Let the novel begin!!

So yes, I have had a massive case of writer's block for the past several months. I have also been massively busy since GUADEC, fortunately doing some very cool things.

I spent July on the usual work stuff, then spent the last week of the month attending OSCON 2006. Opening night festivities were incredibly memorable; after the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards, I watched my first State of the Onion and then The Da Vinci Codebase. I still can't decide what was more fun, Nat's declaration that Perl is - *ahem* - getting romantic or the final conclusion to Dr. Conway's mystery. I'd seen Kathy Sierra speak once before, and she was as inspirational as ever.

The conference was quite eventful for our team. Ben and Fitz, two-thirds of our stalwart Chicago engineering team (and pictured here along with Trow, the other third), gave their Poisonous People talk. Greg and Jason launched the project hosting feature on code.google.com, which had hundreds of projects registered within hours. Chris gave the community a mid-term update on the Google Summer of Code program and I hosted a GSoC BoF for several students and two mentors, followed by beer, further discussion and a fine repast at the truly awesome Old Town Pizza. Thanks to Catfish Man for suggesting the dinner location! Alas, I missed Karl's talk on copyright, but I did get a chance to see it later as a Google tech talk. (If you want to check out the material, and you know you do, the Q&A session following Karl's presentation at Stanford is particuarly good.) It was wonderful to hang out with old friends and make new ones. Portland is always a great place to visit, but alas there was no time to swing by Powell's before departing.

Due to the continuing vagaries of international finance, I spent the first two weeks of August stuffing checks in envelopes. I took a few days off in beautiful Northern California for the annual Girl's Road Trip to Reggae on the River, then headed home to prepare for Science Foo Camp. SciFoo was totally amazing - Timo Hannay with Nature Magazine, one of our co-conference conspirators, wrote up several posts on the unconference and I even got to meet one of my heroes, Dr. Richard Jefferson. Many thanks to Sara, Marcie and the rest of the team at O'Reilly for all their help with SciFoo and for everything I learned from them about what makes a great conference. Nature, O'Reilly and Google will be hosting SciFoo at Google HQ again next year.

I had a chance to put my new conference hosting skills to work the next weekend at The Ubucon. We had about 80 attendees at the conference, and we were fortunate enough to have several of the folks from Canonical join us, as well. The next week I helped host the bi-coastal Python Sprint. GSoC final evaluations began at the end of the month and continued into September, followed by more envelope stuffing. The level of expertise I have achieved at stuffing envelopes may be second to none.

In October, more GSoC goodness followed when we hosted 100ish mentors at Google for a one day brainstorming session on how to improve the program. It was wonderful to meet everyone in person, at last. There's a great group picture of us here, along with a link to the slides from Ben and Fitz's Poisonous People talk, which they kindly reprised at the summit. I got to meet a bunch of the SVN devs at the Subversion Summit the next week. Most of the rest of the month was all about figuring out why everyone who requested a medium GSoC shirt was sent an extra large, and vice-versa, and why FedEx couldn't find tracking numbers for everyone. Sigh. I think next year we'll repurpose Google's pigeon squad for t-shirt delivery.

The last weekend in October, we hosted the FLOSS Usability Sprint III. It was my first time actually volunteering my time to an open source project, and it was incredibly fulfilling. Look out for a report on Drupal Usability coming from the Sprint, and there's more on the rest of the sprint's accomplishments and a link to a photo of all of us here.

November is my favorite month, but this past one was absolutely the best on record. I spent a week hanging out with the Ubuntu gang at the Ubuntu Developer Summit - what an amazing group of people! Mark Shuttleworth also gave a presentation to a bunch of Google folks on Ubuntu, which is available on Google Video. At the end of the summit, the group voted me an Ubuntu community member, which brought tears to my eyes. Now I need to stop being such a slacker and get the signed Code of Conduct in and actually start contributing to the project. So much to do, so little time.

The next day, I headed back to Google for the second day of MySQL Camp. I'd only been able to pop in and out the first day since UDS was wrapping up, and I was really looking forward to hanging out with all of the MySQL developers and aficionados. Fate conspired against me, unfortunately, and I ended up with twenty stitches after a mishap involving that noblest of causes, delivering free beer. Mikal and Kynan took care of everyone fabulously - huge thanks to them, especially Mikal for taking me to the hospital. Since I spent most of the weekend on the really good painkillers, I don't have much to say about the conference, but Kynan and Mikal did a great wrap-up post.

The next two weeks I went on holiday. Yay, holiday! The week before Thanksgiving, Ben's Mum visited us from Auckland, along with his Aunt and Cousin, in from Darwin. We went to Alcatraz - yes, like all other Bay Area natives, I had never been before - and my favorite nursery in Half Moon Bay, along with other general puttering around before they left for their road trip across the U.S.A. It was a lovely visit, though far too short. I know I've said this many times before, but let me just say it again - I am so fortunate to have such a wonderful future mother-in-law and extended family!!

The Friday after the family departed, Ben and a few of our friends celebrated my birthday, a bit late, at a truly awesome house party hosted by San and MikeW. (Thanks for the invitation to the festivites, gentlemen!) I'm still not entirely sure how we got to our hotel, but we did. No, I don't remember checking in. I do remember checking out, as the surliness of the gal at the counter was matched only by the size of my headache. Saturday morning, Ben and I hopped on a plane to Chicago. We had dinner with Ben & Fitz, and Case and Karl, who were also in town; I'm glad I got a chance to see Karl before he headed out on his world tour. We also met Adrian at dinner, which was super cool since we got to learn more about how he developed chicagocrime.org. We hung out with Trow for a bit, as well, though sadly I didn't get a chance to play with Gnoetry during this visit. Coolest piece of software, ever.

