• All Saints; home for Pizza lunch with David, caught up happily; watched Game Night - amusing. Put a shroud around external automatic light to stop it lighting up the neighbors. Got new monitor setup for Mac machine.

• Up earlyish, helped J. tidy & prepare. S&C&A&J arrived, lovely to catch up with them & their Swiss skiing holiday, B&A came too. A fine lunch together - exchanged Truffle to his owners, out for a walk, played games; quizz organized by E. Fun.

• Chased end of year admin, last purchasing pieces, had a couple of calls with Moorcrofts: good stuff. Tidied the house and worked through a list of things that needed doing.

• Some mail chew, admin bits - trying to get some more CapEx sorted before end of year. Plugged away at a task list, and a set of home maintenance problems.
• Encouraged by the ongoing performance saga in flamegraphs of calc - why not spend huge chunks of time counting items in a 10k long std::list ? Lots of good things coming for calc online. Updated blog.
• Bit of evening hacking; nailed a deadlock regression in core's trace event recording.

• Up earlyish, put up a long overdue motion activated light for J's counselling room with Dad; lunch, M&D left to return up-north.
• Watched movies, slugged with the babes.

• Up earlyish to bid 'bye to R&A, breakfast, pottered around, put up house-sign with Dad. Lunch together, B&A off home. Put up pictures, got tidied up somewhat, spent time with M&D.

• Happy Christmas to all; stocking opening in the morning together. All Saints, H. played Organ, and tried to pull stops variously in the morning for a quick service lead by Robert.
• Home for a sherry & a lovely Turkey lunch. Present unwrapping, played & talked together.

• Up earlyish; out for a walk in the morning with the babes along the dyke - discovered our favourite branch for swinging from had rotted & collapsed in the wind; hmm.
• Home, B&A & Truffle had arrived, lovely to see them. Down to the crib service to practice the organ & do some orchestration with H. service.
• N. made shepherds pie for us all. Played Among-us in the evening with T&B.

• Up lateish; got the house setup, out shopping with J. to get stocked up, buy Turkey etc. Talked with the parents. R&A arrived later, ham dinner in the evening, talked until late.

• Up lateish; some mail chew. M&D arrived early, spent time with them & relaxed together the rest of the evening.

• Up late, tech planning call, caught up with a number of colleagues, catch up with Kara in the evening.

• Partner meeting much of the morning; slides, last Productivity All-hands of the year, sales call, sync with Christopher. Out to Men of Faith Christmas dinner in the evening .

• Up early, took E. to school; mail chew, marathon five hours of back-to-back meetings, caught up with Aron, mgmt call. Bed early, slept badly.

• Mail (and increasingly scad of instant messing) chew. Not clear to me when E-mail started to take much more of a back-foot to the slew of decisions.
• Planning call much of the morning; marketing catch-up with Richard; K8s controller code review with Rash & Quikee. Partner call / interview in the evening.
• H's friends arrived for a dinner party.

• Up earlyish, helped 2m Peter with the organ stops; somehow the Swell to Great coupler always makes me think that the Swell manual will use the Great stops, but its always the opposite. Infant baptism; hmm.
• Home for a Pizza lunch, some degree of slugging before emptying all the helpful leaf-collectors in the recesses of the house wall. Watched silly movies.
• Out to the All Saints Carol Concert; preserved voice to try to get Dark's In the Bleak Midwinter out reasonably - with mixed success; still the town band did well.

• Up earlyish. Amazed to get a mail from an injured friend; packed the car with ply-wood & tools & set off to secure the area - poor chap.
• Back, mail chew, caught up on TDF back-log and asked some questions left & right.

• Out for a run with J. partner meeting, frantic slide creation for a TTT on improved COOL testing, another partner meeting. Catch up with Adfinis - encouraging as always.
• Out with J. and H.N.M. to a lovely performance by Eboracum Baroque of Handel's Messiah at Great St Mary's. Amazingly crisp and in some places amusing performance in contrast to the occasionally ragged massed choirs & orchestras. Happy memories of accompanying in the Orchestra at C.H. Lovely to have all the family back together.

• Mail chew, tech. planning call, misc. admin through the afternoon and evening.
• Home-group Christmas dinner - great to have lots of people around the table & packed in eating & talking happily.

• Partner call, interview/chat, worked on slides & snatched lunch. Partner Council - great to have lots of smart people in the room.
• Weekly sales call, catch up with Cor, interview in the evening.

• Annual review calls variously; mail chew, admin left & right; encouraging call with Hubert & a partner & customer. Worked on Partner Council slides until late.

• Planning call for the morning; lunch with H. Encouraging conference retrospective; more mail and admin catch-up.

• All Saints, played with Cedric & Becky & Mary, Robert spoke well. Back to wake various babies at noon - and have a fine pizza lunch.
• H. taxi'd babes to StAG, slugged and watched movies; until Jocelyn & David popped over - really good to catch up with them.

• Up early, J. drove us all to see B&A in Aldeburgh. Hacked in the car, and reviewed documents at length. Fine lunch with them.
• Replaced bulbs variously, poked at dripping tap - apparently user-replaceable washers are no fun these days: instead they make a whole replaceable brass component with grim plastic insert: annoying. Sought one in town to no avail; ordered on-line & gave up. Tidied up garden furniture.
• Home; worked late.

• Partner calls, E-mail catch-up, sync with Caolan & call with Neil; plugged away at some hackery - measuring tile sizes, compression levels and so on.

• To the venue, Richard videoing people, somewhat quieter, gave a talk on what we've been up to recently in COOL.
• Impressed by admiring the frenzy of people pressed into M4 metro line carriages - spent 2+ hours doing a 25 minute journey (an incident) - learned about walking between stations to one where people get off - so creating a space; and missed my Eurostar. Home eventually.

• Met up with Naomi & Richard rather early for breakfast. Set out to Paris' Open Source Experience. Gave out several hundred mints, stickers, talked to a ton of friends, old & new, partners, customers, community - lots of good things going on in France it seems. Shared a booth with Arawa.
• Out for a fine (Italian) dinner with Arawa's growing team too - we hope to need a bigger restaurant in future. Bed late after checking slides.

• Up early again; no trains from Newmarket; drove into Cambridge; trains to Paris variously. Re-read and reviewed tile management logic left & right; came up with a number of improvements.
• Off to first the wrong hotel, and then the right one for the Nextcloud Enterprise Day Paris (in French) - interesting people & presentations; caught up with Frank & his team & customers.
• Checked-in to the Hotel Gaston - I don't know where this fashion of painting a hotel beautifully, and then graffiting all over it to make it ugly & unpleasant came from; hey ho.
• Out to a cocktail party at Ludovic's XWIKI HQ - lovely to see lots of great French FLOSS people there, meet Anca, catch up with Clement; back late with Eloy.

• As part of my 4D chess / cunning plan to convince everyone I'm more foolish even than I seem - I got up super early, and took a train to London/St Pancras to discover I was a day early for my train; bother. Got some quiet code-reading in on the train home at least.
• Planning call, sync with Naomi & Pedro, finalized annual reviews, and dispatched numbers left & right. Worked late.

• Up early, off to visit Naomi in Loughborough; met her at Holywell Church and enjoyed the service together.
• Out for a pub lunch together, and back to for a guided tour of engineering things - interesting. Out to visit Ruth & boys very briefly to drop some hardware off.
• Bid 'bye to N. and drove home; dinner, bed early.

• J. out to counselling training; slept exhaustedly for much of the morning; lunch with the babes, slugged. Cleaned up blog. To work!
• Discovered lots of un-read and answered E-mail in the backlog; bother - worked on that.

• Partner call, sync with Miklos; another partner sync. Got to some debugging and hacking finally - whoot; found a nasty incremental view update regression & eventually fixed it late.

• Technical planning call, sync with finance & Deirdre on end of year comp adjustments - monster spreadsheets of doom; good testing action: why is it that problems tend to only show up in the most confidential documents - and in the least debuggable places? fun.
• Into the office quickly to free up some rack-space; wiped misc. hardware. Started working back through E-mail.

• Partner sync, chat with some friends, sync with Naomi, weekly sales call, Mark showed up to look at our plumbing problems - nice. Quick sync with some FLOSS leaders.

• Catch up for overdue 1:1's, sync with Stelios & Mitch, new hardware ordering action; undergoing a bigger hardware refresh.

• Mail chew; early QA call, planning call, lunch, marketing call(s), some admin, TDF board call, dinner. Forgot all-evening PCC meeting - bother.

• All Saints, violin mostly, Robert spoke well; back for roast lunch. Relaxed & watched movies while also taxi'ing kids from A to B variously.

• Up late, J. out - pottered around the house mending things and tidying up variously. Visited Mark in our old home to get a recommendation on a plumber to fix our pump.
• Mail chew; bit of hacking on OSL sandboxing; J. back and David over for a pizza dinner, and some Codenames + lego assembly goodness together; got a better sandbox cut merged before bed for CI results on Monday.

• Partner call, sync with Lily & Andras; lunch, another partner call, admin, legal call.
• Ad-hoc visit from the very engaging & switched on Principle of Tyndale House, amusingly over-cited for re-discovery of a once-lost star catalog, but more importantly for his contributions to Biblical Scholarship. A very interesting chap. My friend James has impressive Gaunxi it seems.

• Up early; feeling somewhat better, technical planning call - lots of ideas to further improve quality. Mail backlog chewage, catch up with Andras, and Anna.

• Slowly recovering; slides. Monthly All Hands call, lots to say, over-ran by an hour; legal call in the evening.

• Slept somewhat feverishly; voice nearly completely gone; cancelled a day of 1:1's. Partner call, worked on slides for monthly mgmt meeting; had that.
• Most interesting to see the Kiteworks acquisition announcement. Got to a bit of hacking; call with Holger lateish; bed.

• Slept remarkably badly; something about coughing & congestion that's not conducive to sleep. With deep regret swapped Richard in for the OpenUK Awards ceremony tonight.
• Miklos ran the planning call; I listened here & there and typed. Setup VPN (again) with Mitch afterwards; lunch; mail chew.
• Finally got to some tangled financial bits & eventually to a little hacking.

• Up lateish, voice nearly gone, All Saints - played bass & violin, used last of voice catching up with people.
• Home for a fine steak lunch - slugged throatily and watched movies; bit of gardening with J. more slugging.

• Up earlyish; been feeling somewhat throaty recently: too much talking, not enough hacking perhaps.
• Braeakfast, bit of admin, spent much of the day reading python code with E. for her GCSE computer science; voice really flaking unfortunately.
• Finally packed stair-erection tools back into the garage & cleaned the office. Out to see David S's next flight of stairs erection fun. Ham eggs & chips for dinner.
• Caught up on some work while babes watched The Hobbit with J.

• Partner call, sync with Cor, lunch, partner call. Sync with Deirdre, spent some time trying to reproduce a performance issue with Caolan too.
• Tested async merge cells properly. J. helping out with town light switch-on at Church. Got Thinkpad docking station to work - USB ports there are not as busted as laptop ones it seems.

• Technical planning call, COOL community call, sync with Eloy & Naomi, legal call; dug into some code - spent a bit of time hacking! made merge-cells' corner-case popup dialogs async in calc. More calls.

• Early partner call, 2024 financial projections, in-person meeting with Simon, lunch, mail catch-up, weekly sales call. Band practice in the evening.

• Early planning call 2nd half with Naomi & Anna, catch up with Pedro, lunch, sync with Eloy, Miklos, admin, patch review.

• Lengthy planning call in the morning and conference post-mortem, calls, admin, customer call.

• All Saints, band practice; pizza lunch, applied slugging to recover; more Anne of Green Gables.

• Up earlyish; off to David Snashall's to work on removing the previous (turning) staircase: easy - and then fitting some beautiful new oak stairs in their place: hard. With the stirling help of David M. and a number of setbacks: who would think the ceiling beam would twist by 1 inch horizontally over only 8 inches vertically etc. Got it in - leaving the next staircase for next time.
• Home for dinner with David; bed - tired.

• Partner call, k8s controller code review call; UX review call, various team calls & started trying to catch up on the conference E-mail backlog until late.

• Up early, packed, breakfast, checked out; SCC much of the day - quieter; good talks, train to the Airport, flight back to STN. Blog catchup, and a bit of hacking on the plane.
• Drove home, caught the end of Bible Study group; bed.

