Social Fork

UPDATE: It appears that Socialtext has changed their mind. :-)


At the start of this month I was laid off by my employer of the last 5+ years, Socialtext. I was Socialtext's first hire, presumably to gain my expertise from developing the open source wiki, Kwiki. Since then, Socialtext has grown to employ as many as 50 people and has become the defacto leader in enterprise wiki software. They have branched out into other social software directions, and Kwiki, sadly, has all but died.

Many of the other people hired by Socialtext were leaders in open software. Socialtext, much to my delight, fully embraced open source, and actually opened all of their wiki source code several years ago. At the beginning of this year, Socialtext moved all of their code to GitHub, making it even more publicly accessible.

Last autumn there was talk at work of closing the open repositories. My thought at the time was that if they did, someone should fork all the open code. That's just the right thing to do, since the point of open source code is to keep it open for as long as it is relevant. At that point, I bought the domain name exoticslate.org. This was in keeping with the tradition of our developers making anagrams from the word SOCIALTEXT. We had made up over 50, iirc, including OX IS CATTLE, TOXIC TALES and TEXT IS COAL. "Exotic Slate" (although having an extra 'e') is a fantasic representation of Socialtext's rich and elaborate wiki product.

However Socialtext did not close the code, so I had yet another domain name with no good use. Fast forward...

A couple weeks ago I asked Socialtext if I could take Wikiwyg, their richtext editor component (which I had been working on for years), and revive it as a general, open source solution. They graciously agreed. I'm currently in Oslo at the Nordic Perl Workshop with Larry Wall and other old and new friends. Yesterday, at the workshop hackathon, I went to pull the Wikiwyg code out of Socialtext's main repository on GitHub, only to find the the repository was no longer open! Once I confirmed that it was in fact, closed off, I knew what the right thing to do was.

I'm not sure what will become of Exotic Slate. That's the exciting thing about open projects... they take on a life of their own. I hope that people will join me on irc.freenode.net/#exoticslate to take this journey forward.

Bonsoir Chamonix

After a long day of traveling, Yuval and I arrived in Chamonix. We had to drag over 100kg of our luggage around town but finally found a decent hotel. Hotel Pointe Isabelle.

The Hotel seems right in the middle of town. Right across from the McDonald's which is the first place we lugged to after getting off the bus. It was a good place to camp out with our gear while we looked for lodging. The micky-Ds has wifi here. It also has no gratuitous arches which made me feel slightly better about going to one after a couple decades hiatus. I had a salad, used the toilet and headed out on my journey.

FYI, they really do speak French in France. I tried to remember this as I walked around. Soon I had to talk to my first hotel manager. "Bonjour!", I said, knowing I had played all my cards already. "Bonsoir..." he mumbled. Merde! I already screwed up. The old man showed me a room, but it was obvious we weren't meant to spend the night together.

The Hotel Isabelle is €30 more per night, but what's a few euro when the people are nice, you are in the middle of all the drunk brits, you get a free breakfast, and you have a nice little balcony to sit on. Yuval and I dragged our junk upstairs, stepped outside, poured a glass of wine and had a few minutes to relax and realize we were in our new hometown.

Eurö Ingy

Ingy has left the building. Ingy has left the country. Ingy is in London today and making his way to Chamonix this weekend. Ingy digs his new European digs.

Back in October I was hosting the young and beautiful traveling Perl hacker, Yuval Kogman, aka nothingmuch, aka Use Teh Moose. Like me, Yuval works remotely for an American software company.

One day I asked him what he was doing for the winter and he said that he was moving to Chamonix France to spend 4 months backcountry snowboarding every day. Almost immediately I decided to join him. Never mind that I've never snowboarded a single time. Very soon I'll be doing it every day on Mont Blanc!

It has taken me the last 2.5 months to pack away all my belongings and pull up my roots again. (This is my 8th major move since 2000). I had to take an avalanche course and buy several thousand dollars worth of new equiptment, clothing and the season's pass. I had to explain to my employer that working for a California company from France is actually even better than working from Seattle. I had to pack 50 odd boxes and say as many goodbyes.

