like a zombie returning from a michael jackson video

after essentially running out of energy during which i got to spending entire weeks doing administration tasks (not system admin, real admin; as in "papers" and crud) and otherwise dealing with life i decided to cocoon for a bit: spin a little web of quiet isolation around myself. it would've been great to have gone off somewhere amongst the trees (my favourite place to chill out are ragingly vibrant forests) but i had work to do. so instead i just backed off of my blog, irc, etc ...

but, with my theme song blaring in the background, i leap back to the keyboard. or something like that.

the last few days i played hooky and ignored most of my outstanding admin chores and just hacked. hoo boy did that feel good. nothing feels quite as good as going to bed at 5 am after pounding out some code. and nope, it wasn't on plasma though it was kde related.

in the meantime i've booked my flight to akademy. i've also been working on a presentation about our identity as a project. and putting together a montage set to music. i promise to horrify the akademy attendees for at least 3 minutes with jaw droppingly bad music with visuals that might best be described as "fast". how is this different than previous years, the seasoned kde veterans might ask? well, this time i will employ my laptop and a projector (a "beamer" for you euro types). be afraid.

i also somehow landed the 'job' of inviting kernel developers to akademy. something to do with meeting some of them in ottawa a few weeks back. so we should hopefully have a small handful of kernel devs there if the stars align. if that happens we'll do a kernel day on thursday the 28th. spread the word to your kernel hacker buddies.

i also came across this blog entry where the author, a windows user, says: "I think the default KDE desktop looks better then any of the windows desktops that i have seen ... One thing I do notice is the hard drive comes on way less under Kubuntu then it does in XP and thats a good thing .. In conclusion I don't think a windows user or any user can go wrong looking into Kubuntu."

kudos to the kubuntu team, though i think the same can be said of most kde distros these days. speaking of which, i see that the ark linux people made another release recently. as did both kde and the koffice team with amarok, digikam, kphotoalbum and many others also lining up to do the release thing.

there's even talk of a developer's preview release of the kde4 basics coming around the corner.

reflecting briefly again on the whole "low energy" thing ... it's really difficult for me to see the good in things when i'm drained. this is a very human reaction. but when i was younger i would take that perception as a trustworthy reflection of reality rather than a reflection of my own self. as i've gotten older i now, when entering such a space, note to myself that, yes, that's how it feels right now. but that it probably isn't quite that way and that it's really me asking me to not ride myself quite so hard for a bit so i can catch my breath. and so backing off a bit (which i never actually enjoy) i slowly regain the eyes with which to see both the strength as well as the weaknesses of my existence.

and so like a zombie returning from a day on the set of a michael jackson video, i shake off the heebie jeebies and plunge back into the reality of making cool things happen with other great people. (how's that for an odd visual?)