Recently someone asked me for advice on what they can do to improve their career without getting a degree.

I have performed a quick poll of some people I know and found that for experienced people there seems to be little need for a degree. People who have extensive experience but no degree report no problems in finding work, and employers don't report any reluctance to hire someone who has the skills but no degree.

One thing that a degree is very good for is making a career jump. This is most notable when you get your first professional job, school results and references from part-time work don't help and a degree is a massive benefit. But if you have proven your abilities in the field then most employers will be more interested in checking references and the interview process than in qualifications. If you are only interested in getting a job that is one level above where you are at the moment then lacking a degree should not be a problem.

Another possibility for someone who lacks a degree is certification such as the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) provides and the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). One advantage of the RHCE certification is that it is based on fixing misconfigured Linux systems, no theoretical questions, just the type of work that real sys-admins do for their job - this means that people who do badly in traditional exams can be expected to do well, and it also means that the RHCE certification accurately depicts real skills in fixing problems (and it should therefore be more valuable to employers). The LPI exams can be taken by anyone, but to sit for an RHCE you have to be sponsored by an employer.

There are ways of getting career benefits without strictly going upwards. One way of doing this is to move to a region where the pay scales are different. Some years ago I moved from Melbourne, Australia to London to increase my salary. When in London I did work that was a lot less challenging and was paid considerably better for doing so. One thing I discovered is that in London Australians were widely admired for working really hard, I don't think that Australians work harder than British people on average, but people who will move to the other side of the world to advance their career are generally prepared to work hard!

If you spend some time working in another region and then decide to return home you will probably find that employers are more interested in hiring you for what you have learned in another region. Whether you actually learn things that are of value to potential employers when working in another country is debatable, it probably depends on the individual. But when applying for a job you want to make the most of every opportunity that is available - if someone wants to hire you for the special skills you learned in another country then that's OK. ;)

Another possibility is moving to a different industry sector. Some industries have career bottlenecks at different levels. If there is no possibility of moving upwards in the area where you work then getting a job with the same skill requirements in a different industry might open up more opportunities. An example of this is working as a sys-admin in a medium sized company that is not IT based. If you are the only sys-admin in the company then there is no possibility of promotion, moving from such a company to an ISP (or other IT based company) would then give the possibility of becoming a senior sys-admin, team leader, or even the manager of the ops team (if management is your thing).

A final option that few people consider is becoming a contractor. Contractors tend to earn significantly more than permanent employees when they do the same work (so becoming a contractor provides a significant immediate benefit) and as the duration of contracts is usually small there is less attention paid to degrees etc (what does it matter if the contractor will only be there for three months?). Of course most contracts last significantly longer than the initial term, some contractors end up working in the same position for 10 years or more!

There are some down-sides to being a contractor, one is that they get less interesting work (offering someone a choice of projects if they become a permanent employee or the project that is deemed to be least interesting if they insist on being a contractor is not uncommon). Another down-side to being a contractor is the way that contractors are used. The ideal way of running a company is to have mostly permanent employees and to use contractors for special skills, short-term projects, and for emergencies when they can't hire permanent employees. When a company has almost no permanent employees it usually means that something is going badly wrong. This means that if you select a random contract role there is a good chance that it will be one where things are going badly wrong. The money from contracting is good, but it can be depressing when projects fail.

Last week I decried a senior Pentagon official’s attack on lawyers providing pro bono representation to Guantánamo detainees. I suggested that villifying the partners of some of the largest firms in the country was probably not the wisest political move, and was likely to backfire. As it turns out, it appears I was right. See the editorial in this week’s Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly:

…Headlines in print and online were unanimous: “Why Cully Stimson Is Wrong.” “The rightwing assault on the legal system.” “Cully Stimson Should Pick Up His Medal of Freedom and Go Home.” “Law deans respond to unethical Bush lawyer.” And perhaps the most eloquent rebuke of all came from Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried. In an op-ed that ran in the Wall Street Journal, Fried declared that “Stimson showed ignorance and malice in deploring the pro bono representation of Guantanamo detainees by lawyers in some of the nation’s leading law firms.” The former Supreme Judicial Court justice continued: “It is no surprise that firms … on Mr. Stimson’s hit list are among the most sought-after by law school graduates, and retain the loyalty and enthusiasm of their partners. They offer their lawyers the profession at its best, and help assure that the rule of law is not just a slogan but a satisfying way of life.” …What could have been a disaster for the bar turned into an all-out celebration of what lawyers do.

