Five Minutes

This humble little blog has ended up on a couple of Planets lately: specifically Planet SoC, the Google Summer of Code planet which is getting a limited feed of GSoC related posts, and Planet Linux Australia, who are unfortunate lucky enough to be getting a full feed at the moment.

So, uh, hi. I’m Adam. For the benefit of the Planet SoCers, I’m going to be working on a GUI frontend for debugging PHP applications. When I’m not doing that, I spend entirely too much time in film edit suites, writing scripts of both the film and computing variety, taking part in the usual third year computer science group projects, and trying to work my way up the PEAR bugs-fixed ladder. When I’m not doing any of that and I have money, I go to excellent conferences and take part in ill-advised experiments with wireless networking.

Sometime this year I hope to get a full night’s sleep. I’m planning it sometime in December after OSDC. Until then, expect occasional rambling blog posts. Like this one.

Like a lot of people, I have an interest in my family history, compounded by the fact that it’s actually pretty blurry before my grandparents’ generation. The National Archives of Australia launched a service yesterday which provides service records for everyone who served with the Australian Imperial Force in the First World War. It’s been slow, flaky and there’s been the small problem that the search link on the aforelinked page doesn’t actually work, but I’ve finally been able to get a service record for my great-grandfather, Private Martin Allen, who served from 1917 to 1919 in the 11th Battalion.

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I’ve been awaiting the arrival of the Summer of Code mentoring organisations, which were due today. Sadly, there seem to have been some technical glitches at Google, as they first posted five or six mentoring organisations, then dropped them again and put up a message that they’ll be posted here soon.

Obviously I now have the time to actually take part in the Summer of Code (plus, the money would be really handy), but the catch is that I have to figure out what I actually want to attempt. The obvious thing to do is something PHP related, given my work background, but I don’t know if I’d actually be happier picking something a bit different as a change of pace. (I was, for a moment, interested by the idea from Richard Lynch on PHP-DEV to write a JIT compiler as a SoC project — then I attended my PLP lecture on compilers and thought better of it.)

Unfortunately, this is the point where I start second-guessing myself because I’m not visible enough within the open source community and hence feel as though it’s not worth applying for anything. I guess the challenge is to get over myself before the application deadline on March 24 and get at least a couple of applications in.

Anyway, I look forward to the list of organisations and project ideas going up. I’ll doubtless post which ones I apply for on here — provided I actually do apply!

I feel slightly lost without my work e-mail account. This is strange.

OK, I’m more missing the comics feed in Klutz, but the point stands.

I have nineteen and a bit hours remaining at my current job before I finish up and spend the year as a full-time university student. (And, hopefully, a more regular blogger.) I’m now in the funny twilight zone where I don’t really have a hell of a lot more left to do besides a couple of small pieces of training and packing up my desk, yet I still have to be here for a couple more days.

It’s going to be a bit odd being back at university without actually having a job to worry about at the same time. It’s a calculated gamble to make sure that I do reasonably well and graduate this year, but I don’t yet know if it will actually be a positive or a negative when it comes to focusing — perhaps I need something else to switch to when I don’t want to concentrate on uni. Alternately, I may just be freaking out about tossing in paid employment for the first time in a long time.

Better get back to work, I guess. Ah, xkcd archives.

I haven’t had much motivation to blog lately, as is doubtless apparent. After the relaxation of Christmas and New Year, work didn’t so much creep up on me as hit me over the head with a sledgehammer repeatedly, which has pretty much sapped me of any energy I might have had to write, or exercise, or do anything much beyond work and watch cricket.

I’m hoping that going to LCA next week will help me to get back into the swing of things. Certainly last year’s ended up being a great way to kickstart the year, both on a professional and personal level, and I’m hoping that this year’s will be no different. If only there was some way I could work in a side-trip to Queenstown again.

Ah well. A man can dream.

Do you ever record yourself?

Vocally, I mean. Get your minds out of the gutter. Just talking, or narrating, or singing, or whatever? Occasionally, I do — it’s probably one of those things that’s a hangover from spending years yelling at taxi drivers and inebriated punters, but it’s interesting to hear yourself recorded. Often, it reflects more of who you are than you think. If you’re nervous, that always comes through a treat. Yet, reading something in a way that seems to be full of nuance and feeling often comes over flat, or clipped.
One of the things we did in scriptwriting class this semester was something that I’m sure happens in every writing class: we read the scripts of our fellow classmates out, much like a read-through. Apart from hearing your script read out, which I’m sure is an interesting experience (due to my usual do-it-at-the-last-second ways, I didn’t actually have a script at any point that was in a fit state to be read silently, let alone aloud), it’s a chance for everyone else to have a crack at voice acting, in a way. People (and by people, I mean me) really get into it at times, doing accents, trying to emote using nothing but their voice, trying to make the narration of scene descriptions and the like sound interesting.

Yet when you do it by yourself, it seems dry, and flat, and passionless. I don’t quite know how that works. Maybe it’s the setting. Maybe the nuances and subtlety that you think are there all the time really aren’t. Who’s to say?

All I know is that I prefer the inferred emotion of speaking without dwelling on it to the boring monotone of trying to sound interesting. I think it may be better just to leave the speaking to the classroom and the microphone to the odd Skype call.

I’m in the twilight zone at the moment. Although classes have finished for the year, exams aren’t until next week, and I don’t jump back into full-time work until the week after. So I’ve found myself — without really planning it — having five days off a week.

I don’t quite know how to handle it, to be honest. Since January, it’s been all go, all the time, between work, university, going to Mongolia, cricket, and myriad other demands. Suddenly it’s come to a screeching halt. Don’t get me wrong; there’s still stuff I should be doing — some coding I’ve been putting off for a while, some writing that keeps demanding to get out, transcribing journal entries from Mongolia, that sort of thing, but my mind seems to have decided that I need a break, and hence I’m completely unmotivated to do anything besides finally playing Half-Life 2 (yes, I know I’m two years behind the state of the art), reading some books, and seeing just how many commas I can put into a sentence.

Five years ago, in my near four year twilight zone between… erm, leaving Curtin and making the decision to get my shit together, I lived this sort of lifestyle week in, week out. It seemed natural then. Now, as much as I’m enjoying and apparently needed the break, there seems to be a point around 3 pm where I start feeling as though I should be doing something productive, not reading, playing games and listening to music.

Bugger. I think I’ve started to turn into my parents.