• Up early, SCC all day, call with Andras; misc. meetings, partners, customers, and so on; some great product feedback. Kebap with Attitude dinner with the team in the evening; attempted to get to bed early but sucked into E-mail.

• Up earlyish; walked around the Berlin Messe at quite some length before finding the way into the Smart Country Convention: a fine show.
• Met up with Lily, Marc, Richard, lots of partners and old friends, on our joint openDesk booth; talked left and right to partners, customers, potential customers, and so on.
• Meal at a Prison converted to a Restaurant late that night; lost the competitive paying game to Niels (again!) - more effort required; thankful to the great OpenProject team.

• Planning call most of the morning; lunch with M. Back to chasing various fires; partner call. Packed.
• Drove to STN, flight to BER, arrived at hotel late, caught up with Marc, sleep.

• Woke H. for practice & playing Piano for AllSaints - nice to play together again. Back for a fine roast meal, and quartet practice afterwards: sounding surprisingly good still - as the smaller musicians mature.
• Ferried people to/from various stations, Church bits etc. intermittently much of the afternoon; watched some Outnumbered with J.

• Up earlyish, J. off for counselling training; roused sisters breakfast, and drove to S&C's - arrived in time for a soup lunch.
• Boys off to practice cricket; took the ladies through five charity shops in Princes Risborough; bought a popular economis book to match the various dresses and other bargins.
• Home, J. arrived, helped a little with fireworks left & right, G&A&I arrived too - lovely dinner; fine fireworks, good company; left reluctantly. Drove home with J. while H. drove the other babes. Bed.

• Took the Leaf in for an MOT and service with J. to Bury. Partner call, customer & partner call.
• Did a somewhat ad-hoc TTT with basic Linux shell usage tips. Snatched some lunch, customer integration call, admin.
• Picked up N. from Ely station, lovely to see her again, McDonalds waiting for H, drove them home lots of excited re-united sisters; bed.

• Overslept; worked on slides, customer call; COOL community call, catch up with Pedro; lunch.
• Mail, catch up with Kendy, sync with Philippe.

• Up early; pinched & punched for the 1st of the month (very gently) by a more awake daugther than me. Earlyish partner presentation with Andras; Lily back!
• Next partner call; caught up with Naomi on some marketing; weekly Sales call; misc. patch review. Dropped a windows machine into the office for Skyler; tried to find some touch monitor hardware nearby somehow.
• Home; dinner, Band practice & All Souls communion service; home, back to work - slides until extremely late for pitch tomorrow; sleep!

• Catch up with Andras, chat with Pedro; admin, lunch, sync with Eloy; catch up with Ash, poked at COWASM bits left and right, mended the build. Worked on slides until late at night.

• Mail chew, early planning call; took E. to have her braces finally removed in Cambridge: the last girl needing multiple two-hour trips; why orthodontists don't have mobile rooms & camp out at larger schools for days on end is completely unclear to me.
• Home, lunch, marketing content call; misc. admin, catch up with Henry; dinner, back to work for a bit. Paid tax bill.

• Up lateish - a welcome hour change lie-in. All Saints - played Bass with iSing worship - recording to click-tracks make sense I guess, but musicality and ensemble is made harder. Caught up with Ian, and met a Luke after the service.
• Home for a fry-up with E. waited for M. to return home while watching nonsense on Prime. Lovely to have her home.

• Up early, tidied the house; finally dis-assembled and re-assembled the dish-washer replacing a rather sharp piece of metal and plastic frontage - at a gain of only two screws: nice. Cleaned the accumulated grease off with some old meths, without realizing what a smell it made in the kitchen: hmm.
• Posted L's J's vital missing left toy back to him. Missing M. - gone to visit N. in Loughborough. S&C& boys, and B&A over to see us. Out for a walk with them.
• Slugged and watched Pain Hustlers with J. and E. - gripping; some more work until late; getting WASM things building & reviewing a SoW.

• Partner call, mail chew, wrote slides for an internal tea-time training on solving arbitrary problems: or what to do when you get stuck as an engineer; gave the talk, lunch while in the next partner call.
• Out for a run with J. dinner, more work, re-watched Hacksaw Ridge somewhere here.

• L. & J. and babes out into Bury StEdmonds. Tech planning call, COOL community call, admin.
• Out to see Dave S's home, and move an unfeasibly substantial oak beam to support some stairs into place - went very smoothly.
• Home; more work - wrestled podman into having the right uid/gid config to let me run anything; dinner; got blog up-to-date; caught up with N. bed.

• Partner sync call, stand-up, catch up with Ash, Mail chew; partner sales engineering call, weekly sales call, interview with Miklos; catch up call.
• Louise & her kids arrived to stay; caught up with them over dinner; Band practice with Becky & Mary.

• Early stand-up, quick catch up with Pedro. Sync with Eloy, interview, Miklos, catch up with Stelios, sync with Holger.

• Breakfast & bid 'bye to R. Half term; some lie-ins. Planning call, partner call, daily deadline chasing stand-up, partner call.

• All Saints, Pizza, slugging variously; R. over in the afternoon; lovely to catch up with him until late.

• J. out to the garden center with E. Spent some time improving the garage; used John's ARCOY Dovetailer to make an extended monitor stand out of plywood. Why is it that monitor stands never have enough vertical travel?
• Disassembled insulated water-tank enclosure to allow easier maintenance. Slugged & watched Safety Not Guaranteed - touching.

• A day of holiday - with J. - lovely. Into London together to vist the Tate: and see Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, Madame X, and other John Singer Sargents, with a few Turners.
• Out for a late full-English breakfast; partner call while walking to the (mis-named) Affordable Art Show - browsed - quite some interesting & amusing pieces happily with J.
• Fortuitously met up with S&C&A&J at the Globe, had some dinner & caught the train to Cambridge: stuck there - incompetent trains: taxi home.

• Tech. planning call, COOL community call. Partner call, some more monthly mgmt bits until late. Decided to buy the Fairphone 5 - now it has an OLED screen, and current phone is clapped out.

• Up early; into the office; nice to see Skyler and others in the office. Early partner call. Met up with Richard. visited the LAVA lab with Doug.
• Recorded marketing video content in the morning with Richard; lunch. Collabora quarterly management meeting until late; overlapping with Productivity all-hands call, and a partner call.
• Drove home; caught the end of Kelsey's farewell dinner - rotating to South Korea.

• 1:1's with Andras, Pedro, Eloy, monthly management meeting. Plumber visited to admire our failed sprinkler / boost pump valve; hmm.

• Dropped E. to school; attempted to accelerate the morning planning call with better preparation; somewhat shorter - but fewer mgmt staff around.
• Misc. calls & admin, marketing content call.

• All Saints; J. ran kids work. Out for a walk with J - a nice habit; took babes to church.

• J. out much of the day for training in child trauma counselling.
• Up lateish, off to Ridgeons to buy thin ply & Celotex for a new hatch sandwich - missing a roofrack; so roped a sandwich onto the roof through the windows. Mercifully reminded by a helpful attendant that it was worth not roping the drivers door closed before getting going.
• Cut down (a band-saw and multitool-saw special) and laminated a nearly 8x4 loft hatch to cover the stairs with gun foam together to be reasonably light - couterweighted suitably; and all good. Enjoyed J's individual pies with David in the evening.
• Up late finishing some analysis & a report; finally sent.

• Slept rather better, shoulder position improving neck pain: good. Partner & customer meeting. Chat with Jaume & Darshan.
• Bruce & Anne over for lunch - great to see them, another partner call, a gap, and another partner call. Mail, tasks, dinner.

• Technical planning call, COOL community call, admin, patch review, lunch; built complicated project pricing model, partner call, sync with Julie & Tracie.
• Cell group in the evening with Cyril, Alex & Nicki.

• Partner call; lots of admin, review, bits of hackery through the day - very productive when trying to avoid working on something else: cf. Structured Procrastination. Several calls.
• Visited the Physio - "don't sit in one position for too long" - probably I should be more worried about the ingrowing chair. Sales call on return, poked at expenses.
• Poked at system-tap trace to find more COW savings between forkit and kit processes.

• Mail chew, a day packed with 1:1's - worked late, tried to get system-tap setup - but my kernel is out of step with the debug packages somehow.

• Attempted a new format planning call - faster but better? Project planning call, review call. Worked late, slept badly.

• Played bass & violin at church - communion service, Robert spoke engagingly, home for Pizza lunch. Ongoing painful shoulder since returning from Maintz, getting worse. Out for a nice walk with J.
• Took babes to/from StAG, watched The Tomorrow War special effects are getting noticably better - or my eyesight is getting worse, or both.

• J. out for a counselling course; up late, worked part of the morning while E. and M. revised. David over for lunch, set too at the garage: got a bench setup, some more shelves, and tidied lots of guff out of the place - more floor appeared. Pulled pork dinner together - nice. Watched The Wind Rises - a Ghibli film not about a small girl: fun.

• Up early for several partner calls, catch up with Thorsten.
• J. nobly removed a couple of garden stumps much more easily after a year of delay - more roses for the garden.
• More calls; project analysis, spreadsheets etc. Got to report writing in the evening.

• Tech. planning call, COOL community call - and some good calc profiling action of an optimized build; lunch. Monthly marketing strategy meeting.

• Took M. to school; partner call, admin, another partner call, weekly sales call.
• Worked late trying to make thunderbird 115 do my bidding. You would think that the ability to move a set of mails to another folder would be a feature of a mail client (using the keyboard). A Nostalgy add-on used to do it, now 'Quick Folder Move' seems to be the new add-on needed - but of couse, with added intermittent focus issues & unhelpful keybindings. With Geoff's help managed to discover most of my lost IMAP mailboxes under a bug with unified inboxes, and another lost set with an unusual '..' prefix on the IMAP server; nice.

• Catch up with Andras, then Eloy, then Pedro, and more calls - discovered the latest Chrome not working with WASM on my machine.
• Decided it was high time to switch to Leap 15.5 - did an abhortive live downgrade from Tumbleweed - not a good experience: mostly yet-another victim of glibc symbol versioning. Re-booted and completed the upgrade, mending some odd behavior of procps package by manually unpacking cpio and ... discovered that Chrome still doesn't work - bother. Switched to an empty profile and all is well - at least a newer system.

• Rather a long planning call, lunch, marketing content call, catch up with Christopher, partner call. Worked late.

• Up earlyish, All Saints for a family service with Rick leading. J. dropped H. to Ely to go back to Durham. Home for a Pizza lunch, out for a walk with J.
• Dropped babes to StAG; slugged and watched Jack Reacher movie(s) with J. picked babes up, bed.

• Lie in, pottered around tidying the house, mending this & that, turned some carrier-bag holders for Dad on the lathe.
• Spent some time with H. as she packed. Did a number of un-soldering and swapping capacitors on a broken Philips monitor PSU at some length; sadly nothing good came of it. Disassembled the monitor instead - nice to see the diffusers & LED backlights up-close.

• SeaTable conference goodness all day; an interesting product type to get deeper into and engage with. Caught up with Jonathan & Daniel.
• Stayed at the University typing until late, Kebap in the center of Mainz, plane late at night back to Stansted, navigated closed roads home eventually.

• Up unfeasibly early, drove to STN, flight to Hahn, bus into town, taxi to the Gutenburg University - great to meet up with the Seafile team, interesting talks:
• Out for dinner in the evening together; attempted a bespoke Hawaian Flamenkuchen - not a success; but good company.

• A couple of interviews, and a partner call.
• Productivity All Hands call - the mis-pronunciation of Customers as Costumers - never ceases to mildly amuse me and enlivens things: Costume Drama - the way to go.
• Checked in and booked parking for the Seafile Conference tomorrow.
• Poked at profiles, tickets, research etc. Bed early.

• Early partner call, chewed mail, brief catch-up with Pedro, partner call, lunch. Sync with Eloy, monthly management meeting.
• Somehow after a week of conference, trying to get back into sitting-in-one-spot-all-day mode again.

• Dropped E. to school. Planning call, lunch, marketing content call. Admin bits.
• Packed the car, managed to ge the bike rack on the back; set off with J, and N. to Loughborough. Got N. fed, settled into her room, and partially unpacked. Blessed her & bid 'bye.
• Out for a burger in town, and drove home together; another daughter not at home: traumatic.