Here I am on the road again. I'm starting the journey by paying a week long visit to my lovely friend, Chris Dent, in the UK. I love his new home in Newbury. This is fortunate because my visa situation will require me to pay him a few more visits. An American can only spend 90 days of a 6 month period in continental Europe, without jumping through some ungodly visa hoops.

Despite this, I am so excited to be a vagabond (with a great job). It is probably the best way to live, imho. While I hope to have fun playing in the snow each day, I am even more happy about spending my nights with a top notch Perl hacker, whom I can bounce my crazy ideas off. Life is good!

The Labret Comes of Age

Happy Birthday, lip ring. You are 18 years old today. You can vote and fight, but you still can't drink...

I got this little ring in my lip on November 30th 1990. Back then I was one of maybe 2 dozen people in the country, and most definitely the only guy who also had a Dilbert day job. There was one other guy in Chicago, a girl in NYC, the guy in the Research book and a handful in San Francisco of course.

For the first 5 years I got asked 50 times a day, every day "Did that hurt?". Never any other question, and even in San Fran! So weird. I always answered with respect, but sometimes I wanted to scream.

Now it's a different world, and lip rings are completely passé, but I still like the little guy.

Tonight I'm Gonna Nibble Like It's 177.6

Forget 199.9. That was just passing thing. I decided to keep going. Losing weight somehow became more fun than drinking.

Today I finally got under 180 for the first time since I was ???. 21 maybe?

It's kinda cool. Not sure when to stop going down. I'm eating every 3 hours, and exercising a lot, so it's gotta be healthy, right?

One weird thing is that I think I somehow lost my allergy to kitty cats, which I picked up when I was 23. Not sure if there's any correlation. Not even positive I'm not allergic. I hope so.

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Sunday Recount

Note to self: 14 mile runs are HARD

NOPE

My dearest Lyssa is awesome as you can see for yourself. I sent her this and in no time at all she produced that.

Again, I haven't been blogging much. So what's been going on since the last post?

Well, I decided that losing weight was more fun than drinking. In the last 6 weeks I've managed to lose another 15 pounds. I can't remember when I last weighed under 190. Some time in the mid 90s I think. Now I'm shooting for 175 which I think was my weight when I was 13 years old.

Facebook disabled my account last week for using my name as my, um, name. It's all fixed up now. Ingy döt Net is legit and I even got them to lowercase the 'd' which you can't do using their site, and which, when I told them this, brought my dubious surname to their attention. More on this later...

I'm hosting a couple of my favorite Nubile Perl Hackers, jrockway from Chicago and nothingmuch for Tel Aviv. I dressed both of them up in Lycra yesterday and made them bike around Lake Washington. One of them ended up in the hospital, but he's ok. Just a little scraped up. Nubile Perl Hackers are basically indestructible.

Tonight I'm Gonna Party Like It's 199.9

It seems I haven't blogged since June 30th. Another thing I haven't done since June is drink alcohol. At the end of June I decided to go on the wagon for the Summer. Not for any particular reason. I just felt like it.

It was surprisingly easy, and not at all what I expected. I still did all the things I normally do, just stone sober. Interestingly I still got a hangover now and then! :)

In August I started wondering when I should have a drink again. Some old drinking friends of mine came through town, but still I resisted. One day I came up with a brilliant idea.

I've been running a lot this summer. I started running with the Seattle Frontrunners running club which meets very close to my house. I've also been losing a little weight. So I thought, I'll drink again whenever the scale reads under 200 lbs. (I started the Summer around 220 lbs.) But the brilliant part is that I decided, not only that... after I drink I'll have to weigh in under 200 again in order to drink again.

I like to drink good bourbon, wine and beer. I also like to weigh under 200 lbs, but in the last 10 years I've only been there a handful of days. Now I can use one to encourage the other! Brilliant, if I do say so myself!

Today I finally reached my goal for the first time. I woke up weighing 205. In a heavy workout I can lose around 7 lbs. I ate breakfast and lunch and some water. Around 5pm, after work, I decided to go for it. When I left the house I weighed 207. When I got back from a quick 40 mile bike ride I weighed 200.5. I decided to go on a short 2-3 mile run. This actually got me down to 197.5.

Bottom's up!