units total. I'm taking the following classes:

• Graph Theory and Linear Algebra
• Computer Organization (Assembly Language)
• Elementary Japanese I
• Intermediate Calculus

It seems difficult at first glance, but as they are all classes I will no doubt enjoy (and mostly with teachers I've had in previous semesters whom I know are quite capable and friendly), they shouldn't be hard so long as I put in the effort. Thankfully I'm nearly done with my GE classes, too. Just some Chemistry stuff to take in the coming semesters... :)

On a final note, my close friend sciathan_file is returning from Ireland today. Have a safe and pleasant journey, Ally! =)

Come to think of it, that was far less than I had intended to write. I think I should go get some more caffeine....

Let it be officially known that attempting to learn Debian packaging by using their WebKit package (which contains a lot of "non-standard" build setup) as an example has confused the bajeebus out of me. I repeat: The bajeebus is gone.

Thankfully ebuilds are easier to read in a lot of ways.

That is all.