de daumier-seigo's blue period

(with apologies to the salinger for the title)

it's sunny today. beautiful. slightly breezy. warm.

i was contacted today about potentially offering some technical guidance for a local company on what might end up being a very large kde deployment. it's still very much up in the air and all, but it is interesting that more and more of these kinds of events are cropping up. it's not the only one buzzing under my hat at the moment either. so .. good times.

i've taken this week at a bit of a slower pace than usual, allowing myself evening time and staying off of irc quite a bit. i also spent a bit of time with some of the solaris/kde and Sun people to catch up with what's happening there and keep some of balls rolling. this is also the last week of libs "stuff", as per the impending freeze; after this i will be turned to kdebase and kdegraphics pretty much exclusively (not counting the usual distractions inherent with being on the e.v. board, techbase, random occurences in the community, etc =).

kdegraphics is a packaging and maintenance issue; i'll be working on that package as part of the release team effort. a number of applications will be finding their way into extragear out of kdegraphics and we will hopefully be swapping in a couple of new apps. the dividing line tends not to be along terms of simple code quality, but upon generality and audience appropriateness. because of this, it has been important to me to ensure that extragear will have a regular release cycle along with kde4 releases. helio has been very helpful with this.

kdebase will see adjustments in where applications are, much as kdelibs saw adjustments in where libs were. we're releasing kdebase as three separate tarballs starting with 4.0: one for runtime requirements, one for the workspace and one for applications which are fundamental (e.g. file manager, web browser, etc) but which aren't workspace-specific. i'll be helping with that as well as concentrating on getting the workspace into not only working condition but something to get excited about. (that latter is important for me to keep my interest ;)

but that's next week; tonight, i go to the opera: carmen. i've seen it before elsewhere, and it is a show i really enjoyed last time. to 'celebrate' i bought a new pair of shoes to go with the suit i'm wearing. the young woman who sold them to me (and who, to be honest, picked them out; much safer, i've found, to let someone with a keener eye than mine for fashion take on such tasks) asked where i was going (i had mentioned i needed them for friday evening) and it turns out she's an opera fan too, though since graduating from university (fine arts majors are such practical degrees ;) she hasn't been able to get to many.

i mentioned the vivaldi concert in a couple of weeks being put on by the cologne philharmonic at a local cathedral and she said she was hoping to go to that as well and, by hapinstance, was going to germany next month. not to cologne, however, but to berlin. we chatted a bit about that fine city as we completed the shoe transaction. it was nice to run into a young person with an unabashed sense of adventure and culture in this city; there just aren't enough of her sort around for my tastes.

and speaking of culture ... i arrived home last night to a voice mail inviting me to a private invite-only karaoke event tonight being put on by a local hostess for some of the karaoke people in town. (ok, so i used the term "culture" very loosely.) i rsvp'd my unfortunate inability to attend due to a previous engagement tonight (carmen), but boy do i wish i could be there. not only will some of the more interesting and fun karaoke people in calgary be there, it's being held in a private club; the instructions where to take a flight of stairs down from the sidewalk next to another well known establishment and push a buzzer that is "behind an iron grating, on the left side of the door at the bottom of the stairs". this would apparently summon someone who would verify my attendance. how cool is that? i'd almost feel compelled to wear a zoot suit and speak like cary grant for the night ;)

i was assured that there would be future events like this one and that i'd get a call about them as they occurred. my zoot suit riot dreams may yet take flight! =P

all this was between early evening yesterday and lunch today, which i took with p. in the school yard. he's had an excellent week of performance at school academically and otherwise and i thought i'd reward him with a surprise at lunch of one of his favourite foods: sushi. i picked up a few differents kinds of rolls (avocado, cucumber and shiitake) and brought them to him. he was quite happy by the prospect of sitting outside in the sun feasting on the rice and seaweed wrapped delights.

maybe it's the sunshine. maybe it's because it's spring. maybe it's the combination of code, carmen and sushi in the sunshine ;) but it's a good day, whatever the ultimate reason.

oh, and don't forget: register for akademy today!