According to Wikipedia: “Burnout is a psychological term for the experience of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest (depersonalisation or cynicism), usually in the work context. Burnout is often construed as the result of a period of expending too much effort at work while having too little recovery, but it is sometimes argued that workers with particular personality traits (especially neuroticism) are more prone to experiencing burnout.” In this web page there’s a global overview of burnout that might be useful: Burnout is a chronic condition that happens when your body or mind can no longer cope with overwhelmingly high demands. You are trapped in a state of emotional exhaustion, and it is hard to get out of that state. You stop caring about what you do, even though you may feel guilty about that fact. Even if you still continue working, it seems to be hard to make progress. You hardly accomplish anything significant, just go through the motions. Certain categories of people and professions are particularly susceptible to job burnout. Most often these are people who are highly committed and motivated, who have high standards and idealistic dedication to their jobs. Common burnout causes include:

• An overwhelming workload. Could be due to insufficient time management skills, especially lack of planning, prioritizing, or delegation skills.
• Hard work with no clear goals. You work hard and hard, but no matter how long you keep at it, you cannot see any progress. But how could you see that you have got closer if you don’t know your destination?
• Powerlessness to change something important to you. Something that you are very much emotionally attached to, but that is at the same time beyond your control.
• Forcing yourself to make the impossible happen. For example, solving problems without having the necessary resources.
• A conflict between your personal values and the values of the company your working for. You don’t believe in or disagree with what your are doing, but you feel the circumstances force you to keep doing it anyway.
• Hitting the invisible ceiling. No matter how good or competent you become, there is hardly any chance of recognition or promotional opportunities.

For all of those burnout causes what is important is not as much the external factors that fall on you, but how you interpret them, what you say to yourself, and what actions you take in response. Finally, it is important to understand the risks of burnout in your personal or job situations. Once you are its victim, it may not be easy to get things back on track. That condition does not go away in a day. You may not be able to recover by yourself, and you may need to have drastic changes in your attitudes and life style. You are much better off preventing it now than putting your life back together later. Some links:

• How Can We Avoid Burnout?
• Volunteer Burnout

You're pretending people are mocking Mrs Segol ne Royal because she's a woman, well, I don't think it has any chances to be true. It's IMHO a reason for many people to be addicted to her without even thinking to listen to what she says. I've listened to many of her interviews, those are pathetically void and empty. She's not able to use correct and decent French, and when I listen to her, I'm often under the impression to talk to my butcher. If I imagine her in the middle of an internationnal summit, I'm just plain afraid. When I try to sum up her ideas, I come up with a big nothing. That's just air and wind. I can't say the UMP is very kind with her but hey, she's a candidate to the presidency, she should grow a skin, chose a real communication manager (Montebourg, BWAHAHAHAHAHA), etc Recently, presidency candidacy has begun to look like a show. She's making pirouettes over pirouettes. How can you blame other candidates to just push her a bit so that she fall on the nose ? That is indeed unfair, but:

• it has nothing to do with the fact that she is a woman, that's a very very very bad argument, to me it's even in her disfavour, because it looks like that: look it's only a woman, please be kind with here WTF? if she's going to be the French President she has to be a bit stronger than that, and beeing a woman or not is totally irrelevant ;
• I'm not sure she really needs to be pushed hard to fall, her campaign (atm) is a long succession of "rattrapage aux branches".

So I'm under the impression that you defend her because she's a woman, which is certainly a way for chosing your favourite candidate, but it's not in my criterion list (neither as a pro or a cons) for such an election. And I'm not that sure she won't attend to the second turn. The "She's a woman" criterion will weigh on the election in a way that we didn't met before, and that is very hard to estimate.

