Rain

It’s raining today. Terrible business really. All grey and dark. The view from my newly formed outdoor office is not up to the usual standards. At this rate I’ll have to ask the weather man for my money back!

Bill working hard in the new office…

Thanks for the Memories!

Just wanted to share with everyone what a wonderful 6 weeks it was at the Collective.  I learned so much!!  I learned how to post to a Wiki page. I learned how to post and edit Google Documents. I learned way more about CS Groups and the inner workings

 

of this remarkable volunteer run organization. I learned so much about humans’ cruelty to animals that I became a vegetarian during my time at the Collective. I learned how to work with Quickbooks Online. I learned about Nonviolent Communication. I learned more about how to sing. I learned the joys of shiny clothes and bunny ears. I experienced the joys of hugging strangers on street corners.  I learned to live in harmony with 20-some 20-somethings.  I learned to sleep comfortably with earplugs and a light mask. I learned to function in a truly paperless work environment.   And I met, worked, played,  and debated with some amazing human beings – all of you. 

I am back in the US now, on another assignment.  Here is my first sunset in Minnesota.

The clouds are as lovely as The Cliffs, but it is as far away from an ocean as you can get.

I will surely see many of you at future collectives or while surfing.  Am looking forward to it!  Love, Diane

Servers and Friday Night

This week has been an adventure, well not really, this is Nelson, but it’s been a technological adventure. I’ve been discovering a little about the CouchSurfing.com server setup and checking out ways to bring the servers up to date. With the gazillions of other things going on, server maintenance has slipped through the cracks a little.

Other than that, it’s Friday night and I’m faced with the prospect of another Friday night in Nelson. Oh dear. After last weekend’s mis-adventures I’m not sure I even want to leave the house. That coupled with the inevitable cost of beer, it’s all just a little depressing.

Still, we’re planning a camping trip, or something of that ilk tomorrow, so that should brighten our weekend. And then, the very important weekly house meeting on Sunday. Has it really only been a week since our last meeting? Oh how the time flies…

Not to disappoint, a few pictures from last weekend’s Nelson outings for you!

Don’t I look fetching?

 

We’re off again.

Daniel and I arrived at the house on the 19th when there were only minutes to go before the 20th; our mission: To stop by and let people know how much we appreciate CouchSurfing.com.
We don’t have any computer geekery skills to help out with, so we came to cook and clean. It is something we know how to do, and it is something that frees up others to do more of what they do. We stayed and talked and talked and cooked and cleaned (but mostly cooked, as this place is clean), and we really appreciate the chance to give something back to the community that has given so much to us.

Now we are getting back to our regularly scheduled road trip.

Thank you everyone!

New Arrivals

Daniel and Kelly arrived the day before yesterday, but it was only yesterday afternoon I realised, yes, it is true, they are wearing matching tshirts, and oh my word, are those matching trousers as well I hear you cry! Well, apparently not quite. The same material, but made at two different tailors…

Nice walk

Howdy,

Finished my job at apple picking today, not because I quit, but there are just no more apples to be picked. I finished work in Richmond. I had planned on hitching back to the cliffs, but decided to hoof it instead. Its quite the nice walk and suggest anyone interested to do so. Its also paved the whole way by the coast. It takes about 1h45min to 2h and its about 11-13Km. Oh it is also bicycle friendly. Which mean you bicycle junkies can hit that up like hot jam filled muffins. Any ways just thought I’d tell you guys about a nice walk.

“Breakin’ da law!” by Gardner

Prelude
Ok so technically I am not allowed to talk about anything that I do for CouchSurfing International ever. For the rest of time. By signing the NDA I entered a legal contract. If I break that contract I could be held financially liable for any damages caused. A good resource to find out more is the wikipedia article which covers breach of contract

This situation could be avoided if our source code was released under an open license and we didn’t have any secrets. An open license will also attract more developers to the project which may be unable to sign the NDA due to other contractual obligations or perhaps some zealous sense of righteousness.

