The Open Sourcerer

Year MMXV summarized in 2 ½ minutes4 min read

—

by

Jeff
in , , ,

I’m doing a quick retrospective on the last seven years (you’ll see why later). In this first part, here’s a short overview of what I did in 2015 (2 to 3 minutes reading time):

  • In the spring of 2015, I wrote a blog post reporting on my first term (2014-2015) as the president of the GNOME Foundation.
  • Designed, printed and shipped a ton of annual reports for the GNOME Foundation, and wrote forty letters by hand with a calligraphic pen. I also did the design work in 2016 and 2017, but I didn’t do the letters then.
  • Attended GUADEC. Photos I took can be found at the usual place.
  • I experienced a fire in the airport, two broken gates, and an airplane engine failure during takeoff, all in the same day. Makes you rethink your outlook on life. Particularly in light of what happened to my friends at the turn of 2019-2020 (more on that later).
  • In the fall season, I joined two other boards of directors, to manage a real estate portfolio somewhere north of $55 million. I was there roughly three years, until the fall of 2018. Paradoxically, it was much less demanding work than the GNOME Foundation’s board, thanks to the true luxury of having a lot of staffers to operationalize the board’s governance decisions and take care of the day-to-day.
  • With friends, we made a TurBaconEpic (warning: not for vegans.)
  • Quietly ended my close involvement with the Pitivi project, due to lack of time and shifting life priorities. Thus 2015 was the last time I blogged about it (part 1, part 2, 0.95 release announcement. I’d love to be closely involved again, but realistically, years down the road, this is not happening, and I trust the current maintainers to do a great job with it.
  • I inked an old laminated sketch of Cubitus & Sénéchal to give it new life.
  • Made a video for a symphony orchestra.
  • Empirically/mathematically proved that projectors’ “smart eco” modes are marketing bullshit.
  • Discovered that some Spanish, French and British cities don’t understand how roundabounds are actually supposed to work.
  • It had taken me 2-3 years of trial-and-error (and lots of research), but at this point yeast and flour no longer had too many remaining secrets for me, and the bread and pizza doughs I made were pretty good.
  • My longtime friend Étienne came to see me a couple of times during his month-long stay in Montreal that winter, a most welcome visit considering we had not seen each other for three years. Lots of fun and repaired equipment.
  • Kusanagi, the desktop computer I had been using since 2009, was starting to show its limitations with the “modern” web obesity crisis. No longer wanting to constantly worry about my RAM consumption during my intensive use of web browsers (and wishing to work on 90 megapixel images with about thirty layers at the same time), I bought a workstation-class desktop computer (a used Dell Precision T3500 boosted to 24 GB of RAM). This computer was insanely powerful, it just took me two years to figure out why it was randomly crashing and how to fix it (troubleshooting the issue took me 21 months, but writing that blog post took me 10 months)
  • I bought/upgraded a lot of studio equipment for my video production services, from lighting to sound recording and processing, with the goal of getting back in touch with my old creative love of video production. A great pair of studio monitoring headphones to have for accuracy (but I would also say general purpose) is the legendary Sony MDR-7506; however, the earpads flake out after 4-5 years, so I later devised a permanent solution for durable headphone earpads.
Jeff
Latest posts by Jeff (see all)