Following the Ubuntu Global Jam event last Saturday, I was able to spend Sunday finally catching up on some home stuff that needed done. Managed grocery shopping, swung by Bed, Bath & Beyond to get a frame for my O’Reilly award (yay!) and when I got home I spent quite a bit of time dusting and sorting things in the office. I still have some work to do this weekend but it felt nice to get that all cleaned.

MJ and I then took a break to cook some steaks up on the BBQ on the roof deck:

Really loving the new roof deck furniture. We then spent the evening going through some of the details of our wedding ceremony and started customizing some Save the Date cards, hopefully we’ll get those ordered this weekend.

The San Francisco Ubuntu Hour happened to land on this Wednesday and I was a bit uncertain about turnout, but it ended up being our biggest Ubuntu Hour ever with a total of 11 people showing up. I was able to catch up with Grant Bowman, visit with Eric Windisch who was in town from Philadelphia, chat with Jay Trimble who works on (among other things) Open Source projects at NASA about getting involved with the Ubuntu community and we even had some Canonical folks drop by who were in town for the Intel conference. Afterwards I met up with my friend Drew and his girlfriend to chat Ubuntu stuff, ordered dinner with MJ and dropped downstairs to give some Ubuntu CDs to Sameer Verma for the Software Freedom Day event at SFSU the following day. Quite a Wednesday evening!

This week MJ stayed up late with me to help me (read: he did all the work) book my flights for both the Ghana trip and to Copenhagen for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. My first decision was whether to come home between the trips or not. It was a complicated question, I have just 4 days between the Ghana trip ends and UDS begins, and it takes about a day to get back and forth. There were a few factors that made me decide to fly home but it really boiled down to: cost and packing. It was surprisingly more expensive to do one trip of California to Ghana to Denmark than it was for California to Ghana then California to Denmark. Logistics in general were easier this way since both trips had preferred booking agents, which I couldn’t use if I did one massive itinerary (and it would have made filing expenses for UDS tricky). Finally, what to pack, Ghana is hot, Copenhagen is not. I also have very different plans in each place, so coming home to swap out my suitcase, do some laundry and change up what I’ve packed will be useful.

So how long will I be on the ground in San Francisco?

Landing in SFO after Ghana: Thu, Oct 25 @ 4:10 PM
Taking off from SFO for Denmark: Sat, Oct 27 @ 02:45

This should be interesting. Also, MJ will be attending a conference out of town through Friday the 26th, crossing my fingers that his schedule will allow for us to see each other for a few hours between my trips!

I’ve only ever traveled to US, Canada and Europe, so I was due for a whole slew of vaccines for the Ghana trip. My doctor recommended the AITC Immunization & Travel Clinic and I couldn’t have been happier about the service I received there. It was quick and the nurse I worked with was super friendly and helpful with all my questions, even giving me her card to follow up afterwards if I had questions. I was up to date on my Tetanus shot, so walked away with sore arms from shots for Yellow Fever, Hep A&B, Typhoid and the adult Polio booster, and instructions to get a flu shot and pick up an anti-malaria prescription (Malarone) at Costco. The Costco thing surprised me, I’m not a member but it turns out that you don’t have to be to use their discount pharmacy and they take insurance – win! I have to go back for my second Hep A&B shot on October 3rd which should have me sorted for this trip (I then get another in 6 months to seal the lifetime inoculation deal). All of this has ended up being quite expensive so I bumped up my goal on chipin to help offset some of these costs.

I got my VISA form sent off this week too and on Friday we had the first Google Hangout with all 4 of us from the US who will be traveling to Ghana. I’m really happy with how this is all coming together, there are just a few things that need to be worked out, including information about internet access on the ground in Ghana and how travel health insurance will work (can the non-profit cover us or are we using our own insurance? etc).

Now, it goes without saying that my budget has been quite limited these past few months as I save for these trips, but I did find a cheap tinker project to keep Maker me happy… Raspberry Pi!

I hadn’t actually planned on getting one, in fact when a friend James Ouyang mentioned he bought 25 of them I mused that the purpose was “to build one real computer.” But when he brought a few of them at the Ubuntu Global Jam the little device was too adorable to resist. I picked up the Adafruit Pi Box and a couple cheap SD cards and a $5 charger. Amusingly, I had the HDMI to DVI cable required to get it talking to my monitor, but I spent 45 minutes searching through storage for a USB keyboard (turns out the only one I own is my pink flex keyboard). But then I was on my way!

I loaded up Raspbian and booted the little device up. I did updates and pulled out xserver-xorg and lxde since I’ll be running it without a GUI. I haven’t actually figured out what I will use it for, but I’ve got some ideas. Right now it’s sitting in my living room running an IRC bot, as the first thing I ever do with any system upon bringing it online is to run an IRC bot (IRC bots were also the first thing I ever “programmed” on beyond websites).

Oh, and I changed the command prompt to make it look more raspberry:

While on the topic of administering systems, I’ll be attending LISA ’12 in San Diego on Thursday, December 13th as I’ll be on the Advancing Women in Computing panel. I’m super excited about this, and will attempt to turn it into a long weekend down in San Diego so I can also go to the San Diego Zoo (which I’ve wanted to go to, oh, since forever) and Safari Park. Right, I should book this trip too.

Finally, closer to home, I will be attending High Holy Day services with MJ this year (see here for my feelings related to Judaism as an atheist). I never have before, the closest I’ve gotten is celebrating the breaking of the fast with his family in Philadelphia on Yom Kippur last year. Over the past week I’ve been giving myself a crash course in the history and meanings behind the holidays and I’m looking forward to attending.

I was also scheduled to start an Introduction to Judaism class as part of our joining the synagogue and getting married last year. It turns out that my trips trample all over those plans, but they are happy to work with me schedule-wise so I can get the class materials and attend when I’m in town.