Blog - /Personal

I made it safely back to Mishawaka, the home of my mother, sisters, and grandparents. Like usual, the weather was fine all day until I started the trip, then I got hit with rain and snow. When I go away, so does the nice driving weather :^( .

It was fun to see the computer that I first viewed the GNU Manifesto on. It resides in the family room of my mom's house as the "Game computer" of my sisters. Unfortunately, the various installations of GNU/Linux that have existed on it in the past have been replaced with windoze 95. Just for kicks, I compared the interface with that of my laptop. GNOME apps and window managers have become good enough to not only compare with, but beat, windoze in the eye candy and ease of use department. Of course, I will be the first to admit that windoze XP has some ease of use advantages, especially in wireless internet setup.

I made sure not to bring my Playstation back with me. While this may not ensure that I get work done on Projects: Emacs Wiki Mode and Projects: Emacs Muse, it does increase the probability. I still feel a bit new at this maintainer thing. I keep having to fight the tendency to say, "Talk me into adding this feature. Otherwise I won't do it." It is a bit of a novelty to develop software that is used in so many ways. The fact that it runs in Emacs also makes it a bit hard, since there are no set rules for how this software should be used.

The new tech experiences that I have picked up in this past 5 months are only slightly less than the sum of that which I have accomplished technologically in the other 21 years of my life. It is ridiculous.

• Maintaining my first two software projects
• Getting a GNU email address :^)
• Making Debian packages
• Hanging out in IRC channels other than #bclug (which is long dead by now)
• Reading RSS feeds
• Reading email in Gnus (Emacs package)
• Using an Emacs IRC client
• Programming generally useful code in Emacs Lisp
• Learning Perl
• Using Arch, the first version control software I could really "bond with"
• Becoming webmaster of PLUG and heavily contributing to its Wiki
• Setting up an IRC bot that runs in a dedicated Emacs session
• Establishing a website and its contents
• Sifting through many different picture album publishing programs
• Automating the upload of various parts of my website using Projects: Site Scripts.
• Generating a Website: Pgp Public Key and getting the first signature for it
• Becoming a member of HCoop, which hosts my website
• Learning procmail syntax
• Building Emacs from the latest CVS source about once or twice a month
• Making my own GNU-on-Solaris tarball so that I can use Arch with my class projects :^)
• Sending in patches and having them accepted