Aaron Bockover

I must visit this museum in the very near future.

We then venture into the recreation of the Garden of Eden, where we get to meet the Beastmaster himself. Here, a creatively covered up Adam pets the friendly animals of the garden. Oh, and there’s no need to be afraid, because all of the animals at this time were like Disney cartoon characters. They did not bite, sting, or even defecate for that matter. Even the T-Rexes were playful and gay. Adam even gave them all names! How cute!

The hilarity! Thanks, Alan, for pointing me to the best laugh of my day.

After 18 hours on the road on Saturday, I finally landed in Boston. My friend Connor and I left Raleigh at about 4:30 on Saturday morning, arrived in Wilmington, DE around 12:30 to eat lunch with my grandparents and take a short nap at their house (neither of us slept on Friday night), picked up the keys from my landlord at about midnight and stepped into my new apartment shortly thereafter. We spent all day Sunday doing touristy stuff around Boston since it was Connor’s first time here, and I drove him to the airport at about 5:30 this morning.

I haven’t had much sleep since Thursday night. Hopefully all my furniture and other belongings will arrive sometime this week so I can actually settle in. I have a sheet, a pillow, a blanket, and an air mattress until then. At least there are a bunch of unsecured access points around my building to hold me over until I can get the cable hooked up.

A few days ago I went around to websites for all the accounts I have that would require a change of address notification. I signed into my Nationwide insurance account to update the address on my policy, and tonight I received a reply. It started with this blurb:

Thank you for your recent request to update the address on your auto policy. Unfortunately Nationwide does not offer insurance in the state you are moving to.

Great! Would someone mind explaining to me what “Nationwide” means? Apparently everyone except me understands it to mean, “Nationwide - except Massachusetts!” Any auto insurance recommendations?

• May 31 - Move out of Raleigh apartment; move in with parents
• June 9 - Drive up to Boston with some friends
• June 11-15 - Hope my stuff is delivered from Raleigh; settle into new apartment
• June 21-24 - In Wilmington, Delaware for my Grandfather’s 80th birthday
• July 3-4 - Night in Raleigh/Garner for Lake Benson fireworks
• July 14-16 - In London, need something fun to do
• July 16-22 - GUADEC, fun is guaranteed
• July 22-25 - In Brussels, need something fun to do
• July 25 - Back to Boston, hopefully to stay for a minute

• Novell and EFF team on patent reform - Awesomeness

  “I think it’s fair to say that we’ve been talking a lot about patents within Novell in the last twelve months. More than we have in the past,” he said. Novell concluded that the patent system is broken and that patents are hobbling innovation and open standards, by putting companies on the defensive.
  –Nat Friedman

• My good friend Jeff Tickle is working on an awesome Tomboy/Gtk# project called Virtual Paper, and has been making some wonderful progress. He could really use some expert Cairo advise regarding custom gradients on a stroke. I think Jeff should always blog from Virtual Paper itself and never again use the keyboard.

• Late last week Miguel started white-boarding the drawing engine for Moonlight, and has made some progress since getting his canvas to draw a rectangle.

• After a frantic brute-force apartment hunt in Boston last Thursday and Friday, I found a nice place in Kenmore/Back Bay, and will be moving out of my apartment in Raleigh at the end of next week. I’ll spend a week at my parents’ house visiting with family we have coming into town, and then will drive up to Boston on the 10th. I can’t wait!

• I have been working on some major performance improvements in Banshee and will write more about this later. 0.13.x is going to be completely awesome and noticeably faster. Unfortunately I’ve spent so much time this month preparing for the move to Boston that I haven’t been able to spend as much time as I want hacking. The good thing is that I am in one of those mad-hacking moods where I stay up all night and get real work done. These come and go in cycles, and usually last a long time.