I had planned to celebrate with a big family dinner, but because Po didn’t want to make a big deal about getting older (typical two year old), he just ate a toothbrush instead.

Yesterday we adopted a beautiful, 2½ month-old Border Collie puppy. He was the more curious and attentive of two brothers, though it was still a difficult choice! He is heart-stoppingly cute, has that adorable “new puppy” smell, soft and fluffy long fur, and is already beginning to figure out the inscrutable noises of the silly humans. Po seems to be very comfortable at his new home:

It feels like ages ago that Pia started a company, named in such a way that I would eventually have to join… and join I did. It has been a wonderful experience, not just because it has allowed us to do great things for good money — our preferred arrangement of adjectives! — but because working together has taught us so much about business, the Open Source and ICT industries, and ourselves.

One of the nice things about the way we work is that we’ve had plenty of room for our other loves, in both our commercial and community realms. That flexibility, in turn, has changed our business. So, I’ve sunk my teeth into more technical stuff of late, while Pia has been doing lots of education related work. The up-and-down nature of consulting can sometimes be a bit scary, but the ability to evolve our business with our interests — and the changing needs of the market! — is awesome. We’re a rockin’ team.

Of course, none of what I’ve written above really helps to explain why, in the last couple of weeks, we decided to completely change everything. I suppose the flexibility bit might. Anyway, when Pia was invited to join Senator Kate Lundy’s team as a policy advisor, focusing on ICT (as an engine, not a sector), government openness and transparency, and online engagement, there was barely a heartbeat between the two of us before “yes” was the obvious answer. Pia started a week after the offer.

See, there’s a side of me that would totally take a job removing staples from parliamentary dishwashing memos in order to work in Parliament House, but Pia is not the politics tragic that I am… She’s leaping in because the recipe is right: not only are these fantastic and important things to work on, but by working with (seriously clueful) Senator Lundy, there’s a huge opportunity to actually Get Shit Done. A mission worthy of the kung fu steamroller, don’t you think?

Pia’s commute to her new office might have been more of a concern had we not bought a house and moved to Yass just before Christmas. The whole thing is surreal to me on a number of fronts: (a) we bought a house, which seems somewhat shocking among our generation, (b) we decided to buy a house in a matter of days and moved in a matter of weeks, (c) we live in Yass, and (d) we’re really, really enjoying it.

It’s so… serene. We get to spend more time with Pia’s family. There are cows on the hill behind our house. We have a back yard and a shed. The abject lack of urban convenience is improving our abject lack of routine. Win!

So, as of this anniversary we can announce that we’re taking the next logical step for the Waugh family…

We’re getting a puppy!

Happy fourth, poo.

… icky awesome …

Much nicer! Cheesy and nasty, but I just copied the PNGs over the original GIFs in the bzr repository I use to manage our WordPress deployments. I really ought to write about that some time…

Update: Check out my awesome Tango/GNOME Smilies plugin for WordPress and WordPress MU. Rock on with your Tango on!

Update: Eventually I submitted this as a patch for core, and it was committed for inclusion in WordPress 2.9. Plus, the patch adds support for some bonus funky emotes that were available in the Tango/GNOME themes. Hooray!

But she can’t be too upset, with beautiful pictures like these.

A few weeks back, Matt Zimmerman — who must be aiming for a world record in “dude, you so need a blog” demands — reminded me about a bizaare video created early last year as a test for a potential Ubuntu feature, so I thought I’d share one of the stranger historical footnotes in Ubuntu’s grand repertoire of… strange historical footnotes.

In early 2005, Mark decided that he wanted to deliver a surprise, three-minute video message in the upcoming Ubuntu 5.04 “hoary hedgehog” release, so tasked me with figuring out the details. It had to be small, so it would fit on the CD, but could be delivered in any format we could play out of the box… a great opportunity to make a statement about Free formats.

To test the entire production, we needed a few minutes of test material from a DV camera to encode into Ogg Theora/Vorbis… which resulted in the aforementioned bizaare video, starring Pia and I:

While the test was mostly successful (we still had some problems with playback reliability), I don’t think Mark ever recorded the final videogram message, so we didn’t ship it with Ubuntu 5.04 “hoary hedgehog”. If it does happen to exist, it might be amusing to publish it for the interest of Ubuntu history geeks.

The idea resurfaced in May 2006, when Mark published the mysterious “Plan M” for Canonical-internal testing. You’ll know Plan M as the video included with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, in which Nelson Mandela describes the meaning and spirit of ubuntu, the concept that inspired the project’s very name… But I might leave that story until next time.

I realised that waugh.id.au was empty, so I added a family feed reader to it. It’s all sooky and lovey-dovey and stuff. Rock.

This has been a challenging week. But we are a kickarse team.

As friends through highs and lows, we are honest with ourselves and each other.

As partners we are a team of two, grounded in trust and respect.

As lovers we cherish each other with passion, vitality and peace.

As warriors we stand side-by-side in dedicated pursuit of our dreams.

Friends, partners, lovers, warriors: To you, I commit my life.