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The reindeer of San Francisco and more

On our visit to the San Francisco Zoo on Thanksgiving we were able to visit some of their new visitors, the reindeer!

More photos from that day at the zoo here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157632168098698/

Last Sunday we decided to head out to see the final weekend of the baby ostriches at the California Academy of Science’s Earthquake Exhibit.

We also had a chance to walk through their indoor rain forest and for the first time visited their planetarium.

Naturally, we also visited the reindeer that are living there at the academy for the season as well.

More photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157632163802107/

The rest of the week was very busy for me. I am still working, but my job search continued with some exciting news yesterday that is game changing for me, I hope to have an announcement on that front soon.

One of the highlights of my week included meeting up with a neighbor who was moving and looking to sell his laptops, a pair of macs. The first is an old PowerBook G4 (2004) and the other is a much newer (2007) Mac Book Pro. Both seem to be in very good physical condition aside from the batteries (which don’t last long) so I took them off his hands. Now, Apple products aren’t my thing and I haven’t really used much OSX so I figured I’d give it a try. I quickly realized upon booting up the PowerBook that using OSX on it would be impossible as it had been EOLed for that hardware. I knew that Apple had dropped support for their PPC systems, but it wasn’t until then that I fully appreciated what that meant: this old PowerBook G4 is a solid piece of hardware with a gig of RAM and a faster processor than my netbook! I almost took it as a personal offense that such a nice machine has been written off to the scrap heap because there was no longer an OS supported by the manufacturer for it, no updates, no modern web browser… Fortunately for me there are still plenty of Linux PPC ports and the fine folks at Lubuntu still maintain one. The install was a breeze and the only things I needed to do upon bootup were install the firmware-b43-installer package for the wifi and hit up the FAQ for the keyboard backlight fix. I’m now writing this blog post on this charming old PowerBook. Now, I don’t need another laptop, and this thing is quite heavy, so for now I think I’ll end up using it as a test box for Lubuntu development releases. I should probably get around to giving the Mac Book Pro a try this weekend just to confirm it doesn’t have any major issues, I decided to keep OSX on that one so that will be my OSX test system, it currently has Leopard.

On Wednesday I started work early so I could leave early for an appointment and then make it to the San Francisco Ubuntu Hour that I was hosting a week earlier than normal to avoid conflicts with my travel schedule next week. It made for quite the long day. The Ubuntu Hour went well though, one of our attendees brought the new ARM version of the XO (the OLPC laptop) to show off and there were some great discussions about packaging developmental kernel modules for testing and some of the current innovations in mesh networking on Linux.

From there it was off to the Debian Dinner at Henry’s Hunan. We had a couple of Debian Developers in attendence and a couple other new faces to make up a total of 8 people at dinner, which is a good turnout for a dinner, particularly in December when these things tend to be more lightly attended.

Last night we went out to Fort Mason for MJ’s work holiday party where I was finally able to meet several of his new colleagues. This weekend we have some errands to run but we really will be staying in for the most part. We have a lot of wedding stuff to do and a trip to plan at the end of the month to go back to Philadelphia to do the food and cake tastings, meet the DJ and the photographer, look at flowers and probably 47 other things. This Wednesday morning I’ll be flying to San Diego for LISA ’12 (Large Installation System Administration Conference) which I’m really excited about, and it will be great to meet my fellow panelists on Thursday. While I’m in town I’ll be meeting up with the San Diego Ubuntu folks at an Ubuntu Hour and MJ will be flying down Friday evening so we can spend the weekend together at the world famous San Diego Zoo and the wild animal park. Systems Administration and Zoos, what an exciting week I have lined up!

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