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Last night I had a dream in which I was waiting in line to get into a club when I saw Bill Pullman being attacked by a vampire. I immediately sprang to his rescue, but when I killed the vampire Mr. Pullman became my friend Ted, who was sad that I’d killed a vampire he was rather fond of.

Next thing I knew I was at an open grave where MacGyver’s (not Richard Dean Anderson’s) frozen corpse had been split in half, with the bottom half missing. As the corpse began to thaw his gore spilled out and formed new skeletal legs. Then he got up and started walking toward me and I could tell that the look he was going for was that his whole body apart from his head was a skeleton, but it just looked like a really bad prosthetic (I could see his real arms behind the skeletal ones, etc.)

So my question to you, gentle reader, is what the hell did I eat last night?

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I’ve been working my new job for about seven months now, and going from biking five miles and/or walking several every day to barely leaving the house has started taking its toll. Plus, I’ve been reading articles left and right about how sitting for eight hours a day will kill you. In other words, as good as this has been to me:

It was time for a standing desk!

I was looking for something that would let me work standing up, but not lose all the storage of a traditional desk. After trolling the web a bit looking for ideas, I found a promising design where else but at ikeahackers.net.

The Expedit standing desk looked to be exactly what I needed, so Emily and I headed off to IKEA to pick up the parts:

I went with the brown-black color rather than the “birch” and used the legs rather than laying the top shelf on some blocks of wood.

After an epic struggle to fit all of this stuff in Emily’s Honda Civic (in the rain!) we got it all home with only mild discomfort (I had to lean so far forward that the steering wheel knows what I had for lunch).

After gathering all the parts in the living room it was time to start building.

After two nights of assembling furniture and a quick trip to Lowe’s for some brackets to hold the whole mess together I ended up with a pretty sweet setup:

I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now and after adding some anti-fatigue mats from Costco I’m officially in love with working upright.

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Closing Party BannerFriday was a light day as far as sessions were concerned (at least sessions which I found interesting). The first session was about multi-monitor support in Unity. This has been a big pain point for some users in the last couple of releases so I’m happy to see it given some priority. The primary focus this cycle will be two displays (two monitors, or one monitor + one projector), which is the most common case. There was some design work done on how to place the launcher (along which edges and what to do if the user wants to move “through” the edge) and how to decide which is the “primary” display. There was a six-monitor demo set up in the hall which we could play with to get an idea of how it will work. It was just a prototype so it took no time at all for users to break it. 🙂 (blueprint, notes)

Next up for me was a discussion on making sure that there is a base set of packages which will be cross-compilable to ARM. This is a big one for my group since much of our target hardware is ARM-based and our current options for building packages (slow ARM hardware or even slower virtual machines) make development challenging. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing this one accomplished. (blueprint, notes)

After lunch were a set of “lightning talks”, 5-minute talks about whatever interesting subject the speaker could come up with. I could detail them here, but it’s likely that you won’t care. On the off-chance that you do you can watch them yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnh7f36xkRA

The only other session I attended was on finding and fixing the regressions in boot speed in the last couple of releases. Martin Pitt showed off some boot charts from lucid and maverick looking for specifics on where things have slowed down. It looks as if compiz and nautilus are the worst offenders, but there will be plenty of cleanups to go around. (blueprint, notes)

Super CEO

In the evening was the much-beloved after party which had a super hero theme this time around. I spotted The Hulk stomping around the room and our CEO gave her “thanks for all the hard work” speech dressed as Supergirl. The party itself was loads of fun, with the Ubuntu All-Stars playing some classic tunes (can’t go wrong with “Wish You Were Here”) and lots of alcohol-inspired dancing.

After an exhausting week it was time for one more sleep then the a short plane ride home.