Today was the day that my journal first appeared on planet.gnome.org, so hello to those of you reading it there. I'm Thomas, poet, would-be linguist, and programmer; I'm from Cambridge in England and I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia with my partner Firinel (Fin for short) and our daughter Riordon, who are both awesome people I'm lucky to have in my life. I work for an organisation that does awesome things. If you want to know more about who and where and why I am, you should read my bio on LiveJournal.
I am feeling so much better today. I must have slept for over twelve hours on Friday, and today I woke up feeling almost back to normal. When I came down to check my email I found a cup of coffee waiting beside my keyboard. Did I mention that Firinel is an awesome person?
SaraMae and Sharon (Fin's grandmother and mother) wanted us to go out to the diner with them, so we sat and drank tea and ate croissants. A while ago, someone somewhere on LJ was saying that French prosody doesn't really map to English ideas of where the stress lies in a word, and that when a French word is loaned into English, British English tends to stress the first syllable (BAL-lay) and American English the second (bal-LAY). I don't know enough about prosody to know whether this is true, but I present the anecdotal evidence of my very English attempt to order a croissant in America:
Me: I'll have a croissant, please.
Waitress: Go ahead.
(long pause)
Me: Um, what are we waiting for?
Waitress: I thought you said you had a question.
Me: No, no, a croissant.
Waitress: Oh, a croisSANT.
Later we came home, I did some washing up, and we briefly went to the sale. We didn't see any kittens, though.
I believe I fixed metacity bug 114305 today (removing old dead code to do with menu icons). This is part of a much bigger project to revise the entire theme format, which is about half done. I would have been almost done by now, but I broke my laptop a few weeks ago. (I have to say that the people I work for were extremely good with helping fix it, and deserve heaps of kudos.)
My current pet project is a port of xbeeb to GTK. It's tentatively called gbeeb, at least unless enough people decide it should be called plasticdaffodil. There are still a million things to fix, but I think it's now good enough to do an 0.01 release, so I'll try and get onto that, but first I'll need to learn a lot more about how to set a program up with autotools: I'll dig around and see if I can find a primer anywhere. Thanks to all of you who've expressed interest in testing or playing with it; if anyone else is interested, let me know. (If you don't have an LJ account, you can leave an anonymous comment.)
I've lost about eight pounds in about a week, quite possibly because I didn't eat much on Friday. I don't think this is anything to worry about; I'll probably get it back soon enough.
If any of you are going on the Philly Interfaith Walk for Peace and Reconciliation, we might see you there. Either way, peace to you all.