The server that this site is running on is a Debian sarge machine with some backports.org packages for things that I just have to have up-to-date. This has been a pretty successful strategy for me for running servers... except for one thing. If you're running any PHP code, you really need to have an opcode cache like eAccelerator running on your server, too. Otherwise, every single hit to a PHP app loads and compiles every single PHP page it uses before executing. For any kind of load, and any kind of non-trivial app, it's just not a question. But there's not an eaccelerator package in sarge or in backports.org, so I built my own, which I have to keep up-to-date with PHP packages coming down the line from backports. Today, I upgraded from PHP 5.1.x to PHP 5.2.x, and I rebuilt eaccelerator, and... blammo. Segfaults all over the place with MediaWiki, and Drupal decided it wasn't going to save sessions any more. Turning off eaccelerator was enough to solve the problems with MW, but I had to track down this Drupal-PHP-5.2 bug and apply the patch to make Drupal work again. Of course, performance is sucking because there's no opcode cache. I kind of hate that kind of day. tags: php drupal php 5.2 eaccelerator mediawiki

xcache Update to that: I tried out xcache, and it seems to be working fine. So, y'know, hopefully that project keeps working in the future. tags: php xcache

Pirates So, probably the most interesting thing about getafirstlife.com is that the image chosen to represent analog reality is a bunch of kids dressed like pirates. That is one of the selling points of First Life, I guess. tags: getafirstlife kids pirates

Goethe I had a really good class at the Montreal Goethe Institute yesterday. I'm continually impressed by the facilities there. My class did a little tour of the building, including the half-size movie theatre, the huge reading room (with the day's German newspapers), and the big library. They even have a TV going with the Deutsche Welle satellite feed coming in. It's a pretty cool thing to have this kind of resource in Montreal. tags: montreal goethe german

Mon pays Speaking of great resources in Montreal, Amita June and I went for a walk through Parc LaFontaine today. It was a balmy -8C (18 F) and the sun was shining on the snow. They've opened up the pond for skating, and there were about a dozen people lazily twirling around on the ice. Well... they looked lazy. They were probably working pretty hard. Our stated purpose for the walk was to get to the Biblioth que centrale-jeunes on the other side of the parc. The main Biblioth que Centrale shut down about a year ago when the new Grande Biblioth que opened down by UQAM. But they've kept the children's library open, and Amita June's just at the age where she can actually enjoy it. It was really a very nice library. There were a ton of books in good shape, lots of open tables, and a couple of billion toys, blocks, and games to play with. Amita and I both got library cards, which should be pretty fun to use, and we played around with the different books and such. They also have story-time hours at 10AM each weekday, so we'll be going back soon. Amita's favourite part of the library, though, was a big rock dove they had. It had a nice cage with water and toys and mirrors and stuff, but it seemed to like walking around on the shelves better. Amita followed it around making dove noises -- coo ca coo! Our trip back across the parc was pretty nice, too. The kids in the school there were out for recess, and they had built some epic-scale snow forts and were involved in an 18-sided snowball fight as we passed. There was also a passel of kids from a nearby garderie (daycare) who were making Inukshuks out of hardened snow. By the time we got home, we were pretty exhausted, but glad to have gotten some winter outdoor time. tags: winter montreal library parc lafontaine

As I was "predicting" around myself as soon as Segolene Royal was designated as the socialist party candidate for the French presidential election (and thus becoming the very first woman in position to be elected as president here), the days of shit would come. They are coming now. Todays "small sentence" was an half-stolen sentence taken ex-abrupto in a live discussion during a visit to Canada. She expressed some "support" and "sympathy" for the ideas of Quebec autonomy. Of course, this became a big pleasure for the media around to emphasize this story, with the precious help of our right-wing parties supporters, especially those of the UMP dwarf, namely Nicolas Sarkozy. Last week, the shit was about a trip to China (with many care to not interfere in internal politics...apparently, this time she should have interfered....but not when going in Canada, strange...). The week before, this was about a trip in Middle East (a place where Sarkozy will never go during the campaign, will you bet). One woman already experienced this in the past, the only woman that has ever been Prime Minister in France, namely Edith Cresson. When Segolene's popularity was raising, some said that, in these Edith Cresson days, "minds weren't ready" and the like. Minds are still not ready. Our country, with the invaluable help of most of our political staff, does not want a woman to be our international representative. It's pretty likely that she will lose the election, and lose it by far. "They" are way too much powerful. Yes, I will regret it. Yes, I will still support her and though this becomes "ringard". I do want a woman as president and I do want *this* woman (and this party, by the way). Not only because I hate these UMP guys, with a special note for Sarkozy, but also because I really think this can change things. Yep, that may sound stupid, but I sometimes believe in politics. We suck. A lot. I just only hope to be proven wrong in April. Update: M. Mouette had a point about this original blog post, so I corrected its title. Now he can answer on the content if he likes to..;-)

