My boss is a Buckminster Fuller enthusiast and over the years some of that has rubbed off in reading some of his essays and a renewed interest in geodesic dome structures. So when The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) I knew I had to check it out. I finally made it over there on Sunday afternoon.
Exhibit description:
The Bay Area has long attracted dreamers, progressives, nonconformists, and designers. Buckminster Fuller was all of these, and although he never lived in San Francisco, his ideas have spawned many local experiments in technology, design, and sustainability. The first to consider Fuller’s Bay Area legacy, this exhibition features some of his most iconic projects as represented in a print portfolio recently acquired by SFMOMA, Inventions: Twelve Around One. Along with Fuller inventions like the 4D House, Geodesic Dome, World Game, and Dymaxion car, the exhibition presents Bay Area endeavors — from Ant Farm’s 1972 domed Convention City proposal to a North Face tent, and from The Plastiki boat to One Laptop Per Child — inspired by Fuller’s radical idealism and his visionary designs informed by technology, ecology, and social responsibility.
The exhibit itself was made up of two sections, first being direct Fuller artifacts, showing off some of his key ideas and signed works. The rest of the exhibit focused on Bay Area projects that he inspired. I was delighted to see a very nice One Laptop per Child display!
I ended up getting a membership while I was there, so after wrapping up at the Fuller exhibit I walked through a couple more galleries before heading up to their statue garden and coffee shop. I was quite looking forward to the coffee shop visit, as I had seen some of the early experiments of their “Fuller Hot Chocolate” on the museum’s Twitter feed and wanted to see one for myself.
The description reads:
Fuller Hot Chocolate
Tcho chocolate, vanilla marshmallow, milk, house-made sea salt
“Proposal for a floating tetrahedral city in the San Francisco Bay”
It was delicious.
More photos from the exhibit and the museum here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157630049417808/
Since my last general updates post I’ve had a couple other adventures. A few weeks back I took Caltrain down to meet MJ after work for dinner, and took a detour to the Stanford Shopping Center to satisfy my curiosity and visit their Microsoft store. My first impression was that it was ridiculously similar to an Apple store, but upon closer inspection they actually offer an interesting selection of laptops from a variety of manufacturers, peripherals and they had a whole corner devoted to the Xbox 360. It was actually a lot more interesting than an Apple store. Of course this all comes from the Linux-using sysadmin who bought her last laptop at Fry’s for $300 ;) I also attended my first San Francisco Perl Mongers meeting at the end of May. I was a bit nervous being there, and it was compounded by I was the only woman and only non-programmer there, but everyone was very nice and the presentation on a web framework for Mason2 was interesting (I’ve helped maintain our Mason-based site at work). I spent pretty much all of last week after coming home from Phoenix slowly catching up on project work.
This past Saturday I finally reinstalled the server that hosts the Ubuntu US, Pennsylvania and California websites. The server is a Linode that was donated to the Pennsylvania team back in July of 2008 and at the time they had added 64-bit support so I decided to install Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit on it. Since then it’s become quite well-known that the memory footprint of 64-bit is higher than that of 32-bit and that on a server with 512M of RAM, 64-bit wasn’t the wisest of decisions. I upgraded it to 10.04 at some point and decided that when 12.04 came around that we’d do a full reinstall with 32-bit. I keep regular backups, so all I had to do was check the consistency of the MySQL backups and do a quick refresh rsync to grab any changes before bringing down the old machine. Getting services up again was pretty quick, Ubuntu Pennsylvania’s gallery2 install having the longest outage at a little over an hour since it took a while to rsync all the images back up, but I planned accordingly and made sure this was the last site on my list. All told I spent maybe 3 hours working on it and had backups reconfigured, old user accounts and other “cruft” cleaned up and had Nagios monitoring reporting all green before noon. It was that morning that I also decided to take a look at RAM Host‘s relatively new KVM offerings. I use my RAM Host openvz box to give friends shell accounts and it was the development platform for both the new Xubuntu website and the new Ubuntu Women wiki, so it’s not quite as locked down as my own Linode (where only my sister and I have active accounts these days) but I really did miss having iptables and there were some other openvz quirks that I’ve never been all that thrilled with. I got my login details for my new KVM host on Tuesday and tonight I finished up some of the last of my migration from the openvz system to the KVM one and I’m hoping I will have all my users moved can shut down the old (and stop paying for it!) by this weekend.
Friday, Jun 8th, 2012 at 12:50
Love the Mayan pyramid coffee.