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Catching up and a tiger cub

I’ve had a busy month, but not in the “exciting adventures” way, more in the “doing lots of grown up stuff” way that is less blog-worthy. I’m still spending a ton of time learning new things at my new job, MJ and I have been spending a majority of our time together lately working on wedding planning related tasks and while they have finally tapered off, I spent a considerable amount of time this month talking with other members of the Ubuntu community to see how the Ubuntu Community Council could be more effective and to strengthen the bonds I have with folks inside Canonical to help get news out in a more effective manner.

This month of lots of work at home and no travel I’ve also been perfecting the art of staying on top of news I care about and email. With the demise of Google Reader I’ve joined the bandwagon of those moving to self-hosted RSS reader with the installation of Tiny Tiny RSS on one of my servers and during the move I removed a bunch of feeds. With the help of my tablet (comfy read email everywhere) and a painful culling of email lists I really don’t read (it’s time to be honest, I’ll never learn anything from the exim-users mailing list!) I’ve managed to stay on top of email these past several weeks. Throughout this all I’ve also realized that I don’t physically have enough time to do everything I want to, it wasn’t a matter of just focusing and optimizing and avoiding TV. I’ve also been seeking to find better, more effective ways of relaxing, but that’s the topic for another post.

It’s hasn’t been all work though. On March 16th MJ and I spent a little time over at City Hall for the St. Patrick’s day festival there, before heading back home to work on more wedding stuff.


Dressed in green and drinking Guinness

On the 19th I headed over to Chinatown for an OpenStack presentation by Stefano Maffulli, the Technical Community Manager of the OpenStack project. I’d “met” him on IRC before, but it was fun to meet in person and attend the presentation. Out of this meeting came some ideas for pursing a more local OpenStack-specific meetup, since the current “Bay Area” ones are in the south bay, which is pretty far for those of us living and working in the city.

I also bought the $99 Fitbit device in an attempt to motivate more activity day to day. Working from home it’s very difficult to even get to the level of normal, healthy activity, particularly when living in a city where everything can be delivered. And motivation is a funny thing, it turns out this silly little device does actually make me more likely to take the slightly longer route or forgo escalators for stairs more often. We’ll see how long it lasts. On the technical side, it was an unusual purchase for me. It’s a closed source device which is essentially useless without the cloud-based tracking software, and I learned after buying it that there is no current solution for syncing with Linux – oops! Fortunately we have the Mac Book Pro that MJ uses for image processing available and there is a Fitbit version for Mac.

Last weekend MJ and I took Saturday off and headed up to the San Francisco Zoo to “meet” their new tiger cub. Unfortunately the little critter sleeps 20 hours per day and they had a camera set up so we could see her sleeping, but we didn’t actually get to see her come out of her box. We did get a glimpse of her mother as she came out to stretch her legs before returning to the cub for some nursing, aww!

More photos from the zoo visit here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157633093698350/

After the zoo visit we had a late lunch (early dinner?) at nearby Boulevard Cafe before going back out to do some shopping, where I finally found shoes to wear at the wedding, hooray! Just in time too, since this week I had to go for my final dress fitting and needed the accompanying shoes to make sure the length was correct. Fortunately the dress still fits great and the only alteration I need is the addition of bustling button and loop for the train. Also, I’m still in love with the dress, which was a satisfying realization.

This week I did a fair amount of spring cleaning and Passover began. This is my third year observing the no-bread dietary restrictions of this time, and it’s not easy, I love bread (and cake, and muffins and cookies…). It does help diversify my diet a bit though which isn’t a bad thing. We went to the Passover dinner at the synagogue on Tuesday night, unfortunately I wasn’t feeling very well and couldn’t eat a whole lot, but I’m glad I attended, every event helps as I continue to learn more about Jewish customs and culture.

As for this weekend? More wedding stuff! The wedding is less than a month away, we still have far too many things to pin down, including some more details for our honeymoon in Mexico. I am finally starting to feel more excited than stressed though, hooray!