liw's latest blog post got me thinking again about our apt frontends. I've never been satisfied with them, and I've found synaptic particularly unwieldy. They get the job done just fine, but I haven't been able to figure out a better way to do it.

Looking back though, I think there's only one real answer: we want an apt frontend that's just like this. You just search for what you want, mark the packages that show up to be installed or removed, and then just run the thing. Our current setup isn't too different from ye olde web directories (remember when you found links on yahoo or dmoz by drilling down through hand-sorted categories?) which mercifully died in favor of a simple text box and submit button. I think our current apt frontends need to do the same.

Complaining about minds not being ready for a woman elected as president, while showing the same disrespect, calling her by her first name while keeping the full polite naming for male politicians, sounds, well, ironical.

As I was "predicting" around myself as soon as Segolene Royal was designated as the socialist party candidate for the French presidential election (and thus becoming the very first woman in position to be elected as president here), the days of shit would come. They are coming now. Todays "small sentence" was an half-stolen sentence taken ex-abrupto in a live discussion during a visit to Canada. She expressed some "support" and "sympathy" for the ideas of Quebec autonomy. Of course, this became a big pleasure for the media around to emphasize this story, with the precious help of our right-wing parties supporters, especially those of the UMP dwarf, namely M. Sarkozy. Last week, the shit was about a trip to China (with many care to not interfere in internal politics...apparently, this time she should have interfered....but not when going in Canada, strange...). The week before, this was about a trip in Middle East (a place where Sarkozy will never go during the campaign, will you bet). One woman already experienced this in the past, the only woman that has ever been Prime Minister in France, namely Edith Cresson. When Segolene's popularity was raising, some said that, in these Edith Cresson days, "minds weren't ready" and the like. Minds are still not ready. Our country, with the invaluable help of most of our political staff, does not want a woman to be our international representative. It's pretty likely that she will lose the election, and lose it by far. "They" are way too much powerful. Yes, I will regret it. Yes, I will still support her and though this becomes "ringard". I do want a woman as president and I do want *this* woman (and this party, by the way). Not only because I hate these UMP guys, with a special note for Sarkozy, but also because I really think this can change things. Yep, that may sound stupid, but I sometimes believe in politics. We suck. A lot. I just only hope to be proven wrong in April.

More Knowledge@Wharton: “Following the model that made Microsoft’s Windows so successful, Microsoft licensed PlaysForSure to multiple hardware vendors of digital music players. ‘We thought that was a brilliant strategy — [develop] an open ecosystem, get a lot of people [to support it].’ What happened? As Ballmer puts it, ‘In this particular case, the whole was not bigger than the sum of the parts.’” As I said the other day, an ecosystem is never the sum of its parts it s either a whole lot more or a whole lot less. Microsoft was decidedly on the wrong side of the equation this time. Yes, Microsoft did what it had to do to compete effectively. Question is, will this make it harder for Microsoft to build the next ecosystem? And did the tactics Microsoft used to benefit from the last one play a role in the outcome this time? (Via Mary Jo Foley.)

