I booked our flights to Austin for South by Southwest on Air Canada last night. We'd originally planned to drive down from Montreal for a nice weeklong roadtrip, then meander along the Gulf Coast out to Miami for our flight to Puerto Rico for the Wikitravel Get-together in mid-April. It would have been a nice trip away from Montreal's gross springtime.
But we ended up buying a house, which means we've got to be back in Montreal for April 1st for closing and signing papers and taking possession of the house. Which means we're flying down to Austin and Puerto Rico separately. We're going to take an extra week on the Gulf Coast (Texas). As a last-minute add-on, Maj decided to go to IAsummit 2007 in Las Vegas. So we're swinging through there at the end of March, on our way home.
tags: austin sxsw puerto rico gulf coast iasummit house wikitravel get-together travel
Speaking of the house
We did our walk-through with the inspector on Monday, which was really great. The current owner, Gilles, was there, and we got to talk a bit. His English is only slightly better than my French, so it was good to switch back and forth. He and his son have lived in the house for years, but he's going to move in with his girlfriend and her three kids, so they need a bigger house. He started the animation studio at Ubisoft nine years ago, so he's got a fun job.
The inspector was great -- he really got into the cracks and crevices. And he kept telling us how well the house had been kept up, and what good shape it's in for a house of its age. (Current estimates are that the house is about 100 years old, but nobody knows for sure.) We also put a ladder up on the back terrace so we could go out on the roof, which was just amazing. The neighborhood has mostly small houses, so we have a great view up there. I'm looking forward to building a roof deck this summer.
We also just got our financing finalized yesterday. Which means, I guess, that we're really doing this thing. Woohoo!
tags: house roof deck gilles ubisoft inspection financing
OpenID bounties
What's going on with the OpenID bounties for Open Source implementations that were announced last year at OSCON? As someone who's written one of the main implementations (the OpenID extension for MediaWiki), I'd love to see a bounty paid to the Wikimedia Foundation for that work.
The bounty program has some unreasonable requirements, the most onerous of which is that the extension has to ship with the core code. MediaWiki ships without requiring third-party libraries, so the OpenID support has to run as an extension. But I'd still like to see the spirit of the bounty offers followed through, with a bounty given for the MW extension.
tags: openid open source mediawiki bounty