• Somehow ended up hacking over midnight; got AVX2 profiled - 2x faster than optimized C++ - for processing 8 pixels at once, a somewhat smaller win than expected.
• Got home very early, sleep. Up at midday for brunch with N. M. and E. - lovely to see them and spend time with them again.
• StAG in the evening; passionate sermon explaining the text with a Welsh flavour - lovely.
• Home to see J. and H. - back from Durham and to catch up with their news.
• Picked up babes, found lost soldering iron(s) for H. and had the fun of building a set of tools for N. to take to University. Bed early.

• Up; snatched breakfast at speed; got to the venue just in time to give a reasonably stock talk to students on why contributing to LibreOffice is awesome for student's skills as developers.
• Call from H. trying to find a soldering iron to mend a failed Philips LCD screen PSU board; on to talk a little about a few economic themes.
• Caught up with Florian at some length; its been too long; bid 'bye to many friends, thanked Gabriel and other 1&1'ers - and headed for dinner with Caolan, Cor & Uwe.
• Got to the Airport early; RyanAir flight delayed by around an hour shock - on-time RyanAir flights appear to be like the yetti for me.
• Got blog updated, and slides up-loaded on the plane.

• Up lateish; listened to a somewhat saturated Caolan's crash-testing talk on jitsi streaming - hopefully the recordings will be great quality. To the venue, talked to lots more people back to back.
• Held an impromptu talk for Uwe and some others on COLEAT - Tor's IAT patching interception wizardry - finally noticed.
• Community dinner in the evening; up until early in the morning working on slides.

• Breakfast, to the (great) venue, enjoyed the various keynotes from 1&1, and gave my own. Intense hallway track goodness, talking with people, fun.
• Into town again to a historic restaurant for some interesting food, and good company; bed late.

• Up rather late; some recovery at least. Worked on slides. Out to the venue meeting Leif on the way - for community meeting, instead spent much of the time in the hallway track - really good to meet so many old friends and colleagues in person.
• Out into the town via the Metro to visit the Old Town with Gabriel and lots of the community. Back late, worked on slides; into late-night conference working mode.

• Checked out, to the venue, caught up with more people left & right. Off to the Airport, met Svante, flight to Bucharest for the LibreOffice conference. Worked on slides on the plane.
• Arrived via bus & Bolt to the hotel, and out for dinner with Raal & Dennis added - good to see lots of people in-person again.

• Up later; off to the venue, hunted people to get feedback and ways to improve - useful. Debugged a few interesting issues, got started on some builds.
• Fascinating AI ethics talk from Daphne's favorite professor; good stuff.
• Lily back early, dinner with Richard from SuNet, and to bed - via more slide creation.

• Up earlyish; breakfast together, headed to the conference venue. Enjoyed more talks, gave a lightning talk (plus some bonus standup with Brent Gervais).
• Enjoyed Simon's summary of the developing regulations coming up in the EU, really pleased to see Sweetshark again in-person.
• Caught up with Stefan, Frank, Jos, Fabian, Philippe, Maxime and many more. Out for a fine dinner in the evening in Frank's Tesla with Simon & our joint teams - great to work together.

• Met Niels and Wieland from OpenProject over breakfast on the way to the fascinating Motion.Lab venue with Naomi, Eloy & Lily for the Nextcloud conference.
• Great venue, lots of interesting people. Enjoyed various talks, including Max Schrems; caught up with lots of the wider Nextcloud team. Gave my first ever workshop inside a Bus converted into several meeting rooms - missing Gokay who built the slides with Pedro. Pizza together.

• Up early, M. driving lesson, H. working from home; bid 'bye to J.
• Partner call, H. dropped me to the station, train to airport - flight to Berlin. Met up with Eloy, got to our appartment, met up with Lily in person for the first time & had dinner together - fun.

• Technical planning call, COOL community call, partner review call, sync with Miklos. Off to the Dentist for some drilling action. More slideware & review.
• Bible study group with Nicki & Alex. Up late reviewing M. unviersity applications.

• E. off early for some DofE hiking action.
• Catch up with Pedro, Eloy, weekly sales call, worked on slides for pending conferences, sync with Philippe.

• Up too early, dropped car for windscreen replacement in Milton with J. Sync with Quikee, Andras, potential customer call, lots of admin. Got mended car back with J.

• Mail chew, loong planning call - a busy time of year with everyone back and working hard. Marketing content call, project mgmt call with Lily & Andras. Picked up E. from school. Got Mac hardware for Skyler ordered.
• Reviewed and singed-off the 2022 accounts with Philippe. Dinner; worked late.

• All Saints in the morning, Robert spoke well, increasingly need glasses to see the music though - annoying. Pizza lunch. Lots of slugging, watched Jupiter Rising.

• Mens prayer breakfast at Church, home, packed. Out to Holkham beach - 30 centigrade, lovely warm sea, had a wonderful day with the whole family; F&C in the car on the way home.

• Partner call, code review with Rash & Quikee, lunch, partner call, E-mail, sync with Tracie, Miklos, Eloy.
• Nextcloud conference slide-ware poking with Naomi.

• Mail and slide chew, tech planning call, more slide work. Lunch with B&A, partner presentation; visited bungalow nearby for a tour with B&A - looks good. Back to work.
• Bible study group in the evening, good to see people again after a break, Isaiah 40 - good stuff.
• Wrote up my blog alongside a frantically working M. to support her finishing her EPQ.
• Amused to see right to repair applied helpfully to ice cream machines by iFixit and others; particularly in light of Matthias' apparently prescient Ada & Zangemann book.

• Early partner project call; plugged away at admin for much of the day. Weekly sales call with Eloy back. Band practice in the evening with Cedric. Worked on slides with Andras. Tessa over to see N.

• Catch up with Dennis, sync with Andras, lunch, Eloy, then Pedro. Dug at project analysis & reporting.

• Planning calls; marketing content call, marketing team call, encouraging partner call.

• All Saints, played bass & violin; home for lunch. Babes all out for dinner with Aron - watched all of Citadel - hmm; got stuck into Dune - better.

• Got some sneaky hacking in on AVX2 optimization of the RLE code, merged in Caolan's nice XOR to packed bits magic.
• M&D up - breakfast chez-Jules together, and chatted.
• J's family arrived, good to see Sue & Clive&A&J, Bruce&Anne too. M&D left - went to look at a bungalow for B&A nearby. Played games with the babes.
• After they'd left - eliminated a branch, eliminated a loop, and we have an optimized, branch-free loop that chews eight pixels each iteration: nice. Up late, slept badly - hacking before sleep considered harmful over-stimulation.

• Partner and staff calls much of the day, catch up with Deirdre - our in-house compensation expert: great.
• Wrestled RyanAir flights to the Nextcloud conference, and on to the LibreOffice conference, and then to Seafile Seadays too - should be a fun Autumn.
• Discovered that my blog still had an issue with a Swedish conspiracy, thanks to Jeff Fortin Tam for noticing - perl -pi.bak re-wrote everything to use the wonderful web archive.
• Spent time with M&D between times catching up with them - lovely to have them to stay.

• Plugged away at normal calls, slideware.
• Chris over for lunch to examine where best to put solar panels. Nice to have a friend with minute-by-minute weather data sets: is there more sun in the morning or afternoon for example, how does that compare with the price: are west facing panels more valuable than east ? templar is quite cool.
• Sync with Miklos. M&D to stay, on their way back from Grant & Anne's.

• Exciting chat with Gulsah, sync with Hubert, interesting call with lawyer. Worked on slideware.

• Call with Andras, admin, call with Caolan, admin.
• Up late poked at some AVX2 vpermd LUT building and some mechanics around that.

• Out for a run with J. planning call much of the morning, admin.

• All Saints, home made pizza, slept a lot.

• M. finished her chess-board, lots of planing and orbital sanding action; bought some clear varnish for a nice finish - job mostly done: good.

• Brief Partner call, customer call, admin, partner call.
• Poked at ChatGPT - perhaps it can help me optimize my code; gave it some RLE code initRow that could benefit from some love; not impressed. Some great abstract tips eg.

  1. Avoid Unnecessary Dynamic Memory Allocation:

  But it came up with a change (complete with comment) that was:
  

  -    uint32_t scratch[width];
  +    uint32_t *scratch = new uint32_t[width]; // Allocate on the stack

  Not ideal. I was hoping for some clever idea around something new VPCONFLICTD or better some shifts and VPCMPD or somesuch to perhaps make performance better. At least it gave some good factual lookup answers like a prettier technical search engine.
• Mental note to read Paul Graham on How to do great work - and do better work.
• Read code, chased a bug collaboratively - fun; filed more tickets.

• Technical planning call, perf. call, COOL community meeting, a round-up of our Hack-week, catch-up with Miklos and a break from calls to do administration until late at night. E. got her statistics GCSE results: good work.

• Early partner call, work, same partner call, weekly sales call, admin. Out for an unusually positive doctors appointment.
• Catch up with Caolan on performance, and Lubos too; band practice in the evening.

• 1:1 with Andras, and Pedro, partner call, chunks of admin and mail catch-up. More resin-pouring in the evening - managed to mix in some gravel & sand to patch our resin drive at the same time.

• Mail chew, planning call, marketing catch-up call, admin, sync with Nicolas.
• Apparently no nesting of E-mail threads and replies aside from the top-level in TDF's Discourse - a massive regression from simple E-mail lists, particularly in the unhelpful flameware style threads where you want to read the sensible people down a branch and junk the rest; hmm. Continued to work back through holiday E-mail.
• Supervised more resin pouring in the evening; fun.

• All Saints, played with H. and Simon. Home, put up a decent blind in the office with H. David over to catch-up, pizza, snoozed while Rummikub was played, out for a walk with J. and D. on the race-track.
• Tea chez-Jules, babes returned with Josie for a sleep-over.

• Breakfast with the family, chat with R&A, bid 'bye and set off to pick up M. from a Christian teen camp at Kingham Hill School. Drove four interesting young people home via Cambridge.
• Pottered about somewhat, M. checked out her resin pieces and chess-board - looking good.

• Up lateish, partner call, partner 1:1, lunch, admin and project planning.
• Drove across to see Robert & Amelia & babes. Lovely meal, good to see the babes, and catch up with them. Bed-time stories, and out to a bar with Robert until late; then Factorio until even later.

• Up early with N. - polling the UCAS page, much improved since H's results coming; great A-levels, and 1st choice of Loughborough for Design Engineering: good stuff.
• Mailed the Collabora team about hack-week: a chance for much of the team not working on urgent customer stuff - to kick-back and work on whatever they think is a priority around COOL & the LibreOffice technology.
• Technical planning call, COOL community meeting, lunch with Chris. Partner call, 1:1 with Miklos, estimation call, sync with Hubert, admin.
• Caught up with Chris & Leanna, poked at some resin bits in the garage with Chris, and finished Ambassadors with H.

• Pod point repair-person arrived in the morning; good to see them - amazing how little (in terms of electronics & complexity) there is inside a pod-point: a few chunky looking relays and a controller on a PCB - eventually they should become dirt-cheap.
• Partner call, weekly sales call, sync with Stelios, catch up with William, quick lunch with the babes, monthly all hands call. Patch review with Skyler.
• Chris, Leanna & A. came to stay for a bit.

• Catch up with Kendy; sync with Pedro; sync with Shehr, CP monthly management meeting, spent some time on estimation with Miklos.

• Up lateish, mail chew, rather a long, catch-up planning call - lots of good things gone on since I've been away. Lunch. Marketing call. Out to the Dentist with the family. Back, watched Allegiant with the babes. Up rather late working.

• Slept badly, watched other people's interactive Go games while trying to shut-down the mind.
• Up early for All Saints music group, somehow got encouraged to mend the (recently failed) dish-washer with the mystical and un-documented 'Error 23'. Bosch dish-washer rather different to previous Indesit - eventually worked out the easier ways to access the impeller and found my way around. Sadly - no obvious problem - hmm.
• Finished Jack Ryan and watched Mortal Engines (cf. Howell's Moving Castle) while the babes were at Church.