Dave Cridland posted to maemo-developers again today, spuring me to spend my lunch time checking out his email client instead of doing something productive like eating. It's very interesting. Basically he edits the RFCs for Lemonade, which is a IETF standard for email on mobile devices. Basically it is a set of extensions for IMAP and SMTP that improve their performance over high-latancy low-bandwidth connections (like bad wi-fi or GPRS), such as forward-without-download and efficient re-synchronisation commands. Existing extensions such as a useful IDLE implementation are also used to push new mail notifications to the client. To test the ideas in the real world there is Polymer. Polymer is a simple IMAP client that uses the Lemonade extensions as much as possible, so is ideal for mobile use. There is more: it uses ACAP to store the settings on the Internet (Dave also provides free ACAP accounts) so it's configure once, run anywhere. I've just tried it on my laptop, and it works nicely. But it gets better. There is also Telomer, an email client using Lemonade and designed for Maemo. I've just tried it out, it may be seriously lacking in features at the moment, but it works. Features can be written over time, but it takes serious thought to get something as fast and usable as Polymer on mobile devices. I'll quote Dave:

That all said, once it's started, it connects to the mailserver over GPRS in about 10 seconds and pulls up the summary listing in 15, with a mailbox size of 2,882 messages. With a mailbox with 33,732 messages in, it's a little slower at around 25 seconds. That's still way faster than a desktop client on a LAN, of course, unless that desktop client is Polymer - in which case it'll seem remarkably slow.

This is what we need for a mobile email client. I know I've found my email client of choice on my new N800. NP: Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

If any planners want to see the impact of your short-sighted regulations, please visit Bowthorpe

"planning regs mean you only have to provide one space per home. Hence families with two cars, or couples who work in opposite directions and need two cars, often have to block their roads without meaning to do so."

Surely short-sighted would be to cater for today's car parking requirements? Thanks to climate change, oil decline and other reasons, it looks like there won't be as many cars tomorrow. Two-car households may be a temporary problem. If people are parking inconsiderately, bring in a one-car-per-house permit system with edge-of-zone car parks (and let two-car houses buy permits from car-free houses). If you build roads big enough for today's peak use, then in the future, there will be oversize roads for the traffic levels when that land could have been better used for housing. Ah, criticising the barking policies of Antony Little... blogging like it's 1999.

It s over, since yesterday I am back in what Bush calls the old Europe, and I feel like I never really left. But in fact, I did, and was in working as a volunteer at the SOS Hermann Gmeiner International College in Tema, Ghana. Things did not really work out there, so I wrote a work report for the principal, describing what exactly has happened (or not happened) from the first contact until the end of my work there and analyzing what went wrong. This text might also be interesting for anyone who plans on doing similar volunteer work.During my time there I have set up a Linux setup that is, in my opinion, quite neat: Integration into Active Directory, automatic installation, Nagios network monitoring, caching and filtering web proxy et cetera. For my possible successor, but also for anyone who is creating a similar setup, I documented the steps to create such a setup in the techical documentation. Both reports can be found in the content section of my website.

Welcome to this 6th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly (even if I'm late) championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• G rkan Seng n with #270877 (wmaker: I can't swallow windows)
• Christoph Berg with #402976 (espdiff: useless manpage)
• Cyril Brulebois with #403379 (mplayer: segfault while reading an mpeg file)
• Sune Vuorela with #405464 (qt3-dev-tools: QMAKE_INCDIR_QT is wrong in qmake.conf files)

How the vote has been done Three Debian related people voted for these bugs, Mohammed Adn ne Trojette, Pierre Habouzit and Florent Bayle Full ranking Bugs

• #403379 (mplayer: segfault while reading an mpeg file) (6 points)
• #402976 (espdiff: useless manpage) (5 points)
• #405464 (qt3-dev-tools: QMAKE_INCDIR_QT is wrong in qmake.conf files) (4 points)
• #270877 (wmaker: I can't swallow windows) (3 points)

Challengers

• Cyril Brulebois (6 points with 1 bug)
• Christoph Berg (5 points with 1 bug)
• Sune Vuorela (4 points with 1 bug)
• G rkan Seng n (3 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #403379 (mplayer: segfault while reading an mpeg file) (6 points)
• Challenger: Cyril Brulebois
• Bug reporter: Aurelien Jarno
• Voter: Florent Bayle with the full good order !

