wordsmith.social/jonbeckett

It's the morning after Halloween. In the UK Halloween remains very much an import from the USA – I remember it gaining traction when I was young in the early 1980s. It alway interests me to see my friends in the US embracing it far more than us – with many adults dressing up too. In the UK it tends to only be children of infant and junior school age that go door-to-door.

While our daughters have now grown out of dressing up, they were excited to answer the door during the evening – handing out sweets to the children. Our youngest had acquired a roll of Halloween stickers from somewhere, and awarded them to the younger children. Quite unexpectedly the stickers went down far more excitedly than the sweets. More than once we closed the door to excited small shouts of “MUM! I GOT A STICKER!!!”.

Today I'm back at work – or rather, back in the junk room, sitting in front of my work computer, waiting for the next conference call to start. The project I have been on for several months is starting to wind down for a while, and another will be taking it's place. It's odd – being inbetween things.

While writing this I'm downloading Zorin OS, and will spend lunchtime installing it on my old laptop – a huge shoutout goes to the community at Fosstodon for telling me about it. One of the problems of the (vast) Linux community is the number of projects going on all the time – there's no way any one person can stay on top of it all. It sometimes feels a bit like standing in the middle of a busy gathering, trying to listen to all the conversations in the room at the same time.

Eric Raymond was right when he titled his essay about the open source community “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” – the community really does feel like a busy, vibrant, dynamic gathering that's moving at pace in all directions at once – where no one voice is dictating, but the gathering somehow achieves a collective trajectory.

Maybe Darwin's observations have a lot to do with it too.

In other news, something remarkable happened at the weekend. A very long time ago I wrote a blog post about the presenters that used to appear on MTV Europe – and sheepishly admitted to liking one of them rather a lot. Which is fine. Until she finds your blog post, likes, it, and comments on it :)

It kind of secretly made my entire weekend. Still star struck after all these years.