Both boys also enjoy books. I am certain it helps that they see me reading books and magazines a lot, and I buy them books aligned with their interests pretty frequently. They’re both used to the nightly routine that includes having books read to them. But it also means that we have a growing number of books for them, so when I saw a reading nook on sale I ordered it, and then assembled as soon as it arrived. Being 1.5 and 3.5, they do a fair amount of playing around it, but there are books in it (most of the time) and it has been used for the intended purpose of sitting and looking at books. It’s definitely the last piece of furniture we can put in the family room without taking something out, but I think it was a good choice.

We also recently got a new clothes washer and dryer. The ones we had came with the house, and while they weren’t extremely old, they were a bit troublesome. The washer would frequently go off-balance and so we could only run it on low. The dryer was just loud. It was repaired twice by me (with my YouTube co-pilot) and once professionally, but after a few months it would find a new way to be loud. It got to the point that we couldn’t run it at night, or while the boys were taking naps, which was a logistical hassle. Plus, who wants to listen to a loud dryer anyway? The new set is nice and quiet. The only downside is that I have about a month’s worthy of laundry to do because I was so eager to avoid using the old one once we had plans to replace them. That a huge amount of laundry is waiting for me this weekend.

Outside of kid and home life, MJ and I finally got to celebrate our 9th anniversary this week. Our actual anniversary is on April 28th, but we were both in the midst of a nasty cold on that date, so we decided to postpone. As colds circulated the house and other things came up, it ended up being a full month before we could plan something else, but on June 2nd we finally made it out! We stuck with our original plans of having a nice dinner at Murray Circle at Fort Baker in Sausalito. They have always had outdoor seating, it’s quiet, has amazing food, and a beautiful view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a beautiful night. We enjoyed our food, ordered a bottle of bubbly, and relaxed on this incredibly rare evening away from home.

My continued hope is that a vaccine is made available for the little ones soon, allowing us for more options when it comes to going out. Once we feel safer about having a rotation of babysitters we’ll be able to do more date nights together, instead of just going out once a year on our anniversary, which is what we’ve been reduced to in pandemic times. I have enjoyed the growing number of places that offer outdoor dining though. Like the rise of tele-medicine, this is one of the few silver-linings of this pandemic.

Unfortunately we’re not out of the woods yet even with general transmissibility. A mask mandate for indoor spaces went into effect again today for our county as COVID-related hospitalizations are on the rise again. We’re continuing to have fun at uncrowded outdoor events, but there’s definitely a risk analysis that happens with each one. This includes MUNI Heritage Day, which at least Adam and I will be taking the train to San Francisco to check out this weekend. I’m excited about it, we’ll be cautious, but there is definitely apprehension too.

Young Caligula, gardening in Pennsylvania

Fast forward to today. Caligula has been living in a high rise in downtown San Francisco for over seven years! We haven’t brought him out during all this time. I’d loosely mention taking Caligula out to a park here and there, but Simcoe didn’t like being left alone and she’d often react badly when we brought Caligula home from the vet (hissing, growling, for days!). And I figured she still wouldn’t be interested in coming along for the outdoor adventures. Now that we have just Caligula, it was time to revisit outdoor adventure plans. This past weekend we brought him to Golden Gate Park, where we found a quiet patch of grass not too close to anyone else and enjoyed some food (picked up from a Mexican food truck) as Caligula wandered around on a short leash.

We weren’t sure what to expect. I’d never brought him to a public park before, and I’m sure the car ride over wasn’t his favorite thing, but he loved it. My often lazy cat spent the hour and a half there wandering around our blanket, and then dragging me around so he could explore further.

Caligula in Golden Gate Park

Eventually we rounded off our day as the wind picked up and it got a bit cooler, but I’m really happy that he had such a nice time. I know I’ve been pretty down since losing Simcoe, and I think he’s really missed having his snuggle buddy. It was a good way to cheer all of us up.

I’ve mentioned that 2017 has been a tricky year for me, but I’ve started to feel better. Instead of spending so much non-work, non-traveling work watching TV, I’ve transitioned back into reading. My interest in other hobbies has picked up too, I’ve started moving away from so much computer work and decided to get more serious about my interest in model trains. When I was in Philadelphia last time I picked up a starter train set at a toy show, and I’ve now started to refresh my memory on some of the other basics. I subscribed to Model Railroader magazine, and am now somewhat overwhelmed with how much opportunity there is to learn and explore. I’m also struck by the fact that hobby-wise I’ve mostly focused on digital and outward-focused projects. This will be one of the first that gets me back to hardware, but it quickly occurred to me that it can be pulled into a bunch of the electronics projects I’ve idly wondered about over the years. Arduinos and sound-activated controls for a model railroad set? It’s totally going to be a thing!