• Up unfeasibly late, sleep! Breakfast, set-too helping out with some woodwork we're doing with M. Prototype lathe copying tool(s) snatching at the work, lathe jaws either too small or large for the ash dowels - packed with aluminium strip instead.
• H. back home, with Sade for a visit.

• Blessed by three adjacent seats to sleep on on one leg. Eventually home in the afternoon. Created Mac certs, had a hand over from Andras: tag-teaming holidays.
• Continued working through the E-mail backlog. Meals with the lovely family, bed early - exhausted.

• Up earlyish; took C. to her camp with Guy; coffee shop for a conference call, mail chew; continuing to catch up.
• Back for some conference calls at Guy's - starting to ease back into work, lunch & went for a wander with Guy and N. to see the local area.
• Bid a fond farewell, and set off on an epic train, tube, tube, plane, plane, train, tube, train, taxi ride home via Iceland.

• Up early; packed & bid 'bye to the lovely American family, T. dropped me at Alewife & bus onwards to a customer visit in New York.
• Slowly started trying to catch up with E-mail in the bus; lots of things to chew on - an hour per day of mail to triage? Team been doing excellent things in my absence (I should go away more), including our latest COOL 23.05 enterprise release, packed with new goodness.
• Got to New York eventually; sub-way to a customer for a quick visit & check-in; coffee with Sam & Teo.
• Train to Greenwich to visit Guy & his lovely family. Really good to catch up on so much - been a long while, and great to meet the kids C & A; & Katya too in-person and have some time to get to know them.

• Up earlyish, helped the babes pack - somewhat traumatic - normally it's just one of me reluctantly leaving them, rather than five of them leaving me.
• Watched How to train your Dragon with the babes. B. cooked a fine chicken noodle lunch, and went to see her school together, ice-cream on the way home. B. taught the babes how to play basketball a bit.
• Back, caught up with Thomas, flight delayed, and then a tearful goodbye from misc. cousins to each other, and off they went. Used flightradar24 to track their progress in the night.
• Helped T. to get many things back into their normal good order in their house and chatted until late.

• Left T. behind at work, and headed into Boston for a whale-watching trip with a picnic while heading out; lots of whales on the Stellwagen bank, and a rather large and pod of dolphins jumping and showing off variously.
• Back home, then out to Cambridge Mariott for the babes' first Hibachi Grill - which was fun.
• Met up with Miguel and enjoyed catching up - far too long since we did that; back late.

• Up & off to HighRock for church. Back for a lovely roast lunch together, rested in the afternoon and enjoyed MacBeth and a picnic on Boston Common into the evening.

• Out Prom dress hunting for E. - found a nice, inexpensive one at the Natick Mall, and headed home for a late lunch together.
• Off to see Bob & Carole Schulmann in the evening for a fine BBQ with their family, good to see some TranscendAir avionics in-development & catch up after a long time.

• Packed in the morning and cleaned the house somewhat. Set off southwards to explore the USS Albacore had a great tour of the submarine with T.H.N.M.S & L. - rather compact accommodation. Amusing that the chef had more training than the token medic on-board.
• Drove back with T. un-packed, and set-too mending the outlet in his bedroom & getting his car rust-spot painted together.
• More unpacking and band practice on their return with the babes.

• Up late, swam in the sea on the beach, babes body-boarded, - some good waves. Slugged on the beach reading Why Nations Fail - increasingly un-convinced by their suggestion that institutions are seperaable from culture, Landes' Wealth and Poverty of Nations seems generally more convincing.
• Out to a lobster restaurant as a family in the evening: had steak for my part.

• Late Breakfast, slugged about reading Why Nations Fail, and AIQ - interesting. Babes went thrift shopping, lunch and down to the beach. Read more there, back with M.

• Out to Funtown Splashtown USA nearby, lots of sliding down and around with babes. Tornado rather notable along with big drop slides and smaller slides. Much fun. Tasty home made Natchos in the evening, watched Inside Out together and went for an evening walk on the beach. Returned to N. and T. watching Bhorat. Some of The 100 too.

• Slept well, up, breakfast - out to the beach with everyone. T. dug holes with the babes, swam in the sea, packed lunch plus chips. Read some Hayek the road to surfdom with Hannah. Relaxed variously. Back home.

• Up earlyish, breakfast and struck camp. Set off to Fort Knox nearby. An amazing and pristine, granite fortress dominating the river and bristling with cannon emplacements and loopholes. Lovely lunch in the sun overlooking the river.
• On to take a lift up the new cable stayed bridge. Drove on via a dunkin doughnuts stop to Old Orchard Beach - and checked back in to civilization. Got lots of washing on. Food shop with Thomas – dinner. Stayed in with J. while the babes went out with T&B while we baby sat.

• Into Bar Harbour, and out as a family for a kayaking trip over the sand bar, around some islands and enjoyed some waves, geology, bird life and more.
• Met up with T&B for lunch in an Irish pub. Walked over the now exposed spit with M. at speed and on by bus to Sandy Beach (actually crushed shells). Brief swim with J. and H. Back to the camp, hot dogs, babes to bed and sat by the fire in the gentle drizzle with T. and B. for a while.

• Up early, breakfast under a fly screen tent, drove to the Visitors Centre and caught the bus to the trail head. A long walk up Cadillac Mounta with some spectacular views, heat exhaustion, blueberry picking etc. Lunch at the summit, found the water fountain and toilets near the obligatory car park at the summit. Down again and bus into Bar Harbour, enjoyed an ice cream on the village green. Paddled at the harbour briefly - relief for the feet. Had a fine dinner at Beer Works - blueberry cider, bus back, drove home, raining.

• Walk up steep climb of The Beehive - great view for a snack. Started raining. Lunch in the car, walked to the beach in the rain briefly. Back to huts to watch movie Despicable Me 2 and play Pool - played games in our cabin after babea went to bed.

• Drove to Acadia enjoyed lots of No Ordinary Book in the car. Stopped at L.L.Bean for lunch - with deep fried Brussel Sprouts as a novelty side. Drove on to Acadia and got setup and installed. B. cooked and we sat by the fire and got chewed enthusiastically by the local insect fauna.

• Up earlyish, J&M out for a run, caught up the blog; checked work briefly. Babes out to the reservoir to swim - while J. and I went shopping to get stocked up for our trip.

• T. working, off to Kimball Farm in Westford, conveniently situated ~next to the RedHat Office. Putting and boating with the babes, girls enjoyed some DDR dancing goodness, zip-wire. Drove home.
• Helped to assemble patio furniture, and enjoyed catching up with Kate Robson - over from Japan in a matching time window. Lovely.

• Up earlyish, off to Highrock Church in the morning; good sing & preach.
• Home for lunch, then out to Central Rock Gym with the whole family, great to see T&B&L&S scaling walls left and right. Had some good climbs as a family.
• Back for a lovely BBQ and Scoop & Scoot, tried to learn the game 'Wingspan' together - not the most trivial.

• H's birthday - took her & sisters to the Barbie movie, B. doing a Spartan-run, had a walk up Turkey Hill with the babes, played guitar with T. and the girls.

• J's birthday - breakfast, and to a thrift store for the babes, then to a shopping mall for prom-dress browsing at Macy's with E. Played in the lego store with L. and S. Drove back to Burlington Cheesecake Factory for a late lunch.
• Initially feeling a bit devastated from stopping: and having more time to process the backlog of unresolved griefs and troubles from the last year or so - buried under mounds of work and business.

• Lie-in, stashed baggage at the bus terminal, wandered into town - enjoyed the Cathedral ('Elvish') and the local swimming pool, J. surviving the 10 degree cold pool for a while.
• Lunch at ROK, walked rather fast to some charity-shops for N. and M.'s slow-fashion interest, and back to bus to the airport; flight to Boston.
• Two and a quarter hour wait in a line at USA border control, the home of Silicon Valley apparently can't get a fingerprint database to work reliably. Finally got hire car & arrived at Tom & Beckie's - really lovely to see them; sleep.

• Up early, quick breakfast in our room, packed backpacks and off to see the Litli-hrutr eruption - for better or worse we didn't see much magma coming our way - but quite impressive to see the molten rock thrown in the air - got a 20km walk in though.
• Relaxed in the evening, with pot-noodles (food is rather expensive in Iceland) - and started reading No ordinary book to the family.

• Quick call with the team around 23.05. Onto a waking of kids, and a packing frenzy.
• Friends over to see the house for house-sitting orientation; removed seat from the car, packed everything. Set off to S&C's . Had a lovely meal and celebrated S's birthday, she kindly dropped us to Heathrow.
• Worked on the plane - sorted out some mail backlog, re-wrote RLE inner-loop to be potentially more optimal.
• Arrived in Iceland very late, bus to Reykjavík, with a great light-show from the nearby volcanic erruption. Typical nonsense booking.com - double-checkin aggravation - nothing like sitting outside a place at 2am trying to persuade people that you didn't get a last-minute E-mail on the flight with details of how to get through the door: another terrible booking.com experience. Interestingly not had this nonsense (that I recall) with AirBnB. Slept.

• Mail chew, sync with 23.05 release team, planning call, lunch, marketing contact review, more last minute release bits. Tried harder to clear my desk left and right. Up late working on 23.05 polish.

• All Saints, home for natchos for lunch with all the family together again.
• J. out to YFC AGM, cleaned up the house, put washing out with M. started to prep for the holiday season.
• Slept somewhat on the sofa - exhausted; watched Jack Ryan with J. on her return; picked up M. from Cambridge after StAG.

• Bruce & Anne over with S&C and boys to celebrate birthdays. H. and N. at camp, and M. at a concert in Cambrige. Nevertheless - enjoyed some bubbly, presents and some company. David over in the evening - H. and N. returned from their camp in the evening.
• Worked late on COOL performance, long catch-up with N. - such an impressive young lady.

• Up early; out for a run with J.
• Morning partner call, lunch, more profiling and optimization work - stopped 'paste' dumping a huge quantity of guff with trace logging on - that swamped performance.
• Poked at other low hanging fruit in profiles to make things better.
• Tried to get our pod-point motherboard replaced so it will charge the car again ...

• Technical planning call, COOL community call - discovered some exciting performance regressions in both calc and writer - hmm.
• Interviews in the afternoon, hiring someone to help Andras out while he's on holiday; sync with Deirdre in the afternoon. Came to a conclusion, and setup a call for tomorrow.
• Some profiling & optimization in between times.

• Partner workshops for much of the day.
• Quarterly Partner Council call - great to talk to so many of the people representing teams doing great things in FLOSS land alongside Collabora, as well as some of our proprietary integrations, and to show off the features in our new release.
• Sales call in the late afternoon - always good to bring you back to reality: "Why should we contribute to OSS when we can just take it for free and sell it? And of course we don't sell your bit, its a zero-priced complement, so there is no money for that anyway! also we want you to spend your time helping us for free with roadmaps of what you'll deliver so we don't have to do that, security fixes,..." - thats not COOL, and sadly rather common.
• Hiring discussion in the evening - need more time to think.

• Up early, out for a run with J. sync with Andras, four hour partner meeting. M. returned from DofE with some prize blisters. Caught up with Miklos.
• Worked late on slides.

• Mail chew, status report, planning call; lunch, marketing calls, catch up with Luigi, Philippe, internship interview. Mail chew.

• Up earlyish, All Saints with J. - helped Peter with the Organ stops, Rick preached. Home, plus Amy Jane & Julie for a Pizza lunch - slept a chunk of the afternoon.
• Watched Jack Ryan season 4 in the evening and relaxed; bed early.

• Breakfast with Josh & Mel's family - joined by Ben & Miriam & their family, J&M left, chatted to B&M until later.
• Strimmed the lawn edging while J. mowed. Back into action coding - fixed unit testing problems, significantly improved tile debug rendering - with per-tile graphs of deltas applied, and so on: much simpler & cleaner.
• Mel back for BBQ in the evening; back to work until late.

• Early partner call, more partner calls through the day, plugged away at tile debugging overlays & rendering performance. Calls with Skyler, Stelios & Andras.
• Wedding ring sent to Bruce for mending - feels very, very odd not wearing it after ~20 years of continuous use; turns out I fiddle with it quite regularly.
• Josh & Mel arrived in the evening, lovely to meet them - chatted until late.

• Partner calls much of the day. Poked at tiled rendering regressions in the evening.

