Several months ago the Extreme Mammals exhibit opened at the California Academy of Science, on Saturday MJ and I finally took the opportunity to head down to see it. It was a beautiful day and we took MUNI over to Golden Gate Park.
The Extreme Mammals exhibit itself was a real treat, the huge, the small and all kinds of crazy facts about extinct and living animals. Unfortunately it was pretty crowded and made it difficult to navigate at times, when the next exhibit comes through I’ll have to be sure to head over on a weekday.
This was my first visit to the Academy, so I got a taste of all the popular sites. The first after the exhibit was heading up to the Living Roof.
Then over to see the famous white alligator.
And of course to see their African Penguins!
The Academy is really quite an amazing place, I’d like to go back soon to visit the aquarium and planetarium so we got a membership for the year. We stayed until they closed at 5PM and then headed over to 9th Avenue for a lovely dinner in the back patio of Bistro 9.
Sunday was spent wrapping up some things for our trip to Philadelphia where we’ll be spending the week. I will be working Tue-Fri from the hotel during the trip, but we’ll have the long weekend and the evenings to visit friends and MJ’s family. I’m also excited to get to go to the Philly Geeknic on Saturday the 11th. We also made our plans for a trip to Dublin, Ireland next month! MJ will be working while we’re there but I’m taking the time as a vacation (got tips for Dublin trip? Let me know, I’ve never been and haven’t a clue what I’ll see). I was also able to plow through some project work, but my poor todo list is still too long.
On Tuesday evening I launched the OLPCSF Community Summit 2010 website. We’ll be hosting the event near the end of October at SFSU’s campus in downtown SF and the website was one of the early key things we needed to settled. Planning is chugging along and we’re hoping to get the schedule together and have registration up soon.
Wednesday I met up with my friend David who was in town from Philly for a conference. I brought him along to the Linux Discussion night at Noisebridge and then it was out for a yummy dinner at Taqueria Cancun (thanks to the guys at Noisebridge for the recommendation!). Work has been pretty busy, but I was able to shuffle my schedule some so I could meet up with David to visit the Cartoon Art Museum on Thursday afternoon. I’ve wanted to visit this museum since seeing it after I moved here but never made the time for it, what better way to finally go than with a visiting friend? The museum centers around comic-strips but their exhibits also expand into graphic novels and moving cartoons, the exhibit I was most looking forward to seeing was the Nina Paley exhibit which featured some stunning artwork from Sita Sings the Blues.
Now off to finish packing for the Philly trip, we’re heading off to the airport in about 2 hours!
Friday, Sep 3rd, 2010 at 18:45
What sort of work are you folks doing on the OLPC? packaging? porting Sugar? general bug triage?
Friday, Sep 3rd, 2010 at 19:06
@Dinda The event itself is primarily focusing on some deployments around the world that folks in the San Francisco area are participating in, so it’s a lot of collaboration and basic problem-solving that has nothing to do with the actual tech involved.
That said – there will be a tech track! I don’t have a ton of the details yet, but it is still focused on development on Sugar on Fedora since that’s where Sugar on the XOs still runs, though I know there are some Edubuntu folks who are keen on getting it into the *buntu side.
Mostly I just got involved as an OLPC newbie who was inspired by a LUG talk that OLPCSF leader Sameer Verma did where he talked about how many children were being helped by their deployments. I’m just offering my expertise as a general sysadmin (you can make a website on this server we have? neat! do it!) and member of the wider open source community who may be able to bring some more folks in.
Thursday, Sep 9th, 2010 at 19:44
The Living Roof is simply amazing, thanks a lot for posting that!