Increasing the scale, we decided to go back to Philadelphia over the week of Memorial Day. As we were musing about travel, my interest in trains distracted me into talking about cross-country railroad trips and MJ seriously suggested we finally do it for this trip. After geeking out over routes for a couple hours, MJ secured tickets for us on the California Zephyr which we’ll take the entire length, from Emeryville to Chicago in one of the bedroom compartments. From there we’re taking a Capitol Limited to Washington DC in a Roomette and then on to the Northeast Regional to Phliadelphia in Business Class seats. How long does this trip take, you ask? We’re leaving from San Francisco’s temporary TransBay Terminal at 7:50AM on Friday the 26th and arriving in Philadelphia at 5:15PM on Monday the 29th. From there we’re taking the SEPTA regional rail from 30th street station in Philadelphia up Trevose, where the train drops us just over a mile from our townhouse. So it takes a long time and train is not cheaper. Traveling how we are, in the bedroom and roomette is actually considerably more than flying. For us, it’s all about the experience. I’ve not seen much of the center of the country, there are beautiful places I’m missing out on. Taking a train through over the course of a few days is a pretty exciting proposal, I’m really looking forward to it.

With all this train stuff, I realized over the past year how much more adventurous I’ve gotten with rail-based public transit. I’m slowly starting to default to it where it makes sense time-wise, and sad about missed opportunities to take it in the past.

I also recently finished reading Train by Tom Zoellner. He takes several journeys on train lines all around the world, and weaves a tale that blends his experience on these routes, conversations he has with fellow train passengers and a hefty dose of history about each line, and those which are naturally related to it in some way. It was a beautifully written book, and made me even more excited about our cross-country journey! I recently finished the audiobook for Ringworld. I read the book years ago, but never really got into the series. I decided this time around to buy the series as audiobooks and start making my way through them. I got an audiobook of If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran which has so far been incredibly engaging. Back to the pages, I’ve been reading Madeleine L’Engle’s The Arm of the Starfish and my second book by Brene Brown, I thought it was just me, but it isn’t.

But OK, I’m not just spending lots of wholesome time reading. The new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) came out several weeks ago and I’ve been doing my best not to binge watch. I slowly made my way up to 1105, the episode that has my name in the credits because of the Kickstarter campaign. I then went through the next few pretty quickly, they’re just so good! And MST3K has been an important part of my life since I discovered it in the late 90s on the SciFi channel. I don’t remember how I found it, I must have just stumbled upon it in my general watching of the SciFi channel. It’s what made me join my first IRC server to chat with fellow fans. It was there that I met my ex-husband who introduced me to Linux, and dove into IRC client scripting and creating websites. Later I helped a pile of fellow fans run an MST3K fan site, which was tricky after the show stopped airing, but gave me my first experience scouring the internet for stories, which I later used in my work on the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.

I had my doubts about a reboot of the series, on the one hand we had many of the original cast and crew members participating, but on the other they suddenly had big names and cameos being announced as part of the project, and there was a real risk of the show getting more serious than I would enjoy. Thankfully, my fears were not realized. The show is just as silly and campy as it ever was. They didn’t let a budget or big names go to their head, it has the feel and jokes that I came to expect from MST3K.

At home things are chugging along. As I write this on an early Friday morning before work Caligula is in super snuggle mode and is curled up against me. He’s been like this since we lost Simcoe. We think he’s lonely, as my trip to SLC this week didn’t leave him the happiest (MJ was at work all day). There is a temptation to get him a new kitten friend, but every time I think about it I get sad and realize I’m not ready for it. Plus with all my travel lately I don’t really have the time to train a new kitten, who will have claws.

Speaking locally, this past month we’ve seen the closing of two Italian establishments in our area. A.G. Ferrari has closed all bay area locations. It’s a shame, that was my go-to spot for fresh Parmesan cheese and Italian bread. Umbria, my favorite Italian restaurant in the city, and conveniently on our block, has closed. We made our way down there on their final night, finding ourselves in the midst of other random diners, as well as family and friends wishing the owner a fond farewell. There were speeches, stories, hugs, and tears, which we were included us in. Thankfully this is not the end of the story for them! They’re moving up to Glen Ellen in Sonoma, with progress being tracked on their #WheresGiulio website. We’ll have to visit when they finally open, but I’ll really miss having such a great local place.