• Early partner call, sales team call, caught up with Caolan, slogged through contract deliverable descriptions for hours with Andras' help.
• Moved Iceland Air flights for some business in New York - looking forward to not having to do business bits in the family holiday for once. Hopefully no crisis on the eve of that either.
• Helped M. get some Resin sorted out for her chess-board in the evening.

• Up, quick mail triage. Off into London with N. for her annual (modulo COVID) trip with Dad; visited HMS Belfast, the Monument, and The Mousetrap, dinner, train home - lovely to have time to chat properly.

• Planning call(s), job offer call, lunch, marketing call. Dug through admin & mail backlog. All Saints worship committee meeting at Beckie's in the evening. Tried to clear the work decks before bed.

• All Saints in the morning; great family service. Chatted variously, home, slugged, helped cooked lunch for the babes. J. home from Louise' - lovely to see her. Watched Marley & Me in the evening.

• Up earlyish, off to Rob & Amelia's with H. and M. - E. still on her DofE practice hike. H. drove. Had a lovely time, admired the new patio, fire-stand, fine BBQ, lovely to see T&B&babes. Home late. Caught up with E.

• Mail chew; partner call, lunch, interview, partner call. Amused to read more about the supposed panacea that is distro-less containers.
• Also read RedHat Open Source commitment. I have a number of thoughts:
  • First what we do: Collabora Online source code is open - our releases are tags in a public git repo, which we also link from help->about - that helps us support people better, and makes everything super transparent.
  • But - I have huge sympathy with this sentiment; emphasis mine:

    "The generally accepted position that these free rebuilds are just funnels churning out RHEL experts and turning into sales just isn't reality. I wish we lived in that world, but it's not how it actually plays out".

  • One of the troubling things about being in business is having to live in the real world which can get extremely and painfully real. It is particularly annoying at such times to be told - that making it ever easier for people not to pay is the only true solution.
  • The risks of people taking your hard-work, slapping their brand on it, and not contributing significantly are ones we all have long and disappointing experience with too. Of course the FLOSS licenses allow it - but to feel entitled to have this made extra easy for you is unfortunate.
  • My take is a simple and perhaps radical one: Making it easy for everyone not to pay to support development is profoundly counter-productive. Put another way: someone needs to pay for something scarce. We can try to work out who that someone should be eg. "very large IT organizations" are a traditional favourite, and what is scarce (traditionally signed enterprise binaries), but some degree of compromise is inevitable - I have a long write up on various different compromises in the space here: Sustained Freedom from slide sixteen.
  • I have even more sympathy with the rationale, because RedHat is a pure-play FLOSS company. If you are part of the Proprietary periphary mob (also known as OpenCore) - then you have your own proprietary stuff that allows you to make it arbitrarily hard for people not to pay to support development. As such - ironically - as a community it seems we're once again focusing our criticism on those who differ least from FOSS orthodoxy, and who are doing the best job of up-stream contribution.
  • However - this rationale as presented:

    "Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity."

    simultaneously seems contrived. Surely that is what Linux Distros do: they dis-intermediate FLOSS projects - but it is perhaps also an opportunity, let me explain:
  • One of the significant concerns around commercially funded FLOSS projects is that of being dis-intermediated: having their latest code bundled into a Linux distro where it is simultaneously extremely hard to get leads (which drive sales) from downloaders -and- long-term support guarentees are met by that distributor; often without any feature contribution back. The same dis-intermediation threat is there around cloud provision of pure-play FLOSS products.
  • Sometimes creator companies are simply acquired to get the support team in-house; while fair - that seems far from optimal. I see a potentially lucrative opportunity for the first enterprise distro that can build a wider partner ecosystem of contributing open-source companies by - including them into their enterprise products via some transparent business and support co-development model. We have lots of excellent, standard FLOSS licenses for code, but few successful open-agreements for go-to-market FLOSS collaboration - building a more diverse and widespread Open Source business community.
  • Can you imagine the power of the possibilities of RedHat/IBM's scale and experience helping to bring their extraordinary reach into enterprises to a snowballing set of businesses built around the RedHat platform with some turbo-charged mutual partnership model? The volume of FLOSS that could be written & improved, and the niches we could fill and sustain?
  • Either way, it will be interesting to see where this goes long term. For those with very long memories I believe that Cygnus tree used to be distributed only to their customers - in the 1990s.

• Early morning accessibility call - good stuff, sales call. Interviews with PM candidates, partner call; mail chew. Interviews into cell group + dinner combination until late.

• Partner call, weekly sales call, admin, PM interviews, catch-up calls, admin. Pushed some tile management wins.
• Nissan Leaf not charging, silly messages on the car console - expect its down to the well known low-charging problems of the 12V battery; annoying. Bought another, and replaced the battery: lead & acid still: amazing. Still no joy, re-booted pod-point: perhaps the problem is there, charged on a 13A socket instead.

• Catch up with Andras, lengthy partner call, lunch. Sync with Pedro, more admin, got to a bit of hacking in the evening - fun; then couldn't sleep.

• Mail chew; planning call, chat with Elisa; lunch. Helped Nick with an unusual macro problem and an upgrade.
• OpenChain training, more admin.

• All Saints, helped Peter with the organ, noticed how a mid-week practice is rather a benefit by its absence. Back for pizza lunch. Rested variously into the evening; watched Ad-Astra with J.: curiously dissatisfying. Chatted with the babes on their return from church.

• Up lateish, off to open-Church; back for BBQ lunch with David; attacked the hedge together on a super hot day: great progress. Off to Bob & Dee's leaving do in Beck Row.

• Up early, out for a run with J. partner call, interview, lunch, interview, partner call, admin. Booked travel to LibreOffice Conference 2023 which should be fun.

• Technical planning call, COOL community call, sales call, interview, offer, customer call.
• Up extremely late hacking on tile caching.

• Mail chew; early partner call, sales call; admin; Lunch. CP all-hands, sync with Miklos. Managed to re-activate bank account dongle after some HSBC oddity.

• Up early, out for a run with J. chat with Kendy, product call, admin, slides. Lunch, monthly mgmt meeting, more calls.

• Caught up the blog; mail chew, status report. Planning call, chat with Shehr and Pedro. Lunch. Customer call, sync with Andras.
• PCC meeting in the evening, wrote minutes.

• All Saints in the morning with H. Sue spoke - caught up with the wider church family; home for a pizza lunch with B&A visiting - lovely, baked Alaska as birthday treat desert.
• Slept in the afternoon, watched The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - amused by the Cohen Brothers.

• Up earlyish, babes sleeping - out with J. to Lavenham for a walk through the beautiful countryside nearby in the sunshine; pit stop at a pub. Home for BBQ in the evening with the family.
• Worked on slides until late.

• Out for a run with J. in the morning. Partner & customer calls, worked on project slides. Catch up with Luigi, sync with Andras.

• Catch up of E-mail backlog; technical planning call, COOL community call, catch up with Sarper, 1:1 with Miklos, chat with Caolan; more admin. Picked up E. from Soham, bible study group with Cyrille & Jan.

• Up earlyish, trains to the airport, flight home - hacked on cleaning up a re-work of tile management in our javascript for more performance - fun.
• Trains home variously. E's birthday dinner in the evening, so lovely to see the daughters grow up.

• Up early, found the venue, talked to lots of customers, partners and listened to some great presentations; talked about CODE 23.05 - out today and some of the great new features there, as well as the great integration work Julius & team have done at Nextcloud with the SmartPicker and other bits around COOL.
• Interesting lunch with some customers. Back to more talks, partner event slides; talked with lots of partner and sales people until late; out to dinner in town again, bed late.

• Up early, train with H. and M. to Cambrige, set off to Munich. Discovered another joy of TravelPerk: it allows business travellers to book back-packer style tickets without making it clear - where you have no guarenteed seat.
• Eventually arrived, texted a few people to meet up - I should really organize my life further in advance. Headed to the hotel, met up with Marc, Niels kindly took us to the beer-hall for dinner with the Nextcloud team. Great evening, home late.

• All Saints, played with H. Bridge Violin starting to have a buzz & also flaking audio wise; a stray cable inside? may have to go back to a louder wooden violin & a pick; perhaps carbon fibre is best only for bows.
• Home, pizza lunch with the babes, hot day - slept exhaustedly in the garden for much of the afternoon.

• Up earlyish, worked on tile code on and off much of the day, rather rapid interview.
• Helped E. with her statistics after BBQ dinner; worked until late at night & slept badly.

• Poked at 23.05 testing, marketing, and dug into a tile management issue with large presentations. Came up with an entirely better way of doing this and hacked on it between partner meetings.

• Another CODE 23.05 release standup; chasing some interesting performance regressions interactively. Making some good progress, exciting times.
• COOL community call, partner call, catch up with Andras, more marketing review. Cell group in the evening.

• Day full of meetings; stand-up for 23.05 release. Accessibiltiy call, catch up with Sarper, two interviews, marketing call.
• All Saints band practice with H.

• App early, off to the Drivery to record some Hub 5 announcement segments with the team - lots of interesting kit there.
• Out for a rapid burger, airport, RyanAir - flight delayed by an hour on the tarmac baking the occupants for a mechanical fault. Home late.

• Checked in late at night for flight; apparently TravelPerk/RyanAir think it is clever to give users a much worse experience than booking direct when using a booking agent: had to re-validate passports pay Eur 0.6 and similarly bogus stuff: annoying. Much easier to book directly.
• Planning call with the team; lots of good things happening. Drove to STN, flight to Berlin, BBQ at Frank's (nice!) pad, and talked with the team until late. Found and managed to check-into room rather late.

• All Saints, lunch; slugged tiredly much of the day. Watched a Potter, fantastic beasts - well made it seems; still with a repetitive junior/outsider motif.

• Dropped jacket to the dry cleaners, and went shopping with J. at Aldi - watched a shop-lifter get caught red handed there; interesting.
• Got some work backlog done, candidate application triage. Plugged away at a lathe tool for copying things, and a shelf for J.
• David & Allison over for a BBQ in the evening interupted by J. doing lots of ferrying of small girls; lovely to catch up.

• Mail chew, partner call, sales meeting, tested collaborative editing in a call; lunch, partner call. More mail chew, syncing etc. partner call. Continued combing through CVs for various new roles at Collabora.
• Good to see LibreOffice in the Flatpak app-store announced as the future on RHEL; and for those that missed it glad to have Caolán still on the team.

• Up, had some meetings. Technical planning call, COOL community call, catch up with Kendy, 1:1 with Miklos. Encouraging marketing call.

• Up early, rushed to the nearest traffic-jam for a two hour stay on the A14; eventually got to the Suffolk Show. Saw lots of nice (heavy) horses with the pretty wife - enjoyed some sandwiches.
• Interrogated various vendors of insanely heavy farm equipment and admired their wares; solar powered robot planting and weeding machines - nice. Pre-fabricated concrete slab salespeople, giant tractors & lifters. Also a lot of animals & a flower show.
• Home late with some cold babies; Music group practice, dinner.

• Mail chew, encouraged to see that Cor's initiative to break the deadlock and finally get an actionable vote passed to hire a couple of devs for TDF paid off with Khaled hired; great.
• We're also looking for a fluent German Project Manager to help out with some of our German customers and partners.
• Planning call for a couple of hours; lunch. Eloy 1:1, catch up with E-mail backlog.
• Did some work with M. to get her chess-board cut in the other dimension, and re-glued-up looking good.

• Up earlyish, signed a contract, then day off. Out to see the Hawkins' in St Albans, enjoyed a day in the sun, chatting, ice-creams, slept & relaxed.
• Home; Le-anne had arrived to stay, nice to see her.

• All Saints in the morning, started to use ising which seems rather good. Chatted to B&C, noodle soup for lunch. Bid 'bye to B&C - picked H. up from Cambridge.

• Up earlyish, out to All Saints to run Open Church with B&C - no visitors. Home for lunch.
• Out for a walk from Reach to home along the dyke; cup of tea, collected the car and chatted.

• Mail chew; misc. admin. Two hour process call, vendor meeting. Back to mail, slides & admin.
• Barbara & Colin arrived - lovely to see them after so long, sat outside in the sunshine.

• Up earlyish, tech. planning call; N. not well. COOL community call; continued to find interesting performance things to fix there. Lunch, interview, marketing strategy call; admin. Catch-up with Tracie.
• Bible study group, sleep.

