Weekend

Friday

Went to BiZone South Jersey support group. I don't usually go, but there was a "BiZone Planners" meeting in the area the following morning.

I slept at Robin's house, on a very hard floor. My back felt awful the next day until the night when Ping gave me a massage.

Saturday Morning

The BiZone Retreat -- It went really well. We figured out our priorities for the coming year. I'm going to be doing no event planning or facilitating, and focusing my energies on publicity and the conference.

I was disappointed that an idea/proposal that I had been working on for weeks didn't get accepted. However, elements of it were integrated into other projects. Oddly enough, it was rejected based on a prioritization/selection process that I created. So, I guess that shows that the process was fair, since it didn't self-select my pet project. We ran out of time, so we created an exploratory committee for the next conference rather than voting to move forward with the conference. There are some issues that we have to address.

Saturday Night

Pang's yearly toga party. It was fun, slightly smaller turn-out than usual. It is mostly her friends, so I didn't have many people to talk with. I hung out and did the good boyfriend thing. Ping was there but was a little down. I spent the night with her at my place. There was a bit of a mixup. A while back we had agreed to spend the night at Ping's place but when we left the party I forgot and drove home. She called me on her cell phone asking where I was (I was about a block from my place, she was a block from her place). Anyway, she ended up driving to my place.

Sunday Morning

Ping and I spent the morning talking and having sex. She was down, so the talking was really valuable, and so was the sex. We went to Dim Sum with Ying, Yang and Pang. (that is, my 2 SO's and one of my SO's SO). It was really good to have all 4 of us together. We talked a lot about potential baby names.

Sunday Afternoon

We planned to have Sunday afternoon as alone time for me and Pang, and we did. First we napped... we were both exhausted, especially Pang after hosting a really successful party. We talked a lot, had really excellent sex, and watched some TV. Then we went to...

Sort-a Superbowl Party

Friends that I went to college with have a Superbowl party every year. We hang out, ignore the game, and watch the commercials. This year's commercials were fairly mundane, which is either a sign of the flagging economy or maybe companies are realizing that 30 seconds on the superbowl doesn't really sell anything... it just flaunts your overly enlarged ego.

Sunday night

Ping asked me to come to her place for the night. We usually don't do work night's together, but she was down and felt it would cheer her up to be with someone. When I arrived I unpacked a bottle of Lubriderm and gave her a surprise foot massage. It really cheered her up. We went right to sleep. She has to work really early so we got up at, like, 5:30 or something. We were in her kitchen having o.j. by 6something and I was at work by 7am. Wowzers. I got a lot done with nobody in the office!

Poly non-moment at the Superbowl Party

It was a beer commercial. The guy was scared to tell a woman that he was interested in that he was also interested in her roommate. Instead of getting angry, she tells him that he can date them both. The closing caption: Think Fresh.

A woman at the party, who didn't know me, Ping and Pang, says, "Yeah, like that would ever happen!"

I grin and said, "Yeah."

(I don't think anyone else in the room hear the exchange.)

Open Source copies while Proprietary systems innovate

The proprietary world often criticises the OSS movement for making great clones but not innovating. I agree with this criticism... sometimes... but also point out that Microsoft has extended the definition of "innovation" to include "creative ways to combine old apps" and includes making an old technology pervasive to be "an innovation". This becomes an escalating war of words, each redefining innovation. The OSS movement claims that free versions that clone proprietary software is an innovation.

I made a comment on someone's post about people putting crappy data into CDDB and later realized that this is an opportunity for FreeDB to do a lot better.

The FreeDB people cloned the CDDB concept so they could install their better politics into the system. That's a nice start. If they really want to win the hearts and minds of the world, they have to provide a better service. That means provide a different database schema. They need to fix the problems with "Various Artist" albums, with "remix" entries, and "mix CDs". They need to provide a web-based user interface for adding new entries, for suggesting improvements, and making corrections. (When there are 2 entries for the same disc I want people to be able to "vote" on which one they like better so that badly formatted ones slowly disappear). They can provide the old CDDB API so that old software doesn't break.

If they did that, people would use them over CDDB. However, as long as they are simply cloning a bad system, they get no fanmail from me.

And that goes to the people cloning MS-Office, Windows, UNIX, and everything else in that category.