The fence around my house has been dying a slow death for over two years now. Everytime the gate opens a piece of fence falls off. I’ve had some hit me in the head and piss me off so that I threw the piece across the yard. It’s managed to do it’s job so well that at one stage we had four dogs in the yard and I only own one.
Attempts have been made over time to replace it but something has always thwarted the deal. I got the first quote over a year ago but the price gave us a heart attack at the time so we did nothing. Now it’s a year later and the prices have gone up but we can’t ignore it any longer. So I went and got some more quotes. I thought that was hard when it took a month to get them all back, but when we notified the first neighbour to see if they would go halves she decided to get her own quote. A month later and her quote ends up being double the price of our most expensive one. More time wasted.
So, we finally get the ok from her and with lots of trepidation we head out to the other two neighbours sharing the boundary. First stop was our side neighbours who we get along with quite well. They were happy with the deal which was very relieving. Then we head to the next street to meet our backyard neighbours.
Making a large racket as we go through their front gate they meet us at the door. Introducing ourselves they inform us that our dog has been going in to their yard and spending the day there. Horrified we explain that the fence is the reason we are there. They seem happy with the price also so while Pauline is sorting out contact details and such I notice the mozilla.org shirt the guy is wearing. I make mention of it and he informs me he is wearing it because he is about to take a 30 hour flight to Spain for work and it is comfort clothes. He then tells me he is one of the original programmers for SSLeay (used in Netscape) which is now openssl. Openssl is an encryption package for the web which is used in products such as mod_ssl for apache webservers.
How cool is it that I have an open source programmer living behind my house! It’s like discovering that the guy who invented bluetak is your postman or something. It took all my strength not to do the wayne and garth “we are not worthy” salute.
But the best news is, once I hear back from the fencing people we might actually get a new fence!!!!!!