Gnome Summit 2005
Rather than spending Thanksgiving with family, I once again went off to Boston for the Gnome Summit at MIT.

The drive south was terrible, with heavy rain the entire way. In Vermont and New Hampshire, there was fresh pavement that was very slick and was not properly designed for drainage. Going over 80 km/h, the car would hydroplane immediately. It took over nine hours to get there. At one point I noticed my small finger was numb: clenching the steering wheel strongly had cut off the blood past my engineering ring. I was very fortunate with one thing: I had applied Rain-X to the windshield for the first time ever the week before leaving. I hardly used my wipers at all -- that stuff is amazing.

The first day of the summit revealed a much larger crowd than what I expected; perhaps twice as many as last year. It seems as though the other half showed up from Europe. Nevertheless, the day was a little slow for me. I left in the afternoon to do some planned shopping. I hoped it would take an hour or so, but with Boston being the way it is, it took almost three hours. But I got my paint.

On the second and third days I was much more involved, but I never got to any serious hacking. I was simply too tired after the busy first week of work. I had some excellent discussions. I would like to get involved with f-spot and the bug squad. Talking with Larry Ewing, f-spot's author, was motivating. I met Jeff Waugh for the first time and he's quite a character. The rest of the Boston crew were great, as usual.

In general, this year had less groundbreaking new technological ideas. From my point of view, the conference was largely about testing, usability, and visual appearance. Of particular interest to me were the BetterDesktop and Tango Project talks. Both focused on the thought to user experience that other open-source projects lack. The optimization presentations were also amazing -- a tool like Sun's dtrace could go very, very far on Linux. I also got to play with a Nokia 770 PDA. What can I say?: "Very cool" comes to mind. The screen on that thing simply blows the highly-acclaimed PSP's screen away.

The drive back was uneventful, though I realized soon after leaving Boston that I took zero photos during the event. So, I took a photo of that one-and-only metric sign in Vermont, since I keep talking about it.

Luna turns two today! Woof!