More delight, please
The other day, as I was going into the store, I saw a guy coming out. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, maybe an office worker or middle-manager. He was holding some sort of ice cream bar or frozen yogurt pushup or something like that, and looking at it with the most amazing expression of raw delight I’ve ever seen on an adult. Chances are he was really “cognitively challenged” or whatever the euphemism of the day is for a six-pack shy of a case, since anyone who shows that sort of emotion jist ain’ right, but to me he looked like just some guy who’d spent a long hot afternoon in an office, thinking about how good a Frozen Yogi-Yum would taste, and now he was thrilled as could be that he’d arranged his life so he could just walk into a store, and walk out with one, and just eat that sucker. It lightened my mood for the rest of the day, and I can still picture his expression days later.
We need more of that.
In related news, I finally got to someone’s instructions for building Firefox on Windows quickly enough, before all the external links and patches rotted away. Between Jeff Walden’s instructions and the updates in the comments, unlike the previous three sets of instructions which led to bruised knuckles and more holes in my walls, this time (eventually) make -f client.mk build actually built something, and firefox.exe -p actually ran, and I’m typing in a 2005080519 build that only cost me a few dozen KB of downloading today’s checkins over dialup, and has several of my pending-review patches and a few others, right now, this minute.
All in all, I suppose it’s a good thing that when you live alone, there’s nobody around to see the Happy Danceâ„¢, but I doubt I danced it that well since the first time I typed something in Blogger’s textarea, and clicked a button, and pointed at the screen and shouted “look at that, I just clicked a button and it built all that, and that archive page too!”
Please, sir, may I have some more delight?
I just got the happydance delight reading your comment re Slashdot on Techdirt. You spread your wit far and wide, Mr. Ringnalda.
Nice story, Phil. World needs more delight.
You know, I’ve joined a ”movement” to spread that sort of delight myself — in a way. Have you seen Spreading Goodwill yet? :) It’s strange… After visiting SG I’ve started trying to do my part to spread goodwill and even a few smiles. (Still hoping the goodness will come back to me as well.)
Now excuse me while I smile like an idiot about my fresh cup o’ joe.
I’m the author of the building instructions you used to get Firefox to build on Windows. As you noticed while attempting to use them, they’re hideously out of date for working with the latest Microsoft platform SDK. I’ve been attempting various things to get this solved on my end, but so far I’ve had no luck beyond the 3 unresolved external symbols stopping point. I’m not a compiling expert, and the ideas I had combined with what I could find on MSDN were of no use. Could you contact me via email (or IRC – I’m on irc.mozilla.org as Waldo relatively often) with details about how you fixed this? (I’m very much hoping you didn’t do the ”build a library, change something in the SDK itself” route, because I can’t bring myself to officially publish that route, although I’m nearing a point where I might try it myself.) Thanks!