Notes To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number. About DeFuBu

I managed to miss the Igloofest by Piknic lectronik this weekend, which was kind of a bummer since it seemed like it would be such an awesome event. But with a downturn in the temperature -- another -20C day yesterday, with wind chill bringing it down to -28C -- it was just too hard to justify bringing a 1-year-old to an outdoor event. We did manage to do some fun things this weekend, anyways. Saturday was our first day house-hunting. We're planning to buy an apartment or condo in the Plateau Mont-Royal this year, before July 1. July 1 is the traditional Moving Day in Quebec -- the day that every renter in the province either renews their year-long lease or moves to a new apartment. We're going to move out of Renterhood this year altogether, and get into the fun of home ownership. Wish us luck. Anyways, we saw a great place this Saturday, and we plan to do some more house hunting over the next few weeks. We're going to make a decision about whether to stay in our current apartment or not before March 1, when we begin our big road trip down to Austin for South by Southwest. tags: montreal quebec piknicelectronic igloofest cold house-hunting moving day

Bruncher This afternoon we had a great bruncher with friends at our (current) apartment. We invited over Jeremy and Lina and their two girls Syvlie and Clea, who arrived at our door like an advertisement for a skiing school. I love talking to the girls -- they're really smart and sweet people. We also had over Maj's friend Emmy and her husband Stef, as well as their daughter Isadora. Emmy is originally from Oaxaca (city), and Stef is German. They moved here a few months ago, and Maj and Amita June met Emmy and Isadora at their playgroup. This was the first time I met Stef; I got to use my German introduction lessons for this week on him. Guten Tag! Ich hei e Evan! Freut Mich! Isadora speaks Spanish with her mother and German with her father. She'll grow up bilingual, but unfortunately not speaking either of the languages of the bilingual city she's living in. My guess is that she'll probably be pretty expert at four languages by the time she's 10 or so. Maj cooked today, and made a really great smoked salmon gratin, white bean vegetable soup, and hors d'oeuvres. I put together a green salad to round it out. We opened up a couple of bottles of crispy vinho verde and had a very nice afternoon time. The kids got along great; Sylvie and Clea are several years older than Amita and Isadora (one day apart!), but they were really gentle and nice with the little ones. tags: bruncher lina jeremy emmy stef amitajune german isadora sylvie clea

We had some wonderful weather yesterday. I've always said that I like snow. It can completely change the landscape in an instant. And it looks so beautiful.

Yesterday we had a nice snowstorm all day. Large, wet flakes. It was the most snow we've had at once in a few years right around here. It was beautiful just like always. It started early in the morning before we got up and continued until almost midnight. This morning, I went out into a big open area and measured the snow -- 7.5".

There are two problems with snow. One is that it's difficult to get anywhere. The other is that it blows into everything.

And guess what -- yesterday was our moving day.

Fortunately, on Friday evening, most of the furniture that needed to go in a pickup did. But we still had to wrap some things in plastic on Saturday. We didn't get everything moved that we wanted to. Between icy ground outside, travel at less than half the usual speed on the roads, and snow blowing everywhere, things were slow. But that's fine; we'll get the rest later.

This was the scene during the move:



Not long after that picture was taken, it was announced that church was canceled today. We kept moving things though.

Although we didn't get everything moved that we had hoped to, we got enough moved to consider ourselves moved in. We have one fully-functional bathroom. Jacob's bedroom and our bedroom are done. The kitchen will get its floor Monday and we'll get appliances Thursday. The only big thing left is guttering, plus there are still a few doorknobs and light fixtures pending. But it was enough that the three of us spent our first night here last night!

We're very appreciative of the help we got from family & friends, who helped us move and brought us food (since we don't have a fridge for the next few days).

Jacob doesn't like change very much (he cried when he noticed that some clutter in our apartment living room was gone). But he likes to learn about his environment. So today, he woke up at 6AM (and got us up at 6AM), spent an hour happily looking around, then promptly started fussing. That's how the day has been for him -- interest and crying.

At about 7:30AM, we were shocked to see a road maintainer plowing our road. Why shocked? Well, nobody else lives on this road for a couple of miles. It's not exactly a popular spot. And it hadn't been in all that great of shape before winter.

Later in the day, I went out to take some pictures. Here's one of our driveway:



Doesn't it look fun?

