After Wad's talk on repairs and support for large-scale XO pilots revealed an outcry for guides on repair being something that was needed "soon - like yesterday, " Nikki Lee leapt into action and demonstrated that she actually has 8 hands by managing to disassemble an XO while simultaneously photographing and documenting the process. The result: a small but growing set of repair tutorials on topics like screen replacement, keyboard replacement, and (coming soon) other common yet simple procedures for getting a broken XO back in action. Comments, translations, additional tutorials, and better photographs are welcome. Greg Marra, creator of The Blue Alliance, is coming to 1cc tomorrow to help film yet more tutorials. Now if we could only get Nicholas Bodley to post his repair center manual outline (hint, hint)...

Chris Carrick is firing up on his charging peripherals research project by reading two year's worth of mailing list archives and talking with all the engineers he can find. Tank Lai is working on something which should... hopefully go public this weekend, to leave everyone with a cliffhanger. Melanie Kim pulled me aside this evening to show me some design aspects from other games she's thinking of incorporating into her language-learning RPG project. I ran around the office like a decapicated chicken helping workshop attendees reflash their laptops, doing mind-numbing data transfer between the developers program database and shipping spreadsheets (yes, it's getting automated... I hope), and occasionally eating pretzels.

I'll be on a bus tomorrow en route to the OLPC Learning Club meeting at Gallaudet. Fortunately, these buses have wifi, so I might actually get some overdue proposals written... more coming on this soon, but most of them were works-in-progress that highly pertain to C. Scott Ananian's call for a community liason, so stay tuned. I'm also a few days past when I originally planned another round of Sugar bug triaging. (On the up side, sugar-jhbuild works on my laptop now.)

My aunt has Rachmaninov piano concertos! (#2 and #3.) BLISS!

On a final note: my year off is officially over, and I'm looking for interesting things to do come September 1st when the sunset clause on the ILXO office expires. A few things I do know: engineering (electrical/software), open licenses, education/learning, and being able to travel and deploy with, design with, and observe actual users spark me off and get me going. Jamming with hacker communities, working insane but flexible hours, and surfing on the edge of chaos are all things I like. The less I know about a field and the harder/scarier it appears to be, the more I like it. If you've got ideas for good problems to solve, adventures to go on, places to study, or teams to join, drop me a line.