Binary Elysium

Short version: @Ramblurr is my new public Tech/FOSS twitter account, please follow it.

I have been on twitter for quite awhile, for several years at least. My original use case for twitter was something like a web/sms based IRC channel for my good friends from my hometown. Twitter is responsible for keeping us close in the years after we parted ways for different colleges. This use case worked great until my online communities (KDE, tech industry, etc) started jumping aboard the twitter boat.

At first I tried to handle both social spheres—online professional, and raucous college student—with the same account. Needless to say one group did not appreciate the drunken tweets or lengthy star wars quotation contests, and the other group did not appreciate my Java vs C++ discussions. Eventually, I made my account private and left the online technology twitter sphere, but now things are changing.

Twitter has risen to prominence in the online community, and I am missing out on this form of social communication with my fellow technology and open source enthusiasts. So, I’ve renamed my private account, and opened my original for public use.

Please feel free to follow @Ramblurr, my public account, without need to fear a flood of inane, hyper-context-sensitive, ramblings between friends.

The internet is on the fritz here in Negril, Jamaica at Camp KDE, but while it is working I’ll post this photo taken from the balcony during lunch.

This is also a field test of the WordPress Android application.

We have had 3 presentations so far. Right now Sebastian Kügler is giving a great talk concerning optimizing your applications for mobile devices.

More quality updates soon.

Alright, so this post is more of an excuse to play with this new WordPress app for my Android phone, then it is me sharing a spontaneous flash of insight while sitting at gate B2 in Charlotte International.

Airports are fantastic settings for observing people interact. The field of rigid, connected chairs at the gates force people to congregate, and often the sphere of personal space is severly limited. The space is public, but groups of friends or families will treat it as private.

Interesting, how our sense of the boundary between public and private space changes when we are forced into close proximity with strangers. Consider, the young couple getting hot and bothered only a chair adjacent from me as if they’re the only people for miles, but glare at me when they notice me looking at them while typing furiously on this tiny keyboard. Apparently one empty chair on either side is sufficient space for them to consider their activity private, because as someone took the empty seat on the othe side, they stopped immediately.

The family with enough luggage to supply a small army has staked out a section of chairs, almost creating a walled fortress within which they laugh, argue, carry on as if they’re in the comfort of their own home. Then there are the two strangers sitting adjacent to eachother. Their arms share the same rest, yet for all their actions they could be in the opposite corners of the world.

Boarding has started. Hopefully this blogging app works. See you in Jamaica!

The ball has been dropped by me – dropped hard – during the past several weeks. First, I was stumped for a week and a half by the glib+qt fiasco, then my development machine’s hard drive shuffled off the mortal coil. Replacing it took a solid week, and when it finally arrived I installed Gentoo. Two days later, the finally install completes as I’m frantically throwing my life’s possessions into a car:

• clothes
• 2 laptops
• 1 Target desk (retail $50)
• assorted books
• 1 blow-up air mattress

Fast forward through seven hours of me hurtling down the interstate at not-so-safe velocities, and here I am, pardoning my recent idleness as my flight to Paris boards at gate D32. Not accomplishing much over the past several weeks suddenly doesn’t seem so bad: I’m going to Europe! There is a week long hack-a-thon at Akademy; I’ll catch up then.

A bientôt!

The beginning of a new book is like the beginning of a relationship; you don’t quite know what to expect. Hopefully not too much time passes before you become acquainted, and then it’s not very long until you are intimately familiar with each other. The good ones don’t get old, because, while perhaps each page turn/day passing doesn’t reveal something exciting, you can’t put it down. There’s something special there.