After putting in some work over the weekend, W- and I headed to Ottawa. He’s here for the Ottawa Linux Symposium, and I’m here to hang out with a few Linux geeks I know – or at least I would’ve been, had the two people I was looking forward to meet actually decided to come this year. (They both had very good reasons, though.)

Telecommuting worked out mostly okay. I finished the items on my list and joined all the relevant calls. Voice over IP occasionally flaked out on me, but we worked around it. I tried rebooting to Microsoft Windows a few times in order to use the VoIP plugin I’ve got in the mail client, but I sometimes encountered system problems. Still, none of that stopped me from getting my bug list down to zero, and I’m looking forward to the next phase of development in this Drupal project. Hooray! Maybe I’ll try to switch my development environment to Emacs during the break – that’ll encourage me to keep working on the book.

In other news, I now have tentative trips to Washington (September?), Berlin (October?), and Montreal (October?), all because of Web 2.0 stuff. Hooray!

I’m simplifying my wardrobe while adding some flair, too. ;) I used to be quite fond of dresses with matching bags when I was eight or so, and then (if you believe my sister) I promptly lost all sense of fashion. I’m slowly working out my style, my “uniform” – a white blouse, a black skirt or pair of slacks, and a scarf. I replaced my handbag with a medium-sized one with loops for a scarf, and I find a certain odd pleasure in having matched the scarf around my waist with the scarf tied (neatly) around the rim of my bag. It reminds me of fractals. I’ve also made progress on my quest for decent flat shoes I can wear to the office, having decided that life would probably be better without high heels. It might be unfashionable, but it’ll save me back pain in the long run.

Next week, my plans are to:

• Install Ubuntu on another partition and get the IBM Linux layer onto it. I think this will help me be more productive. I’m not quite used to the way Redhat Enterprise Linux does things.
• Patch any critical bugs the testers find, and get ready to move the Drupal project from QA to production.
• Write at least three Emacs-related blog posts.
• Finish my pasalubong shopping.
• Produce a one-page guide to IBM’s Web 2.0 tools for new hires< ./i>