• Sync. with Marco, weekly sales call, chat with Sarper, lunch, sync with Caolan & Stephan, partner sales call.
• Into Cambridge to the Beer Festival, met up with the Collabora team, catch-up with Andrew Haley, some good tips from Simon McV, lovely. Train back with H. late.

• Mail, 1:1s with Andras & Pedro, partner call, 1:1 with Eloy, admin, sales call; got to profiling some dialog bits and merged various improvements.
• Strimmed the lawn with J, helped M. with her physics revision in the evening.

• Mail chew; planning call. Bruce & Anne & Louise over for lunch - luckily lots of left-overs from the lady's day Saturday. Long architecture call. Managed to get ESTAs filed eventually too.

• Cooked breakfast, gave a short talk on Psalm 1: how's your walk ? Out for physical walking, and bid 'bye to the lads - drove Simon home listening to Sons of Korah.
• Lovely to see the babes again; slept exhaustedly on the sofa; picked them up from Cambridge; bed late.

• Out for a cooked breakfast nearby, then walked some miles into Walberswick, lunch at the Bell Inn, walked back by a different route together; good to have time to catch up. Dinner at the Fox Inn together; bid 'bye to Alex.

• Bits of mail chewage; packed and drove Simon N to Darsham, met up with lots of Men of Faith; chatted & drank ale in the sun; BBQ, and a stew from Mihai until late.
• Slept in the Darsham station - a combination of train vibration, and the more impressive lorry-on- level-crossing vibration - making the bunk-house snoring experience more amusing.

• Breakfast with the parents; bid 'bye to them. Technical planning call, COOL community call, lunch, 1:1 with Miklos, E-mail & partner call. Booked flight & hotel in Berlin.
• Spent the evening on Psalm 1 for Sunday; really encouraging to pull it all together & to delightful to get a better understanding of the passage.

• Partner call, weekly sales call, 23.05 release planning call. Lunch, CP all-hands call. Parents over in the afternoon - lovely to spend some time with them.

• Partner catch-up; various meetings, tried to clear my desk somewhat, misc. calls.

• Mail chew. Planning call, two hour partner call in parallel with a catch-up with the wider marketing team. Another partner call, COOL-days post-mortem and next-time planning.
• Quick sync with Caolan; helped sort out AC maintenance in the garden. Family dinner, off to minute PCC meeting; back late, admin.

For anyone that doesn't know him - Caolán has contributed amazing work on the LibreOffice code-base for over two decades, latterly for RedHat. He has pioneered work in many areas around LibreOffice:

• helping to found The Document Foundation, and contributing to its growth and governance
• handling security for LibreOffice, managing CVEs and patch porting
• maintaining our static checking with Coverity and others
• getting fuzzing working, tending oss-fuzz, and incorporating a large number of fixes to stop issues escaping in releases.
• tending our crash-testing of ~750k documents (~60Gb) of bug documents which we continually run through (thanks to hardware sponsorship from Adfinis) - maintaining the great quality of our filters.

We expect Caolán will continue to spend time on these as part of his role at Collabora; but of course this is only a subset of the things he has contributed for RedHat some highlights being:

• re-working the entire LibreOffice UI to use auto-layout instead of fixed-positions, it is hard to comprehend what a huge investment this represents - with over a thousand glade dialog fragments, with over half a million lines.
• adapting the UI toolkit to allow native gtk (& Javascript) widgets.
• maintaining our gtk backends to cope with the latest gtk churn^Wimprovements.
• various vital features such as printing comments in the margins in writer.
• getting almost every package in a RedHat distro to use the same Hunspell dictionaries.
• complex text rendering & layout, fixing innumerable bugs, improving the user-experience and much more.

RedHat was instrumental in founding The Document Foundation, and has invested far more than we had any right to expect through its team over a long period; they deserve our thanks. I expect that LibreOffice will still be available from flathub going forward. However with RedHat now choosing to laser focus its development investment into the open hybrid cloud, it became clear that in order for us to continue to enjoy Caolán's contribution - he would need a new home.

Happily - this circumstance is rather similar to the history of Collabora Productivity's founding with the direction changes at SUSE, and we could act quickly. The paid and volunteer team around the code-base continues to grow. However, it is is important that we retain skills, and continue to deepen the talent pool around LibreOffice Technology and Collabora Online as circumstances change.

The Collabora team is looking forward to working with Caolán to continue his work in three areas: on the underlying LibreOffice Technology, serving our customers as part of our growing (we're hiring) team, and of course to make Collabora Online even better for our partners and customers. Welcome Caolán!

• Up earlyish, pre-service practice with Cedric, played - home for Pizza lunch. Caught up the blog; listened to another Psalm 1 talk.

• Slept in, out for a run with J; then shopping. B&A over; took A. into town to sort out B's phone malfuctioning: an under-used PAYG phone: phoning 150 and re-enabling the SIM: the solution, sadly the UI has no hint for why its malfunctioning however.
• Lunch, toured new bits in the home; David over; bid 'bye to the inlaws; set too at sorting out J's garden lean-too; and getting more out of the garage.

• Up late; chat with Cor, Thorsten - packed, met up with Thorsten and had a pleasant train ride together. Epic queueing nightmare for security, another RyanAir flight delayed by an hour; eventually got home to Stansted and a train strike. J. picked me up and had a very disrupted kid/taxi-service.
• Flushed E-mail, chased documents, dinner with the family, worked late.

• Breakfast with Frank & Bjoern; off to a rather encouraging partner meeting - lots of items ironed out. Out for dinner in the evening, and up late at a bar with Gotz, Niels & Mark.

• Up lateish; enjoyed the warm weather, and remarkable set of people we have, toured various activities; caught up with individuals; lunch with Kendy. Bid a premature 'bye to many.
• Taxi, flight to Hamburg - worked on slides on the plane.

• Talk from Philippe & Guy, rap from Rachel, mostly in-person mgmt meeting with the team; good to see them and discuss where we're going in more depth.
• Fine lunch; enjoyed booths run by other Collaborans, caught up with some mail; more meetings in the evening; dinner together. Individual chats until late.

• Early taxi with Nick & Carolyn to Stansted; met up with a growing group of Collaborans, worked on the flight, prepping slides for the mgmt meeting.
• Arrived in Faro, bus with an even bigger group to the venue, enjoyed fine company, sea, food & drink - after not seeing many people in person for so long; really good to catch up again. Up late.

• All Saints in the morning; family service, making crowns for some reason. Church BBQ outside afterwards. Took all but H. into Cambridge, bed early.

• Up late, got a bit of work in; watched the conoration - pleased to see things done properly in an orderly fashion; and for the King to have impressed on them their role of service to the real King, and the nation. Surprisingly good, albeit lengthy.
• Sorted out J's garden lean-to somewhat, and strimmed the pernicious grass.

• Customer call, team deadline chasing call, catch up with Andras, lunch; out to Josh Bendall's funeral to play violin with Mick on keyboard - a good funeral.
• A chunk of contract reviews; N. cooked a fine dinner, back to work until late.

• Technical planning call, COOL community call, customer deadline chasing team call, weekly sales call. Customer support call with Aron. Bits of hacking & admin.
• Bible study group in the evening. Reading up on Psalm 1 for the Church mens walking weekend.

• Mail chew, early partner call, chat with Thorsten. Encouraging COOL-days marketing post-mortem, interview; All Saints band practice with Beckie & Mary.

• Mail chew, morning planning call, lunch, picked up bits and pieces from Screwfix. Team call, catch up call with Patrick, sync with Gokay on cypress. Varnished new stairs in the evening.

• Up, off to see J's parents - worked in the car a little.
• Lunch with B&A, fixed a number of things around the house for them - blocked drains again interestingly; tough to solve. Poked at various things in the garage; replaced light-bulbs. Chatted, and did a puzzle while babes playing scrabble.
• Chips on the way home, worked through mail.

• All Saints; played with H, Simon & Mary. Growing in number meeting afterwards. Pizza lunch, slept in the afternoon, watched a Glass Onion in the evening. Listened to a couple of talks on Psalm 1.

• Up late, relaxed in the sun - and enjoyed aluminium cafe-style setting at the front in the sun. Lunch. David arrived, went for a walk out to Moulton.
• Home; and set-too with David on re-locating the A/C power, sorting out lighting and so on; got the top of the stairs sorted out.
• Watched Fury in the evening - interesting.

• J. working, took a holiday for the first time in a while: started by some business calls, signed a customer.
• Out to the garage to drill new routes for cables through joists. David arrived & kindly helped. Got joists removed, cables pulled & things re-sited. Used joist-hangers to check the upper stair positioning. Fixed some substantial timbers to the wall to pack the stairs off it by 150mm.
• Lunch; back into action - got the stairs fixed, lots of PVA glue, hammering of dowels, large screws, and something of a fun lego assembly with wedges, and fitting of this & that. Eventually ended up with a lot of glue, and a nice new pine staircase to replace a rickety ladder together.
• Caught the end of Time Trap with the babes.

• Technical planning call; COOL community call, , 1:1 calls, ESC bits. Early band practice with Simon, Bible study group, bed.

• Early partner call, sales team call plugged away at admin, calls with team members.
• Eventually discovered that Cypress tests execute in some almost empty DOM/document context. Poked around windows to find the right iframe to dig out the right document and find the pieces we need manually.

• Mail chew, 1:1 with Pedro; stairs arrived to be fitted in the garage: a whole box full of bits of wood to glue in - fun. Plugged away at Cypress with Jaume & Gokay, interactively. Catch up with zlatan. Setup J's garden lean-to with hooks for tools & some racking.

• Mail chew, planning call, various calls, catch up with Tor, poked at Cypress issues some more with Gokay & Jaume. Worked on isolating parallel running coolwsd's more sensibly at some length.
• Music with E. and a story too - been working too late many nights recently; hmm.

• All Saints, 2m Peter playing the organ - did some orchestration for him. Home for a snack, babes had Pizza. Alfie over to do his first laptop keyboard replacement.
• Kelsey, Chris, Charlie & Emma over for a late lunch, chatted with them through the afternoon; picked up the babes from StAG.

• Up; off to clean & de-cobweb AllSaints - climbed some rather tall ladders & chatted to people variously; bacon sandwiches. David arrived and helped out.
• Home for lunch, set too at the garage, removed shelving, made space for new staircase; re-hung lean-to door, and strengthened the structure. David M. moved tiles while I helped David S. install the glass on a new Velux at his house - by the fourth, we're getting quite good at it.
• Home, more prep work - cut out some hatch joists with the reciprocating saw, and moved some inconvenient wiring around the place. Dinner together. Worked late poking at Cypress and C++ unit test failures on busy machines.

• Out for a run with J. early. Mail chew, plugged away at some consistency checks to detect unhelpful 3rd parties that like to eg. delete the filesystem underneath a running process, and then wonder why things stop working.
• Various partner calls; into Cambridge to meet up with the very charming Niels of OpenProject fame, and his brother.
• Took H. home from work, dinner, back to cleaning up loose ends from the day. Fixed up J's counselling website so http works (was never tested), and mended some old blog links.

• Wedding anniversary - 21 years - what a lovely time we've had together: what a blessing. To work!
• Technical planning call, COOL community call, K8s design call, catch up with Andras, ESC meeting. Apparently my blood says I need more vitamin-D - fair enough.
• Mihai making good progress, concrete base, bits of roof, fibreglass & epoxy.

• Slept for a couple of hours; back to an all-night hackathon - (also wrote J's wedding anniversary card) - trying to unwind 'orrible, intermittent Cypress problems.
• Mihai arrived to build a garden lean-to / shed for J's garden tools & other bits cluttering my garage^Workshop.
• Sales call, went for a bleed at the hospital, lunch. All afternoon quarterly Collabora mgmt call, did some mail & review in parallel.
• Band practice in the evening, then out for a lovely pre-21st-wedding-anniversary-dinner with J. at a new local Turkish restaurant: lovely & lots of it. Staggered home happily.

