Up early; took a nice walk before work. Should make it a habit.
After work I made fake-meat burritos for Emily and myself. Very similar to my fake-meat tacos, only we were out of taco shells and had some huge tortillas lying around.
We decided to work off those burritos by taking an epic bike ride around the city. We rode down to the South Side trail then through Downtown and up Liberty Avenue through Lawrenceville and Bloomfield and back to Squirrel Hill. We took our time and had a nice leisurely two-hour ride.
Up early; more leftover fruit salad for breakfast. Sadly that was the last of it.
Got some nice concrete tasks to perform at work. Performed them.
Made myself a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, paired with some of my mother’s broccoli salad. The post-Memorial Day week is good for eating.
Emily made a fancy flatbread pizza with peaches and gorgonzola cheese for dinner. Yum.
We went for a bike ride after dinner. Nothing too epic, just down to Regent Square and back. Stopped at Tutti Frutti and tried to make use of Emily’s Groupon, but it turns out we don’t have a large enough appetite for frozen yogurt to make it worthwhile.
At home, relaxed with some more Mass Effect 2. I seem to be getting re-addicted to this game.
Up early, still a bit woozy from jet lag (or perhaps an overabundance of cheap beer). Breakfast in a beautiful gallery encased almost entirely in glass. Lots of natural light. Helps with the waking up.
First session of the day was a discussion with some of the Qt developers. They talked about some features and upcoming Qt releases. (blueprint, notes)
I was still feeling a bit off and perhaps I overdid it at breakfast, but I decided to take a break during the second session and have a brief nap in my room.
Next up was a session on Ubuntu One and its model for sharing files with other people. Several paradigms for sharing were discussed including public sharing, private sharing, and collaboration. The main sticking points were how to handle each type gracefully and expose the options to do so to the user without overwhelming them. (blueprint, notes)
Following that I attended a session checking up on Ubuntu’s relationship with Debian. I’m told that in the past these sessions got pretty heated, but judging from the tone of this particular session things must be improving. (blueprint, notes)
After lunch I spent some time in the super secret OEM private room, where I got a preview of some upcoming projects and some really cool toys.
Next I went to a session discussing uploading packages by committing to a package branch rather than uploading a whole source package to the builder. There are some technical nits that need picking on the bzr side (of course they use bzr 🙂 ) but it looks like it could streamline the packaging process a bit. (blueprint, notes)
Last session of the day was a discussion of simplifying Ubuntu’s hardware verification tool. Apparently there are several versions of it floating around used by different groups and the goal is to merge all of them into a single code base. (blueprint, notes)
After the sessions a few of us rented bikes from the concierge desk and took a little sightseeing ride around the city. We rode across the Danube into Buda (our hotel is in Pest) and along some riverside trails before finding a pathway to a little island in the middle of the river. We rode around the island a bit, spotting some ruins, a bird sanctuary and even an Ultimate Frisbee game. We eventually found a nice beer garden where we stopped for dinner and drinks. I finally had some dark beer the name of which I couldn’t pronounce and some pizza which I could also not pronounce but it had mushrooms, broccoli, and corn on it. Pictures of the sightseeing ride and from the rest of the trip can be found on my flickr page.
As it was getting dark we headed back to the hotel. A relatively early night.
Audio driver work took an interesting turn. Discovered that some of the clock settings on the board are out of spec. Vendor doesn’t believe this to be the cause of the performance problem but recommends correcting quickly since hardware in this configuration can behave unpredictably.
Got a call that my bike was ready to go at the shop. Unfortunately the rain kept me from picking it up. Might not get it before Wednesday now.
Home to a lovely ravioli dinner which Emily prepared.
On what I’m sure is a completely unrelated note, a stomach ache prevented me from going to the gym.
Practiced for my guitar class. Still getting the hang of some chord transitions but it is getting easier.
Lunch with Emily at Aladdin’s Eatery. Great little chicken pita roll. Also the raspberry smoothie was delicious.
Walked home; played a bit of Mass Effect 2 (thanks again, hun!)
Out to Frank’s Bar and Grill 88 in Bethel Park for my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Lots of fun, with my grandfather going into rather too much detail about how he kept track of how long they’ve been married.
Back to my grandparents’ house for the “after-party”. Lively discussion of things family and political. Home late to pass out.
Rode my bike to work; first cycling commute of the season. Perfect riding weather. Almost didn’t get tired or sweaty on the way in.
Lunch at DiBella’s (again). We are showing signs of addiction.
Very little progress made on the audio driver on my end. Starting to run out of things to tweak in my code. I’m reluctant to further the stereotype and blame the hardware but I need to double-check some possible hardware timing issues.
Office network ate itself toward the end of the day, making communication with the vendor impossible. Perhaps they found something.
Bike ride home went about as smoothly as can be expected for one so out of shape as myself. One disadvantage of living in Pittsburgh is that every hill you fly down on the way to work is one you must climb again on the way home. I think I heard my leg muscles crying.
Wrote two checks this evening. One was the final payoff amount for my car. The other was to my uncle’s church to buy Easter lilies in honor of his winning battle with leukemia.
little island in the middle of the river. We rode around the island a bit, spotting some ruins, a bird sanctuary and even an Ultimate Frisbee game. We eventually found a nice beer garden where we stopped for dinner and drinks. I finally had some dark beer the name of which I couldn’t pronounce and some pizza which I could also not pronounce but it had mushrooms, broccoli, and corn on it. Pictures of the sightseeing ride and from the rest of the trip can be found on my flickr page.