It’s the 11th today. My dad would have been 72 today. I don’t think he ever really understood what it was I did with computers; as a kid I taught myself 6502 assembly for whatever inscrutible reasons. “My mandate also includes weird bugs,” said Calvin. I probably wasn’t very articulate ten years ago about what it was I did – for Free Software, or in my studies – so I can’t blame him.

I noticed today that I had apparently gotten better at this. Before any major conference I go and get a haircut. This ensures I get one at least every six months so I don’t end up too shaggy. That leads to the inevitable barber-shop conversation. To my surprise I had a pretty handy story ready of doing Free Software, going to San Francisco to meet my peers and friends who work on this stuff, about working from home on software, and about Google. Sadly, I did not check “KDE” for brand recognition. Google, at least, is a global brand as it got a definite “oh, is that where you’re going, of course I use that every day. Is that an American company then?”

Some folk with more glib tongue would have asked things like “how does using a computer make you feel? do you like it?” but that is not my style. Something to practice for whatever the future brings.

The future – it’s now nearly midnight, GMT – holds KDE 4.0.0. Jos calls for viral marketing, Sebas reminisces on the community process that led to this landmark release, and Aurélien finds bugs to fix for 4.0.1 (I must say I agree with him about a lot of widgets that don’t come out quite as useful as they might; that is something that we would want users testing and reporting in a systematic way).

The future’s so bright, I … no, wait .. plasma is kind of darkish gray and blue with nice white highlights. The future’s so accelerated OpenGL ARGB, I gotta wear shades.

Retrieved from the Wayback machine, with broken links.