Last weekend we took advantage of the long weekend and MJ and I finally made it over to the Oakland Zoo. I’ve wanted to go for quite some time because they have some exceptional animals that the San Francisco Zoo no longer has… elephants!
But what actually prompted the visit at this time was the news of a new baby giraffe.
More photos from my visit are over on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629413089059/
In spite of the short work week, I had a particularly productive one. I wish I could say the same on the volunteer work side, I’ve been catching up with a lot of things and a bit more focused on some personal projects we have going on.
On the local tourist side, when I first visited San Francisco MJ arranged our schedule one evening so he could take me on a street car. Love at first sight!
Several months back I developed a habit of snapping pictures of the street cars (collection here) and then began following the Market Street Railway blog. Finally this week I became a Market Street Railway Member. I guess that means I’m now a card-carrying train geek.
Last month Woot! had a Chumby on sale for $99 which I ordered and then used at the Ubuntu SCALE booth. Since coming home I’ve wondered what to do with it. Keep it in the box until the next Ubuntu booth? Hack it to run something else? I decided to start with checking out some of the apps available for it and eventually discovered that it can run, in rotation, a variety of zoo webcams. That’s how I discovered the San Diego Zoo Polar Bear Cam
It’s pretty much the best zoo cam ever. When I go to the zoo I frequently just see the bears sleeping, but when you have the cam running on your desk all day you can watch them eat, swim, run and be otherwise interesting. Polar bears are pretty awesome.
Coincidentally I also listed to a Quirks and Quarks episode recently that included segments about polar bears (and dolphins in mirrors!), very worth the listen: http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/episode/2011/12/17/december-17-2011/
Long term I’m not sure what I’ll do with the Chumby. It makes a great Ubuntu booth accessory because it can rotate through images. Putting something else on it is quite tempting, so it writing an app or two for it if I can come up with something I think it’ll be well-suited for.
I have also been watching some TV. After seeing the advertisements on hulu I began watching Alcatraz. It’s a bit dorky, but I’m a sucker for shows based in San Francisco. It’s filmed in Vancouver but, like Monk, they do all these flyover and similar shots of actual San Francisco for appropriate scenes. One the other night caught my attention:
The Embarcadero, and hey, those pools on the right are the Golden Gateway Tennis & Swim Club where I go to swim and work out!
On the home front, this week we finally got someone in to finish the work on our new bathroom fan and overhead light done, now we just need to get the bathroom painted and the towel bars rehung. The same day we contacted a local lamp repair shop recommended by a representative from the lighting store where we buy all our specialized light bulbs. He picked up the lamps and we should have them back and running like new in a few weeks.
Finally, since SCALE there have been a couple articles come out where my talks were mentioned. The first was a passing mention on SCaLE celebrates a successful tenth year as a premier Linux conference and the other was an extensive report on my talk and another from the Open Source in Education track for LWN, SCALE 10X: The trickiness of the education market by Nathan Willis. Awesome!