I’ve been home for just over 3 weeks. I thought things would be quieter event-wise, but I have attended 2 OpenStack meetups since getting home, the first right after getting off the plane from South Carolina. My colleague and Keystone PTL Morgan Fainberg was giving a presentation on Keystone and I have the rare opportunity to finally meet a scholarship winner who I’ve been mentoring at work. It was great to meet up and see some of the folks who I only see at conference, including other colleagues from HP. Plus, Morgan’s presentation on Keystone was great and the audience had a lot of good questions. Video of the presentation here and slides are available here
With my Helion mentee!
This past week I went to the second meetup, this time over at Walmart Labs, just a quick walk from the Sunnyvale Caltrain station. For this meetup I was on a mainstage panel where discussions covered improvements to OpenStack in the Kilo release (including the continued rise of third party testing, which I was able to speak to), the new Big Tent approach to OpenStack project adoption and how baremetal is starting to change the OpenStack landscape. I was also able to meet some of the really smart people working at Walmart Labs, and learned that all of walmart.com is running on top of OpenStack (this article from March talks about it and they’ll be doing a session on it at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Vancouver).
Panel at Walmart Labs
In other professional news, the work I did in Oman earlier this year continues to bear fruit. On April 20th issue #313 of the Sultan Qaboos University Horizon newsletter was published with my interview, (8M PDF here). They were kind enough to send me a few paper copies which I received on Friday. The interview touched upon key points that I spoke on during my presentation back in February, focusing on personal and business reasons for open source contributions.
Personally, MJ and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary with a fantastic meal at Murray Circle Restaurant where we sat on the porch and enjoyed our dinner with a nighttime view of the Golden Gate Bridge. We also recently agreed to start a diet together, largely going back to our pre-wedding diet that we both managed to lose a lot of weight on. Health-wise I continue to go out running, but running isn’t enough to help me to lose weight. I’m largely replacing starches with vegetables and reducing the sugar in my diet. Finally, we’ve been hacking our way through a massive joint to do list that’s been haunting us for several months now. Most of the tasks are home-based, from things like painting we need to get done to storage clean-outs. I don’t love that we have so much to do (don’t other adults get to have fun on weekends?), but finally having it organized and a plan for tackling it has reduced my stress incredibly.
2nd anniversary dinner
We do actually get to have fun on weekends, Saturday at least. We’ve continued to take Saturdays off together to attend services, have a nice lunch together and spend some time relaxing, whether that’s catching up on some shows together or visiting a local museum. Last weekend we had the opportunity of finally going to the Cable Car Museum here in San Francisco. Given my love for all things rail, it’s astonishing that I never made it up there before. The core of the museum is the above-ground, in-building housing for the four cables that run the three cable car lines, and then exhibits are built around it. It’s a fantastic little museum, and entrance is free.
I also picked up some beautifully 3d printed cable car earrings and matching necklace produced by Freeform Ind. I loved their stuff so much that I found their shop online and picked up some other local landmark jewelry.
More photos from our trip to the Cable Car Museum are available here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157652325687332
We’ve had some computer fun lately. MJ has finally ordered a replacement 1U server for the old one that he has co-located in Fremont. Burn-in testing happened this weekend but there are some more harddrive-related pieces that we’re still waiting on to get it finished up. We’re aiming for getting it installed at the datacenter in June. I also replaced the old Pentium 4 that I’ve been using as a monitoring server and backups machine. It was getting quite old and unusable as a second desktop, even when restricted to following social media accounts and watching videos here and there. It’s now been replaced with a refurbished HP DC6200 from 2011, which has an i3 processor and I bumped it up to 8G of RAM that I had laying around from when I maxed out my primary desktop with 16G. So far so good, I moved over the harddrive from the old machine and it’s been running great.
HP DC6200
In the time between work and other things, I’ve been watching The Good Wife on my own and Star Trek: Voyager with MJ. Also, hanging out with my darling kitties. One evening I got this epic picture of Caligula:
This week I’m hosting an Ubuntu Hour and Debian Dinner where we’re celebrate the release of Debian 8 “Jessie”. I’ve purchased Jessie (cowgirl from Toy Story 2 and 3) party hats to mark the occasion. At the break of dawn on Sunday I’ll be boarding a plane to go to the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. I’ve never been to Vancouver, so I’m spending Sunday there and staying until late on the following Saturday night, so I hope to have time to see some of the city. After this trip, I’m staying home until July! Thank goodness, I can definitely use the down time to work on my book.