I think that even the NDA may fall under trade secrets since there is no link to it on the site which would be that just by making this post I have already broken the law. So just by telling you that I signed a contract which stated:

“Gardner Bickford agrees not to disclose to any Prohibited Persons any Trade Secrets and Confidential Information, directly or indirectly, and whether for compensation or no compensation, without the express written consent of Company. Any such written consent shall be strictly construed in its scope and interpretation against disclosure of Trade Secrets and Confidential Information, shall be strictly construed in its scope to maximize the definition of Prohibited Persons, and shall be strictly construed in its scope to limit the amount of information which constitutes Trade Secrets and Confidential Information.” which is available at
http://couchsurfing.com/nda.html could be a breach of contract.

So I am now an outlaw. I will continue to break the law by letting you folks know what I have worked on while staying here at the NZ collective:

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Saturday was St. Patty’s day. Sunday was relatively painful and I don’t believe that my brain was functioning at full capacity. This would explain why I created the goal for myself to close all of the bugs assigned to me this week. Yesterday I closed one from January and another that I submitted myself. Today I am wondering if I should prioritize my action item list and fix the glaring issue of password security on CS. There’s currently no requirements for new user accounts being created which means that users can use weak passwords. What’s worse even still is that passwords are sent over the network in clear text which means that on a wireless network at a cafe or even here at the collective someone could snatch the passwords right out of the air.

Now that I think about it I think I’ll fix that today.

Gardner

A Busy Morning

It’s a busy morning here at The Cliffs, I thought I’d be one of the first up at 8:30, but I met at least 5 people going about their days already. We welcomed five or six, or possibly even seven new arrivals yesterday, so the house is nearing capacity again. It has that wonderful busy feeling!

My initiating post

My debut post to the blog.  I’ve used the word “swimmingly” during the collective weekly meeting.  I doused my fabulous dinner in hot sauce and cried slightly during the meeting.  I freshened up my personal couchsurfing page, just after working on ideas to freshen up the CS logo.  I ate Weetabix because we were out of other cereal.  All this is, of course, in the opposite order of how it actually happened.

If this were being posted yesterday, I might have, perhaps, added a photo of Andrew in the process of making a “barnyard” breakfast.  It would look something like this:

Greetings from the Laundry Room

A fairly typical day in my Collective life, hugely subjective but for once trying to capture the full spectrum of daily existence over here (not just computers, bugs and the groupies (Brainstormers & Cockroaches) for ONCE! (NOTE: wanna shout out shorter lines in the future but this should give some idea of what’s life all about out here)

Waking up to wander into the living room where I’m greeted with some gruntings over my dish-duties last night (which are later resolved in a fair & equal way and we all learn a bit about in-house communications!). Breakfast of champions, in my case tea, cheese&tomato sandwiches. Backing off to my “office” at the laundry room with determined intent to get back on top of my emails & TODO items in CS code after a few days of (well-deserved!) chillout & movie-watching when having a flu. Pointing Callum towards our past efforts to get blogs on the site & shouting out to get Bill started with the design team.

As the collective approaches the end, it’s about time I start my personal preparations towards becoming a respectable even if temporary citizen of New Zealand by hitching a ride to town with Bridget, Kristen and Hannah to obtain my tax number (IRD). We go shopping a whopping mount of food to last us all for a whole week (to make sure: we only get the most basic stuff and are very price-concious, and Bridget makes sure we stay that way! . I decide to treat my housemates with some cheap-ass cookies (as I’ve not felt I’ve been a really good housemate lately)

Back at the house I get back to my tech duties: answering some people approaching me on the pages I “own” on the site (ownership simply meaning I’m the one who has worked on that particular page for the most over the past few weeks / months – check it up on the right-down corner of each CS page!), check up on meetings code changes made by our new developer POISONS, fix some things on ambassador’s home page and write up minutes of the Tech Team meeting last week. Bigger code changes shall have to wait until I feel a bit better…

As it is customary for the CSC, work-time and recreation are often interrelated, so at sunset I find myself doing the last bits of yoga session by our certified instructor Joshua (who’s the least Texan Texan I know . Finding my inbox with a well-suited job notification Looking forward to a dinner by Kristen and some chatting with my fellow CSC members.

Anu