who only by moving can balance

ten whole years of open beta, and ten whole years of this account. I have learned a lot and worried a lot and grown a lot here, and I have used the platform as a life raft, and I'm very grateful for my community. <3

... I've announced the next contributor weekend, which is running on the 14th and 15th of May!

If you have requests for specific flavours of cake, now is a good time to make them :-)

1. Apply all the changes in this pull request to your develop branch (with thanks to sophie). (Do not commit these changes!)

2. Add the line $DISABLED{loggedout_support_requests} = 1; to your file ~/dw/ext/local/etc/config-local.pl.

3. It should now be impossible to submit support requests on your Dreamhack instance while logged out. You care about this mainly because there is a risk that otherwise you will get 5000 Undelivered Mail Returned To Sender messages coz the spambots faked their e-mail addresses.

These changes will all want to be overwritten as and when that pull request Happens in a code push, but for the purposes of testing stuff over the contributor weekend it might be nice to be able to do so without spam!

Pull requests made: 13 16 18 (with a few more probably to come)

Attendees: twelve I think (in addition to general hanging out in IRC)

Other bug progress: hunningham and pseudomonas did loads of work on big projects, shortcipher has done a lot of testing, cesy has made serious headway on an automated test suite, and me_and has written a feature spec

Longest telecommutes: swaldman had this one cornered (at ~725 miles) until the Australian contingent rocked up (thereby neatly overtaking the San Franciscans and Seattlites); video calls worked, eventually.

Wiki pages edited: SEVERAL.

Issues filed: five (#1604, #1608, #1609, #1612, #1613)

Naps taken: three

Wheelchair tyres changed: two

Slightly suspect soldering jobs: one

Food made: white bean dip & smitten kitchen's chickpea thing, macaroni cheese, sweet potato chilli, couscous, rice, parsley-tomato-cucumber-preserved lemon-pomegranate salad, apple-honey cake, gingerbread-apple upside-down cake (recipe via smitten kitchen; nb you can substitute yoghurt + a little water for the buttermilk), Apfelstrudel (family recipe I should probably write up), lemon meringue pie (with more reasonable meringue)

State of the kitchen: astonishingly non-wrecked.

Next (in-person) event: Saturday 20th February & surrounding, probably. Watch this space for details! (With an option on having me do something virtual or less over-catered sooner if folk are in favour.)

Thank you all so, so much. <3

The thing I enjoy most about Dreamwidth-goes-to-conferences is, honestly, the part where I get to hang out in hotel rooms with a group of people working on making the site better and more fun, one way or another, and I'd really like to have more of that in my life. As such, I'm trying out hosting a Dreamwidth contributor event at the beginning of November.

In terms of what will be going on: I'd never written code before I got stuck into Dreamwidth development, and honestly I'm still very much a beginner at Perl, but I know roughly where things are and there'll be several people who're fluent in Perl present who can help out with specifics. I'm also pretty invested in documentation (both for developers and for end users), Support Board work, and misc organisational stuff. I've got lists of things that could do with being worked on from introductory bugs to specced-out features, and from minor site copy tweaks to entire new FAQs that need writing. I'm happy to mentor & cheerlead in any of these areas from any starting point, and I'll probably bake you a cake while you're getting things shipshape.

We have an A0 whiteboard, a square metre of tea, and lots of things to sit on. I expect there'll be some sitting-around-in-groups-hashing-out-workflows and some one-to-one mentoring and some solo work; there will be a dedicated quiet room in which conversation/interaction Does Not Happen.

Interested? Please let me know if you're thinking of attending so I know how many to expect, but it's absolutely fine if you don't make it on the day.

Interested but can't make it in person? Come hang out in the IRC channel (instructions at the link): telecommuters welcome. <3

( Logistical details )

1. Counselling is just around the corner from the V&A. aella_irene likes the V&A. Ergo we had lunch sat on the art installation You Know You Cannot See Yourself So Well as by Reflection, having spent the morning hanging out in the ironwork collection. (My plan for next time involves making friends with the glass gallery; wrought iron is something I just... find incredibly soothing, for reasons I haven't quite articulated but that include the fact that it's very stark in terms of colours involved, and has lots of nice bold lines and repeating patterns.)

2. Relatedly, plants: the hydrangeas up the sides of the central courtyard are currently fantastic, as are the other plantings, and aella_irene very generously gave me a bag of her household's surplus raspberries, so that was a joy and a delight.

3. Our internet connection is unstable enough (and I'm undermedicated enough) that I don't particularly feel like coding; nonetheless I made lots of progress with my Dreamwidth todo list today.

4. ( Benefits-related discussion. )

5. Peak 90s Kid: my mum frantically facebook IMing me for tech support. I sort of provided it, ineffectually, and she actually sorted the problem out by herself, and that means there exist more photos on the internet of me & largest smallcousin.

6. We had tinned pineapple in the house; we now have pineapple upside-down cake.

7. Another batch of rosemary sourdough is rising on the side, to be breakfast-and-lunch food.

8. I have Steam installed on the new laptop and it was rapid and painless and completely unlike most of my other attempts to install Steam under Debian. This means that I now have a MOUNTAIN yes yes.

9. Every time I reread your blue-eyed boys I find more things in it, and they are comfort and they are in their fragmentary way moments of peace.

10. Externally-sourced self-worth: my comments on the MeFi thread are getting favourited by lots of people & positively engaged with. Hurrah for managing to say things that are useful to people.

1. The toilets labelled "Men or those who identify" and "Women or those who identify": not perfect by quite a ways (I would prefer and rather than or...); and the very visible notice next to the lift detailing where in the building to find gender-neutral bathrooms (with the assurance that gender diversity is celebrated in the community), which are in turn labelled "all gender bathroom".

2. The dedicated quiet space with the comfortable chairs and the open windows and the greenery.

3. The incredible catering - which is vegan by default, with vegetarian and gluten-free stuff carefully labelled.

4. The con lanyards for badges, which are colour-coded according to your preferences in terms of being included in photographs ("no", "ask me first", "yes").

5. The con badges themselves, which are little booklets that attach to the lanyard, containing (1) a copy of the schedule, (2) a map and (3) a copy of the awesome code of conduct.

6. Sufficient power points!

7. Lots of super, super friendly people: I have had pleasant discussions on a variety of topics with strangers, and we know what I'm like about People.

8. Enormous visibility of queer + trans people. (And at least 2 of 3 keynotes are being given by queer-identified women!)

9. Getting to actually put faces to a whole lot of names. :-) And concomitantly, the strangers and friends-of-friends I've been talking to looking at the two name tags I'm wearing (one "Alex", one "kaberett") and asking me which - if either - I prefer (and getting it when I say I don't at all mind, and both are my real name!)

10. Lots and lots of making sure that people stay hydrated, know where they're going, and are generally empowered to take care of themselves.

ridiculous hotel is ridiculous and full of nice rocks; pleasant flight was pleasant; I got to wave at Mt St Helens & Mt Rainier out the window of the Vancouver-->Portland leg; Portland is currently having a rose festival; pho for dinner; and for all I managed to sleep on the plane crashing out now yes yes.

[as we were coming in to land in Vancouver the pilot announced that Terminal 2 hadn't managed to get all hold baggage onto the plane. I was very pleased to be doing carry-on only...]

My baby brother (all nineteen years and six foot something of him) dragged me out of bed this morning in order to make and feed me pancakes, in the kitchen with the back door open and the garden beautiful, and lectured me sternly about the fact that he was only doing this in order to use up the batter, and I wasn't to take away the message that he liked me. (This is how we express intense affection toward one another. My mother finds it quite distressing, bless her.)

( Read more... )