Today I worked on the SEIU's portal at work.
I slept through the alarm, and was only woken up by Sharon honking her horn outside. I got dressed and out the door in about three minutes, but of course I didn't bring anything to eat; Sharon gave me her lunch, leftover Chinese food from yesterday, and said she could easily buy herself something else. I think that was very kind and thoughtful of her.
At St Mark's, the bald priest whose name I don't know preached on Psalm 137 (though both he and the appointed readings omitted the famous curse at the end, which probably needs a whole separate section to itself). He said that even though the question of "How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" was a rhetorical one when it was asked, eventually they were forced to find practical answers to it (building synagogues to meet in and so on since they couldn't meet in the Temple), and they found eventually that God is indeed in the whole universe and not just in Jerusalem, as their forefathers before them had discovered that God was indeed in the promised land and not just in the desert.
I think as an immigrant this particuarly gave me a lot to think about. (And I wonder whether if I go to GUADEC '07, how I'll handle being on English soil again for a week and then having to leave it for who knows how long once more.) Then again, on some level we're all transients passing through this life: someone asked me recently how I like the US, and I said I like it well enough, but I never really feel like I belong here. Zie said zie feels the same about the whole world.
I did see Brian the homeless guy there, but just to wave to briefly.
NARGERY: Havoc pointed out to me that if you set METACITY_DEBUG_XINERAMA, metacity will pretend you have two xineramas on the screen. Using this, I was able to test Stéphane Rosi's patch to #323820 and find that it works fine. I also looked at #304927 briefly. Gentle readers, do any of you actually use metacity's shaken_loose feature, wherein you can unmaximise a window by picking up its title bar and shaking it free? Or is its very existence news to you? If the latter, it might be going away soon.
Also, there was some talk on IRC about why Anne ÃËstergaard's name appears as Anne ÃÆ[]stergaard on the Foundation pages. Character encodings in XML and XSLT is actually the sort of thing I spend a whole lot of my time doing at work, so I took this on the train with me; I now know the answer, though I obviously don't want to commit it without talking to someone on the board. (If anyone's around on IRC tomorrow, I might grab you.)
As I was walking down the street in Philly, a well-dressed person called something out to me from the other side of the road. I asked zir to repeat, and zie halfway crossed the road before repeating, "You look... exactly like Jesus!" I was a little nonplussed before replying, "Well... hallelujah!"
In the evening we went round to Robin and John's house and sat outside and drank beer and talked while Rio and Murphy-the-dog chased a ball around their garden. Fin bought me a chocolate ice-cream from the ice-cream van. *happy*
