'Til All Are One

Things have cer­tainly been crazy as of late. Being elec­ted onto the SLUG Com­mit­tee (at the March AGM) has given me a greater appre­ci­ation of local com­munity issues and of what it takes to co-​​ordinate a group. At the same time, man­aging the Linux Aus­tralia stand at Open CeBIT has also been a tre­mend­ous learn­ing exper­i­ence. My offi­cial report is here.

I’ve had a few requests to elab­or­ate upon the ‘brush with death’ men­tioned in that mes­sage. Driv­ing home after the second day of CeBIT, I exper­i­enced a car acci­dent. While trav­el­ling at at least 60km/​h, I some­how lost con­scious­ness, and woke up phoughed into the side of another car. For­tu­nately, the car was parked and unoc­cu­pied. Nobody was involved aside from myself. The car was a write-​​off, but the pas­sen­ger cabin was fully intact and I exper­i­enced no injur­ies. The other car was part of a com­pany fleet, and its cus­todian wasn’t bothered much at all. Insur­ance took care of the costs on both sides.

I was quite shaken after the crash, and I very nearly didn’t go to CeBIT the next day. After being cleared by a para­medic and two doc­tors (one on the night of the crash and another the fol­low­ing morn­ing), I decided that I wasn’t going to let this get in my way. It was prob­ably the best decision that I made, since it forced me to get back on my feet doing some­thing that I love, rather than sit­ting at home in misery. I was unable to mod­er­ate the Linux Aus­tralia panel dis­cus­sion that I had helped to organ­ise, but I was there at the stand just like on the pre­vi­ous two days.

Oth­er­wise, CeBIT was a resound­ing suc­cess. It proved to be a fant­astic spring­board for us to launch the inaug­ural SLUG Boot­camp. More on this later.

I can’t fully explain why I blacked out in the first place. When I was younger, I would occa­sion­ally black out under cer­tain cir­cum­stances. Neur­o­lo­gists at the time couldn’t identify what it was, but told me not to worry about it. I was prob­ably just exhausted, from the exhib­it­ing all day, the plan­ning in the lead-​​up to the event, my new job, TAFE, and vari­ous other things. The doc­tors that I spoke with agreed with me that it was prob­ably just a microsleep.

I’m still recov­er­ing from the after-​​effects of the acci­dent. I get stressed more eas­ily when driv­ing, but I can feel that slowly reced­ing with time. Most of all, I feel excep­tion­ally lucky that I didn’t hurt myself or any­one else.

LotD:  IBM PC Real Time Clock should run in UT

When I was little boy In Gram­mar school
Always went by the very best rule
But Ever­time the bell would ring
You’d catch me play­ing with my ding-​​a-​​ling

Thus goes Chuck Berry’s clas­sic, ‘My Ding-​​a-​​Ling’.

At the ripe old age of twenty-​​five, I have been the lucky recip­i­ent of an inguinal her­nia. As men­tioned earlier, I car­ried it through linux​.conf​.au (whilst exer­cising a degree of dili­gence). My oper­a­tion was one week later, con­veni­ently sched­uled for Janu­ary 25. That left me mostly immob­ile for Aus­tralia Day. I passed the time with my laptop whilst the Fox Clas­sics chan­nel broad­cas­ted a mara­thon of Kings­wood Coun­try. I have har­boured fond memor­ies of this clas­sic piece of Aus­trali­ana since my child­hood, and I was glad to be able to see it again. Pre­sum­ably, modern-​​day polit­ical cor­rect­ness keeps it off the air for most of the time, which is a grand shame con­sid­er­ing that the un-​​PC ele­ments were inten­ded as humor­ous plot devices and were not meant to be offens­ive to viewers.

Two days later, against my bet­ter judge­ment, I was walk­ing around and play­ing Wii ten­nis. I had never played a Wii before and it looked like so much fun that I just had to do it! Apart from some dress­ings which lost adhe­sion (due to the abdom­inal twist­ing asso­ci­ated with ten­nis), I was no worse for wear. Now, nearly two months later, I feel com­pletely fine. It sure feels good to have the pro­ced­ure over and done with. Now I can resume my iron­man training…

Unlike my last post, this one is ser­i­ous. One of my favour­ite podac­sts, The Linux Link Tech Show, inter­viewed RSI expert Deborah Quilter. The phe­nomenon of RSI has risen to prom­in­ence in recent years, largely in response to increas­ing com­puter use. That puts tech work­ers such as myself in con­sid­er­able risk of devel­op­ing injur­ies, and in fact I am cer­tain that I have developed some already. Ignor­ing the prob­lem only makes it worse. Any­one who works at a desk should listen to this inter­view and heed at least some of its warn­ings and advice.

The epis­ode is avail­able in Ogg Vor­bis and MP3 formats.