Tomorrow morning, I will start my new job at axentra.
I must admit I'm a little nervous but also excited by this new job. After 3 years of being self-employed, and with all the shit I had last year and until this May , it's a definitly a welcomed change in my professional life. Sure I will miss the fact that I was able to wake up late in the morning, not having to dress to go to work and also the 30 seconds commute times, but for a more steady income it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

You can find more blogs from here at this space; labs.trolltech.com

Last year I turned 30 and I know people still wonder when I end up being as old as I look. But on the way to this I pass today the next prime number - and I must say it feels much better than last year. The main reason is that I have a new job. This may suprise one or two, but it shouldn't.

Don't panic, I still work for SUSE. But I teamed up with my wife, who is also a software engineer and we decided to create a product on our own in the after hours. This is also the reason you may have missed me on the release-team mailing list so far. I just don't know how much time I will have left for KDE and openSUSE over this other project. It's a pretty radical change, so please bear with me if you expect me to do something that I don't do in the timeframe you're used to.

Anyway, what is this project about? I can't really say much about it at this point. It basically just passed early beta tests (which is also the reason I had some time for KConfig love) and we're both already pretty happy with it. I uploaded an early Screenshot in case you wonder what it looks like.

Of course it will take some time before we can release it - but as you know me, I'm the born release dude: we schedule for early august and perhaps KDE 4.0 can rally with it - I wouldn't mind if KDE beats us.

After three years at relevantive, I decided to work as a freelancer again - and moved in to a shared office in Berlin Kreuzberg.

While the relevantive office was beautiful, this is sure a small upgrade:

It's the first time in my job life that I do not share an office with other usability people, but with people of many different backgrounds: Hardware developers, security consultants, web and software developers, and a trick film company. I'll sure miss the cross-table usability talks we had at relevantive... but am also looking forward to see how a trick film is produced, hehe!

I decided to change the post title when I looked at the Planet and saw that Matthias's post about the Berlin office is right up there at the top.

So, my news for the day, is...wait for it...yep, I'm moving to Berlin. And no, not to work for Trolltech -- though Rich joked that I seem to be the only KDE person switching jobs and not going there. I'll be leaving the SAP LinuxLab, after almost four years, at the end of June to work for a pro-audio software company in Berlin. In a meeting today I announced the news to the rest of the LinuxLab (previously only my manager had known) so I can finally mention it publicly, though I made the decision a few months back.

While I'm looking forward to the change, being in Berlin, which I've fallen in love with over the course of the 10 or so visits in the last year, and a little bit of a change in scenery in the office scene (as well as working on multimedia software), I feel like I should at least take a moment to say thanks to the folks at SAP that I've been working with for the last several years. While there have been ups and downs during my time here, on the whole it has been an experience where I've learned a lot (more organizationally than technically) and I'm glad that I'm leaving on a positive note.

Berlin is really in the process of becoming KDE-Central. We've had a number of oldies (though some are inactive these days) that have been there for a while, Jan has managed to get it established as the KDE usability capital with Jan and Ellen there and Tina and Florian there off and on, the new Trolltech office will no doubt pull in a couple of new KDE-ish faces, and there are a couple of other KDE folks that either have moved there recently or will be doing so this summer. Just from names I could scratch out there are 12 KDE folks that will be around by the end of the summer.

(And now, for the first time since creating this blog a few years back, I've found a use for the "new job" category on kdedevelopers.org.)

I've been a buzzy little bee for the past few weeks. I would have posted a few days ago, but it ended up turning in to a DOT article.

I started my new job a few weeks ago. Yay for working at home, but I'm having trouble leaving work at work and actually "going" home. Last night I came home from class at 2300 to make phone calls and write emails until Justin reminded me I was "home". Its easy to roll out of bed and go to work, but hard to leave the keyboard at a certain time and stop being a IxD for the rest of the night.

Its possible I am flying to Ohio for a day trip tomorrow. I was supposed to go last week but the interviews wern't scheduled soon enough, and so far there is only one lined up for tomorrow. I can't say I'm excited about the day trip to Cleveland (being from Pittsburgh and all), but hey, it could be somewhere in Idaho or someplace. The trip will give me an opportunity to interview users of my client's software and get a better idea of how their product is actually being used rather than how its supposed to be used.

The Vegas countdown has begun and we leave in 15 days. As most of you know, I am from Pittsburgh. Many of the friends I had in college and beyond have moved on to different parts of the country and a big group of us (12 or so people) are going to meet up in Vegas.

