Got tired today of talking (well, writing) too much and doing far too little. So this afternoon, I went out and...

  • ate stir-fry
  • shopped for electronics equipment (I refuse to believe tnat no store in New York sells AVR programming equipment. I am obviously not looking in the right places. However, I do not know what the right places would be. Suggestions?)
  • walked around Washington Square park (lovely!)
  • took a free yoga class (interesting - and somewhat revealing of the disastrous state of my neck, back, and shoulders... could probably spend 1.5 hours doing that again).
  • made a bundle of Spanish-language poetry for the XO, which entailed
    • learning XHTML (ok, reading the diff between the XHTML and HTML specs - which I've been meaning to do for a while in the name of Better Standards Compliance; this was a good excuse)
    • learning some Spanish along the way, thanks to Rafael and Sebastian correcting my atrocious grammar and word-choice periodically.
    • discovering that there are haikus en espanol! While I'm not surprised that there are haikus in Spanish (why wouldn't there be?) I hadn't even thought about that before, and was pleasantly surprised to come across it.
  • Chimed in on Janet's budding paper on FOSSlike collaboration in schools and Cormac's stub on making Wikiversity a personal learning space (my contributions to the latter are currently just incoherent babble).
  • tried emacs - I still feel way more comfortable in vim, but I'm going to try using emacs as my editor for the week and see if the learning curve's really worth climing.
  • I feel like I did a whole lot more this evening, but can't remember it right now - I'm fading fast, and need to sleep, and very soon. (I also need to do laundry, but the sleep comes first.) I feel like I should be able to do a lot more in 9 hours, although a lot of this time was spent wandering around the city, which was Most Excellent, so I really should not complain.

Before I pass out, though - I just want to note two things. The first is that I really want a workstation setup like cjb - ginormous monitor, super-ultra-ergonomic keyboard, mad hacking skillz acquired without RSI bundled together with them. I'm really worried about RSI. I'm constantly fighting a preventative battle against it, but my wrists still get sore once in a while (whereupon I immediately stop after I finish what I'm writing, stretch, and cease keyboard use for the day or as long of a stretch as I can), and my shoulder setup is definitely unhappy.

The second is that the OLPC Chicago grassroots community makes me incredibly happy. They just set up a jabber server for their XOs (so that you can see other people in your Neighborhood view even if they're not sitting next to you on the mesh network) - which is cool, but the really cool thing is that they did it in a completely grassroots, ad-hoc, non-official way.

Somebody was reading morgs's blog posts on how to set up an XO Jabber server, and emailed the list saying "hey, can we do this?" Soon after, other people chimed in with "well, what do you need?" and "ooh, I have a server," and "hey, I can help install that," and less than 12 hours later, it was up. The power of people who realize that they have the power to do Awesome is... well, Awesome. Best example of ad-hocracy I've seen all day.

Tomorrow's destination: Chinatown. Tonight's destination: sleep.