I was just reading the latest issue of Home Power magazine, which is celebrating 20 years of publication with this issue. One of the articles, by Kathleen Jarschke-Schultze, talks about the value of reusable cotton bags for shopping instead of accepting the usual "paper or plastic". It caught my eye because my wife Karen is an avid cotton-bag user. Kathleen ends the article with an idea that I think is worth repeating:

So how about this new etiquette: Conservation in everything except courtesy and generosity. Seems like that would be a refreshing change. We all need to just put one foot in front of the other to keep moving forward on conserving global resources. Even if it is slow or small, take that first step.

I like that. Conservation, courtesy, and generosity should never go out of style...

While I've smiled for a lot of photographs at speaking engagements around the world in the last year or three, to the best of my knowledge Elizabeth Gordon-Werner is the first person who ever painted me during one of my talks. Pretty cool. She has the painting of me online, along with lots of others from this and other events at her Art Smitten site.

People keep asking me about the beard thing... Here's my take on what happened and why.

Just before I left for LCA 2009, my wife offered to send along one of the limited edition prints of her award-winning waterfall photograph. She knew from prior years that the LCA organizers often host an auction or raffle to raise money for some worthy charity at the conference banquet. Since the photo was taken at Milford Sound on the way to last year's LCA in Melbourne, there was a connection between the photo and LCA. We had no idea what this year's charity might be, nor did we anticipate that her photo would become the centerpiece of the evening's fund-raising activities.

The charity selected this year was an organization that is trying to save the Tasmanian Devil from extinction. Professor Hamish McCallum, the chief scientist with the program, gave a talk after dinner and before the auction began. The native population is suffering from a fatal facial tumor disease that results in horrible lesions, and is likely to kill off all the Devils within a decade or three. My family and I all have a strong love of nature, and Karen and I had the pleasure of touring Tasmania after LCA 2003 in Perth, so this seemed like a great charity to raise money for with her photo.

As often happens at LCA, the auction and related fund-raising activities got complicated. This year, the photo alone was bid up to $2500 (which was very cool!), before people started offering things for higher bids. For years, going maybe as far back as Perth, I've been cajoled about shaving my beard if the bidding hit some level, and have always said no. This year, someone offered $5000 if I would shave my beard, and again I said no. Much later, after more cajoling and many counter offers, when the bids and various matching offers had us approaching $20,000 in total donation to the charity, I relented and announced that if we hit a total of $25,000 going to the charity I would consent to a shave. The resulting frenzy, including the suggestion that if it went high enough Linus should do the shaving, and the formation of a bidding consortium that kept raising more money and bidding against itself, was completely unexpected! Others have tried to capture details of the insanity, but the bottom line is that by the end of the evening, the total had blown way past anything we could have imagined, and by the end of the conference the total going to the charity was on the order of $40,000!

Why did I agree to let Linus shave my beard? To be honest, I'm not entirely certain. I only had one beer that evening, so I can't blame intoxication. The fact that it would yield a worthy charity something over 10 times what my wife's photo alone had drawn as a maximum bid seemed significant to me. In hindsight, I also think I was at least a little bit curious to see what my face looked like after having a beard since sometime around September of 1982! In any case, I made the offer, insane amounts of money were raised, and on the last day of the conference, over the lunch hour, Linus took trimmers in hand and removed my beard in front of an audience.

The reactions have been completely overwhelming. A local TV station and a local newspaper in Hobart were both there and ran stories. The ripple of mentions in the blogosphere was and is just astounding. There's even a silly Shaving Bdale game created overnight by the "Mad Scientists" at Secret Lab! And from all over the globe, people I do and don't know have been sending emails and finding me on IRC to plead with me to grow my beard again! Right after the shave, my good friend Keith Packard said "Bdale, grow it back!". Before I left Hobart, my wife emailed saying she and the kids hoped I wasn't waiting until I got home to start. Joey Hess blogged a hairy tale about how I'd scarred the minds of young Debian developers. The leader of Debian-RS sent word by email that the group all hoped I would re-grow my beard. And on and on and on... I'm really not used to being the center of so much attention!

Being suddenly without beard felt weird in lots of silly little ways. I was hyper-sensitive to drafts. The feel of cold beverages hitting my upper lip was downright strange. And I kept wanting to scratch what wasn't there! After making faces at myself in the mirror for a while, I decided I really wasn't happy, and do prefer being bearded. So I haven't shaved since Saturday morning in Hobart, and am pretty scruffy looking. My wife said today that I'm "already starting to look like Bdale again".

At the current growth rate, I have high hopes of having at least some facial dignity back by the time I speak at FOSDEM. And no, I won't be shaving my beard off again any time soon...

