Misadventures in firmware- and cabin-land

Today I drove with my mom to Port Townsend, where we have a cabin. I ended up building a fire because Mom was out, which was an interesting experience. It took me four tries but eventually I got it. Yay!

Try #3

Try #3, burning

Also, I bought the Humble Weekly Sale with Jim Guthrie, because Jim Guthrie is freaking awesome.
So it's now Debian Week, the week where I become a Debian maintainer. Here is my approximate plan:

1. Install Debian Jesse. Fairly easy except for the fact that I'm doing it on a MacBook Pro that a. has Apple's moon-man of an EFI implementation and b. has a Broadcom chip that needs firmware.
2. Upgrade to Debian Sid.
3. Read Debian Policy Manual.
4. Write Debian package.
5. Submit Debian package.

Currently I am stuck on step 1. I've tried to put firmware in a FAT partition on my Mac, on the EFI system partition on my Arch flash drive (which, because it is the EFI system partition, is FAT), on the ext4 partition on my Arch flash drive, all for autodetection by the Debian installer. Nothing. Next I tried downloading the installer from the Debian package archive, but that uses a wget script that obviously won't work, since I can't get wireless and don't have an Ethernet cable. Therefore I extracted the .deb archive, extracted the control files in it with tar, and modified the script to copy the firmware from /mnt instead of using wget (this is assuming that I've previously mounted the needed partitions manually). Then I rearchived the whole thing back into a new .deb file. However, when I rebooted into the installer recovery environment again, it turns out that the shell doesn't have dpkg. Very frustrating.
It now looks like Debian distributes its own firmware bundle, and that may work. I will try that after blogging, but I swear, I'm this close to just burning the unofficial image with the firmware already on the disk. Assuming I can find a CD in the cabin.
I am going to attempt to blog every day that I can this week, and if possible, the rest of the summer. We'll see how it goes.
On an unrelated note, a little while ago I started version-controlling my dotfiles with Git. This seems ridiculous but it's actually pretty common - just search for "dots", or even better, "dotfiles" on GitHub. You can find a ton of interesting stuff that way. I have now merged configurations from my server, from my MacBook (just did this today!), my Arch install on my flash drive (from which the initial commit originated), and my Arch install on my ACER laptop. I have made every file in the repository portable across each of these systems, so I don't do anything funky with branches, or anything like that, to differentiate between system-specific configs. For example, at the top of my .zshrc, you can clearly see OS detection that sets the DISTRO environment variable to either "DARWIN" or "ARCH" (because those are the two that I use with zsh). Exciting!