I’ve been going to the movie theater more than usual lately, and still have at least one movie on my list to see. Two of the ones I saw last week stood out for their super princess power (and passing the Bechdel Test): Brave and Snow White and the Huntsman. Both movies centered around a princess and a queen as main characters, but the complexity and depth of all four of them, plus the very non-traditional story line for princesses, made for a captivating experience. Neither of the movies ended with a “happily ever after” of finding the love of a man, instead they find personal reconciliation and show the strength to be powerful, inspirational leaders within their kingdoms. Also? Very happy that Snow White had reasonable armor.
Speaking of awesome women, I had the pleasure of meeting up with Natacha Rodriguez on Friday. She’s a developer from Argentina who was in town for work and we met via the Ubuntu Women mailing list. We took the F from Powell up to Pier 39 and ended up with dinner at Boudin at a great table overlooking the Bay. In spite of not knowing each other all that well, the evening was full of cheerful conversation about work, family and our mutual interest in open source and getting more women involved with STEM. As I always do, I proposed taking the cable car back to Powell to wrap up the night. In all, a very enjoyable evening!
Last Saturday I spent the day hosting the online Ubuntu User Days, 12 hours of Ubuntu tutorials! I wrote up a quick summary of the day, including links to sessions and the Spanish User Days that happened that day as well here. During that event I ended up hosting a bit of a free-form “Community Roundtable” to fill a slot in the schedule where we didn’t have an instructor. It was a bit of an experiment, bringing in “whoever was online” from around the Ubuntu community to answer questions. The beginning of the hour felt a bit forced, but once I realized that a strong moderator was needed (me), I was able to pull volunteers in and allow each to spend a few minutes talking about what they do and how others can get involved doing the same thing. I also did the Xfce portion of a presentation on Ubuntu Flavors.
Thursday evening I headed out to Concord, CA to do an Introduction to Ubuntu talk for a Linux class at ITT Tech (slides here). This is the fourth time I’ve had the opportunity to speak to a class there and each time it’s a different experience. The level of engagement differs a lot between classes, but I was happy that both the professor and the students kept the questions flowing for almost 20 minutes following the conclusion of my 20 minute presentation.
I also made plans to speak at FeltonLUG on July 14th. It took a few emails back and forth with the organizer to pin down a good talk for the group and we settled on “Everything you ever wanted to know about Xubuntu” and here’s the description I sent off to them:
Xubuntu is a recognized flavor of Ubuntu built around the Xfce environment.
This talk will cover what exactly it means to be a “recognized flavor” in the Ubuntu ecosystem, the basics of how development is done and the current community-based projects (and how you can participate). There will then be a review and demonstration of some of the features included in the 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) release, now in the Alpha 2 phase, including the recently released Xfce 4.10 and GIMP 2.8.
Elizabeth Krumbach has been using the Xfce Desktop Environment since 2004, Xfce on Ubuntu since 2005 and became a formal member of the Xubuntu project in 2011, where she now holds the positions of Marketing Lead and Website Lead. In her day job she works as a Debian Systems Administrator for LinuxForce.net.
I’ve never actually made it down to this LUG, Saturdays being as busy as they are, and have made tentative plans in the past to present, only to discover that they would conflict with travel plans (I think both times it was conflicts with the Ubuntu Developer Summit). I’m really looking forward to finally being able to speak and meet a few of the members who I only have ever communicated with via email.
In the family stuff category, MJ and I have now been together for 3 years and engaged for 1 year, the anniversaries of these falling on July 3rd and 1st, respectively. Due to all the wedding planning and an upcoming trip to Maine, we decided to tone down celebrations this year, no anniversary trips or gifts, just a nice dinner out at Waterfront Restaurant. It was indeed a nice evening out, particularly since it rounded off a very busy weekend of errands and preparing for our trip to Maine.
We’re leaving on our trip to Maine on a flight that leaves at 6:10AM tomorrow morning. The trip is to visit my mother, youngest sister and my new nephew… who hasn’t been born yet. As I write this my sister is at the hospital doing baby-is-coming things. I should be an Aunt in a few hours!