We’ve also been carving out bits of our weekend to actually catch up on boring adult things. Our dining area has always been a den of chaos, and I’ve finally started tackling that by picking up a new piece of Ikea furniture so we have a place to pack things into. The chaos still mostly exists, but it’s starting to be tamed and some things are now put away, hooray!

I think this weekend will be a stay in one. I have a ton to do here before I depart for two weeks. And a busy work week is on the horizon with attendance at DevXCon on Monday and a journey (ferry + car service) up to Napa on Wednesday to speak at a conference on Thursday. Then the rise-with-the-sun trek over to the TransBay terminal Friday morning to catch that train across the country. It’s all exciting stuff though, I wouldn’t trade next week for a boring one even if I could.

One of the things we focused on with the 8th edition was, knowing that it would have a shelf life of 2 years, future-proofing. With the 9th edition we continued this focus, but also wanted to add a whole new chapter: Ubuntu, Convergence, and Devices of the Future

Taking a snippet from the book’s sample content, the chapter gives a whirlwind tour of where Ubuntu on desktops, servers and devices is going:

Chapter 10: Ubuntu, Convergence, and Devices of the Future 261

The Convergence Vision 262
Unity 263
Ubuntu Devices 264
The Internet of Things and Beyond 268
The Future of the Ubuntu Desktop 272
Summary 273

The biggest challenge with this chapter was the future-proofing. We’re in an exciting point in the world of Ubuntu and how it’s moved far beyond “Linux for Human Beings” on the desktop and into powering servers, tablets, robots and even refrigerators. With the Snappy and Ubuntu Core technologies both powering much of this progress and changing rapidly, we had to be cautious about how in depth we covered this tooling. With the help of Michael Hall, Nathan Haines and Sergio Schvezov I believe we’ve succeeded in presenting a chapter that gives the reader a firm overview of these new technologies, while being general enough to last us until the 10th edition of this book.

Also thanks to Thomas Mashos of the Mythbuntu team and Paul Mellors who also pitched in with this edition. Finally, as with the last edition, it was a pleasure to work with Matthew and José on this book. I hope you enjoy it!

This year our team at HP kicked off an internal book club, each month or two we’d read the same book that focused on some kind of knowledge that we felt would be helpful or valuable to the team. So far on our schedule:

• Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown
• The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun
• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, and Ron McMillan

This month’s book was The Year Without Pants. I had previously read Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker which is my favorite book on public speaking, I recommend it to everyone. This, and given that our team is in some ways very similar to how the teams Automattic (makers of WordPress) work, I was very interested in reading this other book of his.

Stepping back for a high level view of how we do work, it’s probably easiest to begin with how we differ from Automattic as a team, rather than how we’re similar. There are certainly several notable things:

• They have a contract to hire model, partially to weed out folks who can’t handle the work model. We and most companies who work on OpenStack instead either hire experienced open source people directly for an upstream OpenStack job or ease people into the position, making accommodations and changes if work from home and geographic distribution of the team isn’t working out for them (it happens).
• All of the discussions about my OpenStack work are fully public, I don’t really have “inside the company”-only discussions directly related to my day to day project work.
• I work with individuals from large, major companies all over the world for our project work on a day to day basis, not just one company and a broader community.

These differences mattered when reading the book, especially when it comes to the public-facing nature of our work. We don’t just entertain feedback and collaboration about our day to day discussions and work from people in our group or company, but from anyone who cares enough to take the time to find us on our public mailing list, IRC channel or meeting. As a member of the Infrastructure team I don’t believe we’ve suffered from this openness. Some people certainly have opinions about what our team “should” be working on, but we have pretty good filters for these things and I like to think that as a team we’re open to accepting efforts from anyone who comes to us with a good idea and people-power to help implement it.

The things we had in common were what interested me most so I could compare our experiences. In spite of working on open source software for many years, this is the first time I’ve been paid full time to do it and worked with such large companies. It’s been fascinating to see how the OpenStack community has evolved and how HP has met the challenges. Hiring the right people is certainly one of those challenges. Just like in the book, we’ve found that we need to find people who are technically talented and who also have good online communication skills and can let their personality show through in text. OpenStack is very IRC-focused, particularly the team I’m on. Additionally, it’s very important that we steer clear of people whose behavior may be toxic to the team and community, regardless of their technical skills. This is good advice in any company, but it becomes increasingly important on a self-motivated, remote team where it’s more difficult to casually notice or check in with people about how they’re doing. Someone feeling downtrodden or discouraged because of the behavior of a co-worker can be much harder to notice from afar and often difficult and awkward to talk about.