El and Jan are coming to visit me in D.C. before we head to Atlanta for the printing meeting in April. I'm pretty excited for their visit, especially since El hasn't been to the U.S. yet. I'm also going to be in Atlanta for Monday and Tuesday (instead of just Monday) so I'll have the chance to catch up with other people too.

The kde-usability and kde-usability-devel lists have been pretty active lately with random threads here and there as well as preparation for the meeting in Berlin as well as future planning for the project. I have to say I'm happy about how well people are communicating lately rather than the normal troll and rat-hole sessions.

School has been suprisingly tame, but I have been very good about scheduling my time (I hope I can keep it up, I am notorious for 'putting things off'). Now that I got the usability reports up on the site, I can continue with my 'resolutions' list from the beginning of the year. Jan and I have an article forthcoming, and I am in the process of writing another for an industry newsletter. I would like to get moving on some KDE-Edu work as well (time and sanity permitting).

But first I must worry about Ohio. I dont even have a plane ticket yet!

Friday is my last day at .gov where I will be moving on the bigger and better things. For the past 14 months Ive been through three natural disasters (Indian Ocean tsunami, Katrina/Rita hurricanes, Pakistani/Indian earthquake), watched a few funerals on TV (Pope John Paul II, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King) and scandal galore (too many to list).

I can't say I'll miss the job very much, but I will miss my coworkers. They were really the ones who made the job interesting, and while being a consultant I wont get that same 'Office' atmosphere.

There needs to be a better solution for syndicating my blog. I have two active blogs, this one and my personal one. The difficulty with this is that I often cross blog because I have the same interesting things to say to both audiences. The KDE developers blog is the account which gets syndicated to Planet and LinuxChix, but it misses a lot of the random usability and interaction design rants I write. Although Planet reaches a lot of people, not everyone reads/syndicates it so I would be missing people who read only KDEDevelopers. But I've also had my personal blog for many years. What a dilemma, because one will have to go.

I will be doing some interesting work in the upcoming weeks in which I should be able to donate some of the materials to the KDE-EDU project (I still have to work out the details to see what deliverables I can release from the contract). I will be conducting in some in-depth requirements research for education software for children from Kindergarten to 12th grade. Non-proprietary materials such as personas, survey results, usability studies, and style guides could greatly help the KDE-EDU project in creating better educational software. I'm excited for the project mostly because I'll be able to give some of my daily work back to KDE.

For those of you who play WoW (world of warcraft): an addiction test

Well on your way!
You are 73% Addicted!
You play a lot, and you're starting to get hooked. Keep it up and soon you too will be part of the ever-growing group that is totally addicted. Or, see the warning signs now and get out while you still can!

Truthfully, if I took this test a few months ago I probably would have been 90-95% addicted. I've been very busy lately and havn't had the time/opportunity to sit and play for hours on end because of homework, housework, and other random things. My second character (undead rogue) is slowly leveling up, so I think once she gets to 45/50 I'll be in get-to-60 mode.

El mentioned in her recent blog entry about an issue with the Defaults button in many of the application configuration UIs. She also posted this thread (list membership required for archive) about this issue, which led to a discussion about it in #openusability.

A preliminary solution would be to create '[Reset all defaults] [Reset (Fonts) defaults]' buttons to better save the user from accidently resetting ALL defaults instead of just the current tab defaults. In the end we'll just have to test it and see if it is a better solution and by how much.

I will be in Las Vegas March 17-20 if anyone is going to be in the area. Also, there were some small talks about having a Usabiltiy/HCI-WG meeting in Washington, D.C. in the beginning of April before a meeting in Georgia. If there is any interest in this, drop me a line so I can work something out.

And finally, a funny story:

This morning, I bought a banana from the cafe in my building. The only bananas they had were green, and I tried to pick the ripest one. When I got to my desk, I thought about my banana and said 'I wonder if it would riped if I put it on my laptop?'. Fruit, afterall, ripens with the help of heat not time, and my laptop runs very hot. And so I put this banana on my laptop (I use an external keyboard and mouse) and told my friends about it. 'Do you think this will work?', I ask my coworker as he looks at me with a strange look. 'Guess what I did!', I tell a friend who proceeds to laugh at my silly idea.

Well guess what. Four hours later my banana no longer has green spots, so by the time I leave for class I should have a nice ripe snack for the drive. Whoo!

In a follow-up to clee's recent blog, I'd like to add I'm in a similar, but not exactly equal situation.

I've quit my current job this Monday and I'll be moving to Norway in a couple of weeks to work for Trolltech. And I'm also waiting for the second half of Battlestar Galactica's season.