• Mail chew; overdue catch ups with Kendy, then Pedro. Slides, monthly mgmt meeting.
• Popped over to see David S & help him get his new velux window glassware inserted: a small piece of ply-wood with a block at the end turns out to be the optimal tool.
• As I try to improve my German; really pleased to read Henry Hühnchen to the family "Der Himmel stürzt ein!", sagt Henry Hühnchen.
• Helped M. organize and glue her chess-board together in the evening until late, hopefully the big-breaker of old PVA will still do the job.

• Up early, mail chew, planning call, plugged away at Cypress bits with Jaume; catch up with Marc, then Philippe.

• All Saints - played in the morning, Sue spoke. Home for a pizza lunch, with our neighbour Tammy over to share that.
• Out in the evening to try to unwind a friend's laptop purchase that got twisted up; hopefully successfully.

• Worked much of the morning; found that Cypress tests were re-downloading & jitting all the JS, added a force cache parameter to (hopefully) markedly accelerate them.
• Poked at some brian-straining Cypress timing / intermittency issues; improved waiting for cursor movements.
• David over, out for a walk with J,H,E - M&N revising in Cambridge. Measured up the garage for some new stairs, and mounted Dad's tool cabinet.
• Cypress: removed extra simulated button presses on emitting text events; reviewed a number of Ash's patches, worked late.

• Mail chew, partner call, catch up with Ash & Jaume. Lunch. Partner call.
• Pleased to see a nice recap of COOL days, and some wrap-up ramblings too.
• Reviewed some commits. Dinner, solicited and processed more product management input from partners and customers - great to have a good way of capturing where they want to go.

• Mail chew, sync with Miklos, COOL community call, catch up with Andras,Pedro & Anna. Sync with Cor.
• Quick lunch, partner call, customer call with partner. Out for a run with J. Plugged away at BinaryDataContainer re-factoring to make it swap-able.

• Up earlyish, helped Dad grind some stainless strip to mend his cupboards, read The Magician's Nephew - a classic.
• Catch up call with Eloy; caught up with some mail. Lunch. Bid 'bye, slept & chewed mail on the way home in the car - terrible weather.
• Got some work done in the afternoon; All Saints band practice in the evening with H.

• Up early, breakfast, helped Dad get a root out in the garden, remove lots of leaves, moss & mulch from the shed's guttering.
• Out for a walk around Ripley Castle in the sun with M&D - lovely - fine Ripley ice-cream afterwards. Home for lunch.
• M. set-too with the joiner/thicknesser to make lots of beautiful, planed beech and teak lengths to turn into a chess-board. Dug out Dad's tool cupboard for the workshop & eventually found the key for it, nice.
• Pleased H. had a good 1st day at HP in Cambridge.
• Watched an old Animal Farm (with real animals - and a happy ending) - somewhat underwhelmed; not the point.

• Up lateish; bid 'bye to R & A & boys. Plugged away in the car at an unreliable unit test, blog update & image size profiling.
• Out for a walk into town, and up the castle steps - a lovely day. Jigsaw puzzle.
• Experimented with joiner, thicknesser with M. for her chess-board. Discovered joining on the convex surface tends to exacerbate non-flatness - fun.

• Robert, Amelia & boys arrived overnight; taught them to 'peg' people. Good to see them - out to All Saints - Bishop Mike speaking. H. playing the organ, Jenny there too nice. Good to catch up with people afterwards.
• Home for rib & drumstick lunch with the family; sat around chatting variously, slept for a bit; tea. Played Carcassonne & Camel Up in the evening with R&A, up late chatting with R.

• Up; strimmed the grass, re-layed-out the last PCC minutes, finally transribed the last set of APCM minutes - nice.
• Re-routed the front-door keeps so the door can be double-locked without excessive force - very much nicer.
• Spent some time with M. investigating making a copying tool for chess pieces.

• Up lateish; time for a day off. Did some hacking - found a way to persuade SwLayIdle only to do huge invalidations rather than expensive off-screen rendering. Put the washing out.
• Sue, Clive & boys arrived - fine lunch, and out for a wander with them - nice to catch up. Out for a long walk with Chris Brighty in the evening, sunset over the race tracks: pretty.
• Ordered Ash dowel & epoxy for M's chess-board + pieces project in the evening.

• COOL commnuity call, monthly CP all-hands call, partner call; customer catch-up call. Finally got to some more profiling of an image movement performance problem - SwLayIdle again doing a giant double-buffered rendering - interesting.
• Cell group passover-style meal in the evening; lamb & questions, Christina over to see H. too.

• More report writing; bits of hacking on image scaling performance, out for a run with J. Partner call. Catch up with Caolan.
• Band practice with H. worked on improving my organ stop-pulling skills. Grace for sleep-over with M. Watched Ponyo - something fishy about that film.

• Good to get up later than 6:20am in the holidays; worked on report writing much of the day, catch-up with Marco, call with Mazin. Worked late, H's friend Charlotte stayed over.

• Mail chew, sparse planning call - people taking a well deserved rest. Chat with allotropia team, then with our a11y team doing some encouraging work. Out for a run with J.. Mail & meetings variously. H's friend Nina around - lots of friends of H's about too.

• All Saints in the morning, J. at Grace's baptism at the Ark, shared lunch. Pottered around tidying the garage - amazing how many boxes of screws one can accumulate.

• Up lateish, got sucked into some more BinaryDataContainer preparatory re-factoring: hacking is fun!
• Helped M. get setup with the bandsaw to cut her chess-board out of some useful slabs from John Cornish, with David's help too: fun. Got a genuine-Meeks-sr. cupboard onto the wall.

• Mail & admin backlog catchup - not as bad as expected; if much of the team is travelling - they're not mailing me it seems.
• Poked at BinaryDataContainer code that holds compressed images in memory (or swap).

• Up early, breakfast with the COOL-kids, packed and set off for an all-day mgmt meeting in the office. That sped by, then bid 'bye to all and sundry - ferried people to stations & Claire College, and home.

• Breakfast, partner day: informal opening chat with Simon around various open-source topics, great talk from Robert.
• Product Management workshop - lots of interesting and sometimes unexpected input around what partners want: excitin & useful for our planning. Updates from Eloy & Naomi.
• Some of us went out punting in the rain - a very British experience - before a formal candle-lit dinner at Ridley.
• Bid a fond goodbye to people in waves until rather late at night having gone from pub to pub.

• Up early, cooked breakfast; Kendy kindly compered the talks, Naomi's sorted out a great venue, fine food, lots of good company - packed a huge number of 5 minute talks in; thanks to all who spoke.
• Gave a thanks / summary / wrap-up of COOL days' technical track with some random prognostication:
• Out around town in a team with Robert, Cor & Tor for a ClueGo game/race thing - fun. Back for dinner at the college.

• Mail chew, misc. admin & slideware bits. Packed, off to Claire College via the office to pick up some conference goodies. Met up with Naomi & welcomed people variously.
• Dinner at Millworks - good to see lots of people from the wider team & community - encouragingly COOL momentum.

• All Saints in the morning; H. played, pulled stops for the organ variously. Italo and Tiziana over for lunch - lovely to see them & spend some time together; dropped them back to the Fitz.

• Worked much of the day writing slides & preparing talks for COOL-days next week. J. cut the grass.

• Mail chew, interview & offered a job. B&A over for lunch, partner meeting. Bit of code reading - knocked up a performance fix for our staging server.
• Setup various bitwarden bits to point at our vaultwarden server. Played with UCS somewhat with Mazin.

• Caught up with Miklos, COOL community call, more mail chew. Partner call, sync with Andras, catch up with Naomi and Eloy on COOL-days.

• Up early, various trains, plane to Luton - some peace in the air to work on task backlog.
• Encouraging sales call, various other calls, caught up with admin.
• All Saints band practice, and out to collect M. and H. from Hills Road. J. and N. returned from Loughborough design engineering open day.

• Up early; breakfast with Simon; got some E-mail chewed - call with Andras, and off to the venue. Caught up with people variously.
• Enjoyed presenting the work from the team included in Nextcloud Hub 4 alongside Nextcloud - some great progress & incisive analysis to enjoy.
• Out for dinner with remaining team; back to meet Simon's charming lady - Frieda; slept.

• Up at 3am-ish, drove to Luton, flight to Berlin. Met up with the Nextclouders to practice for their big Nextcloud Hub 4 announcement tomorrow. Lovely to see them.
• Kindly hosted by Simon Tennant in the evening - really lovely to catch up with him properly after so long.

• All Saints in the morning - great to have Sam's son (Mary's great-grandson dedicated). Home for a pizza lunch, and presents for J. on Mothering Sunday.
• Caught up with babes, read stories, bed early.

• Up; J. at counselling training all day - out shopping for Mothering Sunday; replaced dripping mixer tap in downstairs toilet; had to use a dremel to angle-grind the (already rusted) steel screw-threads off, all for want of a little chromium in the steel. Got it sorted, and the plywood / tile facing cut to size.
• Out for a short walk with J. - then David over for pulled pork & a chance to catch up. Watched Chaos Walking in the evening.

• Mail chew, dropped babes into school, woke up N. and encouraged her to print & submit her project.
• Admin, various calls. Celebrated N's project hand-in, read stories to babies.

• New bed arrived on a palette; chat with Miklos. COOL community call - couldn't run perf report on the server - out of memory; discovered perf archive - nice! but no good docs on how to effectively use it with perf report or hotspot.
• Client support call during lunch, chat with a customer. Catch up with Paris, and Andras.
• Lots of bed assembly and movement in the evening before house-group, and more bed work.

• Encouraging sales call. Interview, admin, calls through the day, bit of profiling & code reading. Helped E. with her math homework.

• Up early, run in the rain with J. mail, 1:1 with Kendy, catch up with Pedro, lunch, partner call, sync. on COOL-days schedule with Eloy & Naomi. Customer call, supplier call.

• Up early, planning call, lunch, catch up with Paris. Out to Mike Tippet's funeral at All Saints - great talk, H. played organ, back. Calls variously, dinner, out to PCC re-ordering meeting.

• All Saints in the morning, guitar to fill-in for Beckie. Home, quick lunch, picked M. up from StAG youth house-party - a winner of the assassins game. Pizza dinner, relaxing variously.

• Up lateish, J. to AllSaints, provided on-hand debugging advice for N. much of the day.
• Tried to get memory trimming patch pushed; fell over amusing CI fails due to day-of-week dependent code in unit test at the weekend issue up-stream. Makes a pleasant change from random breakage introduced by me. Always bad when you have no recollection of writing the code, but the style shows it must have been you.

• 8am sales call, partner & customer calls through the day, calmed down a runaway logging problem in a corner-case. Implemented a memory / cache trimming feature for inactive documents.

• Up early; E. off to have her toe looked at. Mail chew, chat to Miklos & Quikee, some digging into memory management, lunch, sync with Paris, customer call until late.

• Up too early, mail chew, breakfast with Eloy & met some happy users in passing. Checked out, off to CS3, tried to catch up with some work, talked more to people.
• Enjoyed lunch with an enthusiastic Biochemist interested in visiting rather than sharing data. Off to the airport - Ryan Air ! - three plus hour wait for delayed flight; what a terrible service. Eventually got on a plane home.

• Up later; breakfast with Eloy, worked on slides somewhat, off to the conference. More talks with people variously. Gave mine at the end of the day:
• Dinner with Eloy, sleep.

• Up remarkably early, drove to Stansted, flight to Barcelona for CS3; plugged away at tasks on the plane. Arrived, lunch with Eloy.
• Listened to talks, met up and chatted with a number of great partners & customers for the afternoon. Out for Tapas in the evening with Frank, Bjoern & Eloy.

• All Saints in the morning, played with H. Robert spoke well on a letter to a church from Revelation. Home quickly to see M&D dropping by from Robert's.
• Lunch together, relaxed, out to help David S. install the first of several veluxen in his roof conversion; surprisingly heavy.
• Home, chatted with the parents until late.

• Up earlyish, off to R&A's for L's birthday party, good to see lots of the extended family over there and play balloon fights - with three-to-four small boys concurrently.
• Did some relaxing hackery in the evening having driven back; amazing what you find when you profile.

• Out for a run with J.; a day of many calls, worked on CS3 slides & admin in gaps. Tried an on-line / video violin lesson for E.

