Well, I'm Back

I've had a great week up here in Boston with the rest of my desktop team. It really helps to chat in ways that wouldn't reach the acivation threshold required to send email or ping someone on IRC. Of course we've also spent a lot of time in more structured meetings. The downside is that I haven't been able to do much reviewing or bugfixing this week...

Yesterday I visited MIT. I reflected on the nature of my professional life as I rushed from a talk on the openSuSE build infrastructure to talking with a student about widening operators in abstract interpretation ... prior to giving a talk about my real work on Mozilla and the Web. The talk went well, I think, although there was less audience interaction during the talk than I expected, given that there were W3C staff present --- my talk chides the W3C a little, hopefully in a constructive way. In fact I was pleasantly surprised when Tim Berners-Lee introduced himself after I'd finished, although for better or worse he had missed the chiding part. I did manage to complain to him about the SVG spec a little bit, so I hope something useful got through :-).

On Saturday I'm off to New York, looking forward to seeing friends and giving the talk again at IBM Hawthorne. I just hope my voice is OK, I've been hoarse all week, I think a combination of a virus and too much chit-chat. I'd like to avoid a repeat of my thesis defense when I croaked my way through the talk and had to answer questions in almost a whisper.