martin's cereal bowl

At this point you're probably thinking: Ok, so what's the real story, Mister?

And the answer is that in Danish, we really do use the term re-inventing the cereal bowl about somebody engaging in something which is generally considered stupid and an utter waste of time.

So what did I re-invent, then? Several years ago I decided to write a nice GNOME login widget for the X Display Manager (xdm). The widget grew, and before I knew it I had rewritten the whole bloody daemon from scratch. The xdm code is pure evil, you see. It's from the days where fork() was expensive and setjmp() considered a pretty neat idea.

Several of my friends wanted to honour my herculean task by presenting me with a trophy - a cereal bowl - which was given to me at my 25th birthday party held at Zach Brown's place in Durham, NC.

As you can tell from the picture, I was quite moved by this.

That is, however, not why I'm in tears. The real reason is that the crowd's rendition of "Happy Birthday" was horribly out of key. People were having a good time nevertheless. Except Phil, but that an entirely different story. And alcohol had absolutely nothing to do with it.

As you can tell from the following picture, we were only serving pop (Let me digress and extend my gratitude to the Gimp people for providing such a wonderful image editing tool).

At this point, the sharpest tools in the shed will have spotted that there's a noticeable difference between the bowl at the top of the page and the one from the birthday party. People with smooth knuckles can click here for a hint. So the deal was this: Everybody attending the party would sign the bowl, Ryan would get it glazed, and then send it to me.

Or so I thought...

Because the bowl got glazed alright. But instead of being sent to me, it lived an exciting life going back and forth between points A and B in the trunk of Zach's car. And when both Zach and Ryan left Red Hat, the bowl was passed on to other members of the (by now rather long) list of Guardians of the Holy Grail. Err, Bowl.

I know for a fact that Adrian Likins had it for a while. He took good care of it, fed it, and took pictures of it too. And when Red Hat moved offices, the bowl moved along.

Meanwhile I went through both official and unofficial channels, tried everything from diplomacy to extortion. But the keepers did just that. Kept my bowl. Bastards!

And this is where our young hero enters the stage - Matt Wilson - a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is. Through cunning bribery Matt managed to get an export license and hand-carried the bowl across the border. And at the 2002 Ottawa Linux Symposium - after 3 years of painful separation - I was finally reunited with my preciousss.

Instead of being carefully wrapped and hidden away in a safe place, the bowl is now sitting on my desk at the office, - constantly at risk of being shattered by ferocious pool-playing coworkers. But such is life. You can't have your bowl and ... oh, whatever.

ph4ttY iC3

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