I just moved my blog from blosxom to ikiwiki. Slowly, but surely, my web-related infrastructure for gag.com and related sites is all moving to ikiwiki+git...

I shoved in a rewrite rule to map the old top-level URL to the new one, and ensured that my rss feed will only contain new posts. However, all the "permanent" article paths changed. Oh well. I'm much happier now!

Quite some time back, I wrote about my disappointment that Ampad had ceased manufacturing their Quad Ruled Steno Books, which I use to make notes to myself on just about everything.

Several of my friends in Europe responded that similar pads in A5 size were commonly available in retail stores, and I quite happily bought a few on a trip to Germany. Then, one of my colleagues at work had some nice notebooks made up for a customer event with grid paper and suitable logos on the cover that I grabbed a few of and have used quite happily.

Sometime in the intervening years, Ampad started producing these pads again, but with a different product number, 42036. I stumbled over some at a local office supply store and bought a big pile... others have noticed too, and sent me email about it, which is why I'm taking the time to write this...

Yes, I'm much happier now!

I'm not a serious fan of professional sports, but over the years, I've enjoyed watching a wide variety of sporting events at different times and for different reasons. It can be fun when a relatively local team is doing well, and even more fun when they're doing well with style.

For the last week or so, I've been paying attention to Major League Baseball for the first time in several years. Last night, from a hotel room on my current business trip, I watched the Colorado Rockies baseball team take the National League championship, thereby winning the right to compete in this year's World Series.

It's pretty amazing that they've now won 21 of their last 22 games, including seven straight in the playoffs. But there are two other things that captured my attention last night prompting me to comment here. The first is that this really has been a team effort. With due respect to the various players on the team, none of them seem to be superstars... instead, they come across as a group of very good players who are just doing their jobs really well. And second, they really do seem to be having fun and aren't taking themselves too seriously.

I don't know what's going to happen next. They may win, they may lose. But those two observations last night cheered me up after a fairly stressful day, and left me encouraged that doing what you love as well as you can, and finding others to work together with who care as much about the cause at hand as you do can still lead to extraordinary results.

That's pretty cool.

A long-time friend pointed me to another "categorize yourself" site the other day, this time it's a Programmer Personality Test. He pointed out that it's only 12 questions, wouldn't take long, and he'd be interested in how I scored. I found the questions really irritating, but the results led to some interesting discussion that my friend suggested might be worth a blog entry.

I get either a DLSB or PLSB, depending on which arbitrary choices I make on several questions where neither option is at all representative of my world view. He found this interesting, since I'm the only other person he's talked to about this that also got a P. He also noted that LS seems to be very strong in all the "real programmers" he knows, and wondered if that might be why managing programmers is so much like herding cats.

One of the bits that I find so artificial about this is that the model that I personally find most effective in the loner/group continuum isn't reflected by the questions at all. It's neither a "do it all myself" nor a "engage with everyone before doing anything" approach. The free software community collaboration experience has proven to me that the most effective approach is a hybrid, where you "do something" followed by engaging collaborators, who may well help you decide to throw a lot away, which is ok if it was a learning experience, and/or it leads to a better result. In the end, you may not even be the center of attention or "owner" of the result.

In fact, often the way to get something done right is ensure that you get the right person to do it, which often isn't yourself... but the strategy for getting the right person to do it is almost never to engage in group-think before doing any work! It seems to me that in our community, leading usually starts with doing, while success is related to who else gets motivated to follow your lead and join in the doing...

After dropping my daughter off at camp today, we wandered over to In The Groove so that I could pick up some fresh tie-dyed shirts. My son found a few he liked in his size, too, and my wife bought a cute patchwork skirt.

Good thing everything in the store we cared about was 30% off today...

It's rare that I find a letter to the editor of a newspaper profound enough to be worth tearing out and saving. Today was one of those days. I am pleased to discover that the full text is visible online, so I can share Ashley Frohwein's letter Insight on Fourth of July flag burning here.

Sadly, I'm not always proud of my country... but some of the principles on which it was founded remain as noble and inspiring as ever!

For a couple years, I've routinely used Ampad Quad Ruled Steno Books to make notes to myself on just about everything. This morning I realized I'm using the last one from my most recently acquired package of 12... so, naturally, I tried to order some more.

They're gone. Apparently, nobody sells a quad-ruled steno pad any more.

I even called Ampad corporate customer service, where a very helpful woman poked around on her computer and confirmed that the product has been discontinued, and the last case in their inventory shipped out as part of an order to a university bookstore in early April. There aren't any more in stock, and they probably won't ever print any more.

Grumble. At least I can still buy quad-ruled engineering pads, even if they are clumsier to carry around...