I’ve been wandering up and down the peninsula quite a bit this week. First was Wednesday night when I finally met Terri Oda! We met at Shiva’s Indian Restaurant in Mountain View with John Hawley and BJ Wishinsky, both of whom are also locals but I hadn’t met yet. It was a really delightful dinner, great conversation, even if I’m now feeling that much worse about not being able to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing yet again this year (so many conferences, so little time and money! Plus my birthday is smack dab in the middle of it).
Last night I headed down to Mountain View again to have dinner with MJ and then head over to MicroCenter to pick up a X203H bd 20″ Widescreen LCD Acer monitor which was on sale for $129.99. I like watching shows, DVDs and streaming media while I’m working on projects, but it’s been a bit tricky with just one monitor, and neither my laptop nor my netbook has a DVD drive, and neither of them are fast enough to suitably play hulu videos, so I was confined to just playing what was in my downloaded and ripped media collection. I tried a few solutions, streaming DVD via vlc from my desktop, sharing over SAMBA, ripping and DVDs and then watching them but none of these solutions were great and didn’t solve my Hulu problem and the laptop and netbook screens are so small anyway. I eventually resigned that I’d just need to get a 2nd monitor, then had to decide how it would work. Would I replace my graphics card on my desktop with one that could do dual head? Or maybe hook the monitor up to my firewall/xen server, which already has xorg on it from when I had it hooked up to my television. I went with the latter, and it’s working out great. Plus I’m able to finally use some of the power of this p4 w/ 3G RAM instead of having it sit here as just a firewall and xen-based dev box!
Tonight hopped on Caltrain yet again to attend my first Bay Area LinuxChix meetup down in Menlo Park. It was the first meeting in quite some time for the group and we had 10 people show up. It was nice to see some of the folks I’ve already met out here, and a pleasure as always to see some new faces. Plus, in spite of having to squeeze 10 of us at a table not nearly big enough for 10 people, the closeness to Caltrain, the atmosphere and ability to order food and drinks throughout the evening by heading up to the counter and ordering made Cafe Borrone a really nice venue for this kind of social meetup. I really hope we do more of these in the future!
Looks like tomorrow we’ll be running a lot of errands (including dentist appointments, meh, dentists). Sunday will be painting day.
Sunday, Jun 6th, 2010 at 15:15
It was great to meet you face to face at last! Now I need a scheme that makes celebrating your birthday at the Grace Hopper Celebration seem so natural that it Must. Be. Done. Perhaps I can get the approximately 1,800 geeky gals who will attend to sing Happy Birthday to you? Or at least all the attendees in the Open Source track? Open to suggestions. ;-)
Monday, Jun 14th, 2010 at 10:41
@BJ Haha! I wish :) Hopefully I can make it out next year.