Randal!

As someone who escaped the trappings of static systems by way of a young (older than me) CEO who insisted that I read Learning Perl to fix the bugs in my head, a long time ago: I might not be here now if I hadn't read your books. 

With the 4.0 release, I know what it's like to work with you. It doesn't suck. I'd like to urge the community to consider this individual for the board, even if his time/bandwidth may be limited. Randal has a LOT to offer our community, even if his time is limited. That's my view, anyway. 

--Casey

On Jan 28, 2013, at 7:05 AM, merlyn at stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) wrote:

> 
> OK, right down to the wire.  What I said last year pretty much applies
> this year, but I'll put my hat in the ring anyway.  Here's what I said
> last year, with annotations (in brackets):
> 
> I'll admit it.  My day job*s* consume most of my time now.  This is the
> full-on opposite of the situation when I put my hat in the ring for the
> 2008 board.  I was broke (no income) and broken (arm) and bummed (the
> market crash reduced the value of my house by a full third, putting me
> heavily underwater, and my dad and uncle had both recently passed away).
> 
> But I had rediscovered this thing from my younger days.  Smalltalk,
> particularly in the form of Squeak, and the Seaside framework that made
> it a whole lot easier to debug webapps and carry state around.  And
> GLASS, which gave me access to commercial-grade VMs when I wanted to
> scale.
> 
> In the midst of so much sadness, this made me happy.  So I created a
> blog, and spoke out about Squeak on a dozen podcasts (including my own).
> And I spoke bravely of the "year of squeak", inspiring others (including
> many of my fan base) to take a look at that silly little toy language
> with decades of history.
> 
> Lots of action back then.  Lots of inspiration.
> 
> This past year, my work schedule has interrupted my attending about 20%
> of the bi-weekly board meetings, and it seems like I have not much to
> offer except making promises that never find time to complete, which I
> regret later.
> 
> [This is still true, even this year.]
> 
> However, I'm still inspired by Squeak.  I have a client that has
> committed to a major code rewrite of their customer-facing site in
> Seaside and jQuery before the end of this year, so I'll be dusting off
> the old images soon.  I'm also working to migrate the squeak.org
> websites to a more accessible platform (running jailed in a FreeBSD VM,
> on ZFS so point-in-time snapshotting and journaling are all available).
> 
> [Neither of which happened, although we now have a working freebsd VM,
> so we're a bit closer.]
> 
> I also still have a voice and a following, and whether or not I'm
> reelected to this year's board, I will still speak fondly of Squeak.
> 
> [And I still do.]
> 
> So, I beg you, if you find a candidate that's likely to make more than
> 80% of the meetings (and have time to take on more outside tasks),
> please choose them.  But otherwise, I'm there, and will continue to do
> what I can, even if it's not everything I want.
> 
> [And this is still true... I'll serve, if elected, but if you want new
> blood, I won't be offended in the slightest.]
> 
> The rest of the board also said that if I don't run again this year, the
> meetings will be far more boring, since I'm also the jester in the
> group.
> 
> [They didn't urge me to run this year, because I missed the last three
> meetings.]
> 
> Consider this my official announcement.  If y'all have questions, I'll
> watch for them here in squeak-dev.  Thank you.
> 
> -- 
> Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
> <merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
> Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
> See http://methodsandmessages.posterous.com/ for Smalltalk discussion
>