On the sight-seeing side of things, we went to the King Tut Exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago. I've long been fascinated by all things of Ancient Egypt, so I was happy to be able to catch this traveling exhibition while we were in town. Better still, Ben had never seen Egyptian artifacts before, so seeing this particular collection as an introduction was pretty amazing for him. We headed up to the observation deck of the Sears Tower, too, but I wish we'd have gone up in the evening instead so we could have seen all the city lights; the view was still spectacular. We wandered down the Magnificent Mile one night, which was a beautiful - and chilly - walk. We didn't do any other tourist type stuff, except for eating real Chicago pizza, but we had a gorgeous view of Lake Michigan from our room at the The Drake Hotel.

We left Chicago two days before Thanksgiving and headed for Washington, D.C. Ben spent the afternoon napping, while I went to go check out the Google D.C. office. Ben and I had dinner with DannyB and his lovely wife Melissa downtown, then they were gracious enough to let us come to their place so we could meet their bunnies and do our laundry. Ben now has independent confirmation that bunnies just naturally chew on power cords, though I think his overall opinion of the species has improved, which is a plus.

The weather report asserted that Thanksgiving and the following days would bring dudgeon gouts of rain, so we planned our visit to the National Mall and surrounding environs the next day. Despite the conversation we had with DannyB the night before about the greatly improved accuracy of weather forecasting, the rain arrived a day early, but we braved the rain and made our first stop the Jefferson Memorial. As always, visiting this place was very moving for me, as Jefferson's writings, politics and philosophies have always been a great source of delight and debate for me.

Ben and I trekked through the rain to all of the other sites along the National Mall, though we didn't end up going inside the Washington Monument. My cynicism about my fellow Americans got a sound trouncing from seeing the number of families gathered there, also soaked and shivering, parents reiterating stories I'd heard long ago about the aspirations for liberty and justice upon which America was based. I'll spare everyone the long rant about how far I think the nation has strayed from this idealized foundation.

When we visited the Vietnam Memorial, I found someone had left a framed list of all the New Zealanders who had died in the war, along with some poppies for Remembrance Day. I checked the database of WWII veterans for my grandfather's name, but didn't find it in the registry, so I'll be adding an entry for him. I bought one of those Passport to Your National Parks books at the Lincoln Memorial, then Ben and I wandered to all of the sites in the area so we could then go to the Ranger Station and collect the cancellations showing we visited all the monuments. I'm looking forward to filling the book up and passing it to our children, along with all the wonderful memories of our journeys around the States. We got back to the hotel and spent the rest of the night trying to recover feeling in our extremities.

We spent Thanksgiving at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, which was surprisingly crowded. As usual, the Hall of Minerals held my attention for a good two hours. We spent some time checking out the Air and Space Museum before trying to figure out what to do about dinner. We ended up driving around in nearby Maryland, settling finally on the one place we could find open. Mmmm, traditional Japanese Thanksgiving dinner.

On our last day in D.C., we headed to Arlington National Cemetery so I could show Ben the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. My cynicism about my fellow Americans rapidly returned after listening to some - uh - young "lady" in gigantic designer sunglasses complain in a twangy drawl that everyone standing at commencement of the Changing of the Guard was blocking her view. I suppose I will forgive the - uh - poor "uninformed" soul who left her/his mobile on, as there was only a request to remain silent and standing at the beginning of the ceremony, and that clearly must have excluded phones. Grrr. I griped all the way to the Eternal Flame. I hope you both heard me, too - shame on you! (And, I suppose, shame on me for not holding in my vitriol until we got to the car.)

We left Arlington and wandered out to NoVA to see Mike and his girlfriend, Amo, who were gracious enough to offer us a ride to the airport at 06.30 the next morning. It was wonderful to catch up with Mike and even nicer to meet Amo. Usually, when I'm told that I'll just love someone's significant other, it means I'll spend our first and last meeting discussing the weather and everybody's health, wondering if there's a couch I can hide beneath and desperately trying to pretend that I actually give a crep about her extensive collection of $700 shoes. Nope - this gal actually has decorated their guest bathroom as an undersea paradise, complete with sea turtle photo. Amo, you rock!!

After a delightful shopping binge while the boys returned our rental car, we settled in for a delicious dinner at a pub that had some 40 varieties of chicken wings. Mmmmm, wings. Just before we sat down for dinner, Amo disappeared, reappearing about fifteen minutes later with a bottle of whiskey for me, as they didn't have any at their house. Did I mention that Amo rocks? We caroused for the rest of the night, though Mike's cats didn't sleep on us despite his warnings that they would. Ben and I did our best not to feel cheated. Amo took us to the airport in the morning on her way in to work in D.C. My illusions that everyone on the East Coast works 09.00 - 17.00 are forever shattered.

The next few weeks are going to be pretty exciting, too, so I'm sure my writer's block will be kept at bay. Hope you've enjoyed the whirlwind tour of the last five months.

(BTW, I think everyone has actually gotten paid for GSoC now. If you haven't, you know what to do!)