I decided to see if we could get out. The short answer is yes. The long answer is "yes, if you have patience." After rocking the car back and forth to get it turned around in the yard, I was able to keep up enough speed to get to the road and back. So Terah and I had lunch with my parents, then went into town to get another carload of stuff. There were children out playing everywhere, and well-worn sledding paths down hillsides. Too bad Jacob isn't old enough to enjoy this!

It was last April when we first started thinking about this. By June we had bought the property out here, and in October we moved to the apartment. It's been a long time feeling like we were living somewhere temporarily.

And, right now, it is great to be home.

My last entry is maybe not so well understandable. In a mail between Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta and me, he put it in much better words than I could:

	Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2007 14:05:29 +0100
	From: Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta <agi@inittab.org>
	To: Daniel Baumann <daniel@debian.org>
	Subject: Re: [late]Thanks for your work
	On Sun, Jan 21, 2007 at 01:08:48PM +0100, Daniel Baumann wrote:
	> Hi agi,
	>
	> the orphaning of some packages wasn't ment as a signal to get 'please
	> thank me' or so, nevertheless, thanks for your mail.
	I know it wasn't meant to be that. But I really appreciate the work of
	some DDs, specially those that do their job, mind their businesses AND
	don't make of it a power position. Those hundreds of DDs or the like,
	that simply like this as is, and don't make of it a power struggle or a
	cabal thing. And you are one of them, as others I could name are.
	> I was taking care about 2 to 5 hours every day and nearly all of the
	> weekends to keep my packages in shape. All I got from this is rants
	> withouth any concrete background like 'look at him, he has so much
	> packages, they can't be good. They must be crap, it's impossible for one
	> person'. Also, some people in Debian do have a problem when people do
	> more than they do themself, and they're hating the others for that.
	Yep, that's what I meant. Those that are looking for competition... In
	a free software community. Morons.
	> Now, I'm just tired of that and went down from ~150 to ~100 packages. I
	> think, I did not point that out very clearly.

However, I am not going MIA now. I still care about my packages, but for a smaller number of them (reducing them in a second orphaning round down to ~50 in a few weeks). And don't worry, there will be no more entries about this topic from me. Thanks Alberto and the few others who replied.

Via the Frontal Cortex (my favorite recently and accidentally discovered blog¹), on the cultural relativity of near-death experiences:

Many Africans interpret near-death experiences as somewhat evil, a bad omen or a sign that they were somehow “bewitched.” Among 400 Japanese NDErs that participated in a study, many reported seeing long, dark rivers and beautiful flowers, two common symbols that frequently appear as images in Japanese art. East Indians sometimes see Heaven as a giant bureaucracy, and frequently report being sent back because of clerical errors. Americans and Brits often say they are sent back for love or in order to perform a job or task. Natives of Micronesia often visualize Heaven as a large, brightly lit American city with loud, noisy cars and tall buildings.

I’m not sure what’s worse — returning from death to rectify the inadvertent omission of a certificate of service on a motion for leave to file a reply brief in excess of the ten-page limit (maybe I should have picked a different profession) or getting additional time on Earth because the powers-that-be failed to complete a 27B/6. I really prefer the beautiful flowers, but it’s probably too late for that. ¹Is there a term of art for such blogs? E.g., a blog discovered from an unrelated Google search that turns out to be worth adding to the blogroll.

Today I found a way to combine consuming my favorite Radio Station and using my favorite System Distribution.

On working hours and most of the time at home I’m listening to Frisky Radio, founded by Faisal Sultan. But I’m missing it the 3 hours per day, when I’m traveling between work and home town. I did realize, Frisky Radios provides podcasts, but only one per week and the download history isn’t such long. Some days later, I thought stream ripping could be nice. So I did run:

$ apt-cache search stream ripper
goobox - CD player and ripper for GNOME
kstreamripper - kde frontend for streamripper
streamripper - download online streams into audio files
tunapie - Lists audio and video streams from Shoutcast and Icecast

My decision was to use streamripper in combination with screen.
Streamripper can provide a relay server, where you can listen to and save bandwidth and decide, what should happen with already existing tracks. This all seems very nice and I’ll see how lovely it will work together with my player, which name I will not mention in this context. Debian, planet