• Mail chew, thrilled to see our work with Nextcloud and Deutsche Telekom around their great MagentaCLOUD announced. This brings Collabora Online (and LibreOffice technology) to another large group of users, and lets us continue to invest to improve both COOL and the underlying LibreOffice technology for everyone; more in Steven's article.
• Also really pleased (something of a news roundup today) to see the EDPS piloting Collabora Online too with Nextcloud. FLOSS solutions that give you back your Digital Sovereignty: full control over your data, software, and IT stack are here.
• Catch-up with Miklos, COOL community call, lunch, catch up with William & Paris, then Lars & Andras, ESC call.
• Early tea with the family, up late.

• Chat with Stelios, sales planning call; caught up with William, lunch. Partner call, introducing Anna, more calling action with William.

• Mail chew; answered a few questions at a partner webinar by Eloy, lunch, partner call, catch up with Pedro, mail.

• Mail chew, planning call, lunch, catch up with Paris. Sync with Guy & Eloy, chased a nasty bug.

• All Saints in the morning with 2m Peter, encouraging Growing in God meeting afterwards. Pizza lunch, slugged in the afternoon.

• Put up new light over the lathe, to be able to see what's up. Helped J. clean up after mowing the lawn. Lunch. Out for a walk at Lynford Arboretum in the afternoon with J. and H. Back, Harry Pottered in the evening.

• Partner call, staff calls, sync with Paris; lunch. Catch up with Nicolas, Eloy, chunks of admin.

• Catch up with E-mail, Miklos, COOL community call, took H. to play piano for the local retirement home.
• Partner call, sync with Andras, catch up with Naomi. Cell group in the evening.

• Up early, mail chew, positive sales call with the team, partner call, up-beat Collabora Productivity all-hands call. Dug through some legalese, call with Paris and Lubos.
• Out to band practice, back, mail, chat with Patrick.

• Up early; out for a run with J. Catch up with Kendy, then Pedro, snatched lunch, then a partner call. Monthly management meeting, sync. with Cor, chat with accountant.

• Mail chew, planning call, lunch with H. Marketing call, Project kick-off call with some of the team. More admin & planning.

• All Saints in the morning, meeting afterwards & chat with Rev Robert afterwards; back for a fine roast lunch. Relaxed with a pile of babes, out for a walk with H&M in the afternoon to see the snowdrops & lovely countryside.

• Up earlyish, out to Ely to do an Octagon climbing trip with M. out for a nice pub lunch afterwards together. Tried to drive home - but Nissan leaf inoperable, assumed I'd not charged it but - apparently not, a failing 12V battery - very weird needing to jump starting a car with 25kWh+ in its Li-Ion battery
• Home eventually; hmm. Set too grinding out the grout to get access to the inaccessible isolators feeding the dripping tap in our downstairs bathroom. Watched Tenet with the babes - amusingly: starting at the half-way point, and then re-watching from the start.

• Up late, customer call, partner sales call, customer call, admin, synched with Anna, interview for a new marketing person, more admin.

• A day off! quick mail chew in the morning, drove to Aldeburg with J.H.&E. - partner/sales call at the end of the car ride, had to eat lunch during the call.
• Had some time to chat to B&A, tidied up a bit, drove back via Sue & Phil's new Rectory in Ipswich - lovely to see them; chips on the way home. Caught up with my blog backlog.

• Encouraging sales call, partner call; synch calls, mail chew.

• Valentines day cards; J. had flowers & a new pringles-like chocolate crisp thing. 1:1s, Nextcloud call, lots of admin & planning.

• Turns out I threw out H's artwork material - cunningly left in a bin by the front-door (bother).
• Planning call, worked on the E-mail backlog, talk with Christopher in the evening.

• All Saints, band practice in the morning, slugged for much of the afternoon.

• J. out to help at Church with open-morning, R&A&babes arrived back from a holiday in Cypress (with muted earthquake) via Stansted for lunch. Enjoyed some time with them.

• Hoped to clear the day to go out with M. but instead got stuck with important customer & partner calls, and feeling grotty. Urgh.

• Still not feeling great; various 1:1's, partner calls, hiring triage.

• Feeling distinctly unwell, coughing up lumps - never good. Up late, to work! A huge backlog of things to get to - sales call, partner call, band-practice at our home.

• Up early, a Eurostar homeward, popped in to the first State of Open Conference chatted to Frank; caught up with some old friends & talks. Home to see the family and recover somewhat late in the evening.

• Breakfast, and set off to the co-working space; caught up with lots of people individually. Profiled WASM-ness with Tor in firefox with some success - no libpixman acceleration there, and the fall-back methods are horrifyingly slow.
• Checked on C'bras Turkish team - all well thank God.
• Out for dinner as a large group, had a spectacularly unpleasant interaction with someone. Enjoyed a chance to get to know Gabriele better in the evening - a kind person at a good time.

• Breakfast, and to the conference, more standing by the booth and meeting people left & right. Out to Le Falstaff with a set of friendly hackers, talked until late.

• Breakfast, off to the ULB, caught up with a good number of old friends; Dodji requested pushing my blog regularly - so I'll try to keep it more up-to-date. Quested for an internship for H. Quick chat with Lennart before my talk:
• Snatched some lunch somewhere, talked with Gerald, and met various friends old and new - met up with the cool kids in the LibreOffice dev-room, and gave a quick talk on COOL over lockdown.
• Back to the hotel, and off to Beta Co-working for a lovely community, pasta dinner - talked much of the time to Andreas, Sophie, Philippe and others. Up late in the hotel lobby.

• Open Forum Europe day - lots of interesting people to talk to and catch up with; some good presentations too. On to the FLOSS foundations dinner afterwards, then out to the Delerium Cafe with Thorsten - fewer people than normal, caught up with some people, bed extremely late.

• Catch up with Miklos, various trains to FOSDEM; met Wookey while waiting for a Eurostar. Arrived, found the Bedford, worked on slides, got some food, finally finished slides without being insanely late - unusual.
• Perhaps it's possible to avoid the late-night zombification effect of doing the hacking then the slides just before the talk ?

• Weekly sales call, partner meeting, good in-person chat with Simon N. Researched travel, slides etc. Chat with Cor.

• Chat with Kendy, Pedro, Andras, interviews. Sync with Naomi on marketing candidates - lots of hiring and interviewing going on.

• Planning call much of the morning; booked CS3 travel, various partner calls in the afternoon. Lovely to catch up with Sean Atkinson in the evening.

• All Saints in the morning, back for lunch with David, played games with J, H. & D. who kindly took babes to StAG. Relaxed.

• Set too with H. clearing and cleaning out the office; managed to get H's new desk cut down together on the band-saw and after binning a whole filing cabinet - eventually fitted into the corner: nice.
• Anne over for a birthday celebration with Bruce; lovely to see them, pie & cake for lunch. Spent some time with them; back to dunging out the office.

• Poked at slides, chatted to Dee & Becky who came over, multi-partner conference call for several hours. Spent time cleaning out the office, shredding ancient papers etc.

• Catch up with Miklos, COOL community call, catch up with the OpenProject team, partner call, admin. Persevered with my Duolingo German-learning habit.

• Positive weekly sales call, monthly Productivity all-hands call, catch up with Patrick, Thorsten. All Saints band practice.

• Admin, mail, planning, status report, 1:1's, played with Miro a little. CP monthly management meeting.

• Planning call; marketing call, reviewed 2023 projections with Tracie & Julie. Catch up with Philippe.
• AllSaints PCC meeting in the evening.

• All Saints, played in the morning with Peter, relaxed in the afternoon.

• Up lateish, dismantled washing machine, replaced the inlet hose, J. cleaned the soap dispenser, replaced the front seal & spring. Amazingly - no leaks anymore.
• Dug through personal tax filing, eventually with some results - filed for J. and myself late in the evening.

• Up early, out for a run in the frost with J. Home, mail chew, admin, H. passed her driving test 1st time, happily. Catch up with Naomi & Eloy, sync call with Andras. Worked through Univention conference action items.

• Up early - driving babes to school due to missed train. Sync with Miklos, COOL community call, mail chew, lunch, catch-up with Andras before all afternoon C'bra Quarterly Mgmt meeting until late.

• Up early; off to the workshop venue, Marc spoke on Collabora Online, lots of discussion, pleasant coffee with Andreas, tram not working, taxi to the airport, not checked-in in advance for Ryanair - what a silly system - paid the fine.
• Home - lovely to be back with the babes & Mary. Caught up with the news & progress.

• Early breakfast with Naomi, Marc & Eloy - off to the venue, met some friends - improved my German variously by listening to some interesting talks.
• Talked to lots of partners & customers, enjoyed food, some music, catch up with Thorsten & Lothar, bed rather late.

• Up early, packed, mail chew, planning call. Catch up with Mazin. Slide & data review. H. had a driving lesson, Nicki over for tea, drove to Stansted, flight to Bremen. Caught up with Eloy in-person before bed.

• All Saints in the morning, church vision & cornerstone retrospective meeting afterwards.
• Home for a fine roast, helped N. to assemble her new computer - while watching Space Balls during the length delays during installation.
• Watched Johnny English reborn with Mary, tea, played Rummikub with H,J & Mary. Finised up PC in the evening with N.

• Up earlyish, helped seal windows in guest-room for Mary R. - coming to stay with us today for a week.
• Removed washing machine seal: interesting 0.9mm wire necked to far smaller where it rusted 'orrible - who would use galvanized wire instead of stainless corrosive environment? Hotpoint apparently. Found the rusted screw (see previous thought), and located leak finally around rubber filling manifold. Ordered parts & re-assembled.
• Mary over to stay at lunch-time.
• Re-plumbed washing machine feed from main to avoid pump noise at night (economy-7 electricity) - pipe bending with E, soldering with H. looks good.
• Planning bits with H. Got ahead with admin.

• Worked on slides for a somewhat unexpected partner call with Andras, Tor & Pedro; had the call. Caught up with Eloy.
• Into Cambridge to see Avatar-WoW - fantastic visual effects, somewhat unwise plot emphasis on family & planet as idol, but good fun. Back for a take-away - a treat for N's 18th.

• Chat with Miklos, COOL community call, interviews & offers variously - for some of our open positions.

• Encouraging sales call with Eloy & Mazim, 1:1 with Kendy, partner call in the afternoon, admin. All Saints music group practice in the evening.

• Calls with Pedro, Naomi, Mike K, chat with a UK based startup, sync with Philippe, back-to-back calls & admin all day.

• Sync with Anna, ISO audit call, planning call for much of the morning, dug through E-mail, admin bits. Ordered lots of bits with Robert's help for N's new PC - a Zen 4 beastie.

• All Saints in the morning with Cedric on Piano. Mission meeting afterwards, home for a fine lunch, Tashi & Emily arrived - lovely to see them, picked up babes variously from StAG in the evening.

• J. out to All Saints - warm spaces, chewed mail, caught up on personal admin: ONS study response, personal admin etc. David over for lunch.
• Poked at a plumbing issue with David, before re-wiring J's counselling room, with power-over-ethernet hub, wifi extender, and other such gubbins - rather successfully. Pizza dinner, bid 'bye to David, slugged.

• Up lateish, mail-chew, admin, interviewing bits.
• Amused to see that an old class-mate Tim Vincent-Smith has built a/the Pianodrome and is rescuing and re-using old pianos.
• Pushed a large amount of project planning out of the door somehow.

• Took babes to park & ride in Cambridge: train strikes. 1:1 with Miklos, COOL community call, admin. Partner catch-up, chat with Andras, more project planning. Cell group - with Mary, Leo & Alex.

• Back to work, mail chew - encouraged by a lovely speedup from Noel for our projection spreadsheet: seconds to tens of milliseconds to edit; nice.
• Sales calls, sync with Gokay & Andras, worked on project description pieces. J. took down decorations.
• Call with Ben & Kendy on our hiring pipeline - if you'd like a job around Collabora Online & LibreOffice technology you can checkout Collabora careers.
• Bit of hacking until late, improving profiling & tracing.

• Some mail chew, sync with Andras, helped to seal some annoying wooden windows, tidied the house somewhat. Helped H. machine some aluminium to repair her dead Beats headphones. Up rather late working on some maths with Miriam. A more successful day off.

• A day off - planning calls during the morning; sync. with Andras. Out for a run with J - partner call & special pricing call, some of the afternoon off.

• All Saints - music with H. home, sogging action, more Jack Ryan.