I think what struck me most about both the experience in the book and what I’ve seen in OpenStack is the need for in-person interactions. I love working from home, and in my head it’s something I believe I can just do forever because our team works well online. But if I’m completely honest about my experience over the past 3 years, I feel inspired, energized and empowered by our in-person time together as a team, even if it’s only 2-3 times a year. It also helps our team feel like a team, particularly as we’re growing in staff and scope, and our projects are becoming more segregated day to day (I’m working on Zanata, Jim is working on Zuulv3, Colleen is working on infra-cloud, etc). Reflecting upon my experience with the Ubuntu community these past couple years, I’ve seen first hand the damage done to a community and project when the in-person meetings cease (I went into this topic some following the Community Leadership Summit in July).

Now, the every-six-months developer and user summits (based on what Ubuntu used to do) have been a part of OpenStack all along. It’s been clear from the beginning that project leaders understood the value of getting people together in person twice a year to kick off the next release cycle. But as the OpenStack community has evolved, most teams have gotten in the habit of also having team-specific sprints each cycle, where team members come together face to face to work on specific projects between the summits. These sprints grew organically and without top-down direction from anyone. They satisfied a social need to retain team cohesion and the desire for high bandwidth collaboration. In the book this seemed very similar to the annual company meetings being supplemented by team sprints.

I think I’m going to call this “The year of realizing that in person interaction is vital to the health of a project and team.” Even if my introvert self doesn’t like it and still believes deep down I should just live far away in a cabin in the woods with my cats and computers.

It’s pretty obvious given my happiness with working from home and the teams I’m working on that I fully bought in to the premise of this book from the beginning, so it didn’t need to convince me of anything. And there was a lot more to this book, particularly for people who are seeking to manage a geographically distributed, remote team. I highly recommend it to anyone doing remote work, managing remote teams or looking for a different perspective than “tech workers need to be in the office to be productive.” Thanks, Scott!

I don’t often write about what I’ve been reading, but I typically have 6 or so books going of various genres, usually one or two about history and/or science, a self improvement type of book (improving speaking, time/project management), readable tech (not reference), scifi/fantasy, fiction (usually cheesy/easy read, see Ian Fleming below!), social justice. This is largely reflected in what I read this past week, but for some reason I’ve been slanted toward history more than scifi/fantasy lately.

Surviving Justice: Americaâ€s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated edited by Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen. I think I heard about this book from a podcast since I’ve had a recent increase in interest in capital punishment following the narrowly defeated Prop 34 in 2012 seeking to end capital punishment in California. I’ve long been against capital punishment for a variety of reasons, and the real faces that this book put on wrongfully accused people (some of whom were on death row) really solidified some of my feelings around it. The book is made up of interviews from several exonerated individuals from all walks of life and gives a sad view into how their convictions ruined their lives and the painful process they went through to finally prove their innocence. Highly recommended.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I read this book in high school, and it interested me then but I always wanted to get back and read it as an adult with my perspectives now. It was a real pleasure, and much shorter than I remembered!

Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming. One of my father’s guilty pleasures was reading Ian Fleming books. Unfortunately his copies have been lost over the years, so when I started looking for my latest paperback indulgence I loaded up my Nook to start diving in. Fleming’s opinion and handling of women in his books is pretty dreadful, but once I put aside that part of my brain and just enjoyed it I found it to be a lot of fun.

The foundation for an open source city by Jason Hibbets. I saw Hibbets speak at Scale12x this year and downloaded the epub version of this book then. He hails from Raleigh, NC where over the past several years he’s been working in the community there to make the city an “Open Source City” – defined by one which not only uses open source tools, but also has an open source philosophy for civic engagement, from ordinary citizen to the highest level of government. The book goes through a series of projects they’ve done in Raleigh, as well as expanding to experiences that he’s had with other cities around the country, giving advice for how other communities can accomplish the same.

Orla’s Code by Fiona Pearse. This book tells of the life and work of Orla, a computer programmer in London. Having subject matter in a fiction book about a women and which is near to my own profession was particularly enjoyable to me!

Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore. I heard about this book through another podcast, and as a big Ben Franklin fan I was eager to learn more about his sister! I loved how Lepore wove in pieces of Ben Franklin’s life with that of his sister and the historical context in which they were living. She also worked to give the unedited excerpts from Jane’s letters, even if she had to then spend a paragraph explaining the meaning and context due to Jane’s poor written skills. Having the book presented in this way gave an extra depth of understanding Jane’s level of education and subsequent hardships, while keeping it a very enjoyable, if often sad, read.

Freedom Rider Diary: Smuggled Notes from Parchman Prison by Carol Ruth Silver. I didn’t intend to read two books related to prisons while I was laid up (as I routinely tell my friends “I don’t like prison shows”), but I was eager to read this one because I’ve had the pleasure of working with Carol Ruth Silver on some OLPC-SF stuff and she’s been a real inspiration to me. The book covers Silver’s time as a Freedom Rider in the south in 1961 and the 40 days she spent in jail and prison with fellow Freedom Riders resisting bail. She was able to take shorthand-style notes on whatever paper she could find and then type them up following her experience, so now 50 years later they are available for this book. The journal style of this book really pulled me in to this foreign world of the Civil Rights movement which I’m otherwise inclined to feel was somehow very distant and backwards. It was also exceptionally inspiring to read how these young men and women traveled for these rides and put their bodies on the line for a cause that many argued “wasn’t their problem” at all. The Afterward by Cherie A. Gaines was also wonderful.

Those were the books I finished, but I also I put a pretty large dent in the following:

• Betty Zane by Zane Grey
• Live and let die by Ian Fleming
• The Remedy by Thomas Goetz
• The Mental Floss History of the United States by Erik Sass, Will Pearson, Mangesh Hattikudur
• Switch by Chip and Dan Heath
• The Articulate Advocate by Johnson Hunter

All of these are great so far!

I’ve been catching up on my reading some too. I’ve been making my way through The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women, which has been really valuable and I’m enjoying. I’ve been challenging myself with The Revolution Starts at Home, which is a fascinating read but requires me to leave my comfort zone and listen to stories and reflections from people whose lives I don’t really understand and frequently struggle to identify with. For fun I picked up Abominable Science because I would totally be a cryptozoologist if I wasn’t such a skeptic. My magazine pile is also shrinking, I’m at least to the point where all of them are from 2014 and my brain is now full of cool science news.

During the great 5 day downpour of 2014 I didn’t stay home, as tempting as it was. On Sunday afternoon after the Sharing the Beauty architecture class (which I wrote about here), I met up with my friend Steve to finally check out the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. It’s one of the few major museums in the city I hadn’t yet been to, so in spite of the rain we made the trek across the city to visit. We skipped the special exhibition and did a tour of the whole permanent collection. I was particularly happy to see one of Edward Hicks‘ version of The Peaceable Kingdom. I’ve seen another at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and have a print of his Noah’s Ark (which I also saw in Philly) hanging in our condo. He’s one of my favorite artists, there’s something captivating about his paintings, particularly of animals.

While MJ was travelling for work this week, I also had the opportunity to have a few other meals with friends. I love working from home but I do find loneliness creeping in, particularly since events I do go to have more than a handful of people and trigger my shyness, making them exhausting. One on one meals with friends are much better, I should do more of them.

But in bigger meals, it was fun to have the San Francisco Ubuntu Hour and Bay Area Debian dinner this week. Most of the attendees were the usual suspects who I love spending time with, but at the Debian dinner we were also joined by Tollef Fog Heen who in town and able to make our discussion about the init system debate in Debian much more interesting as he is someone who was directly involved.

I mentioned earlier in the month that we’ve been working to treat Caligula’s strain of pseudomonas which has turned him into a sniffly furball. Unfortunately, while they appeared to work at first, the latest round of antibiotics were also ultimately not effective. We’ll need to follow up with the vet to see where to go from here, as Simcoe has also been sneezing. Poor critters.

In conference news, I’m spending a lot of time today prepping for SCaLE12x, which I’m flying out for on Thursday. In addition to the two talks I’m already scheduled for, I also agreed to do a third, 30 minute talk at 3:30PM on Friday on Open Source Systems Administration in the Infrastructure.Next track. I’m also happy to report that my Code Review for Systems Administrators talk at LOPSA-East was accepted! So I’ll be heading back east in early May (or late April, we’ve been discussing spending our wedding anniversary in Philly).

And so March doesn’t feel left out, my trip to Maine to visit my sister, nephew and mother is booked. I’ll be flying out on the 15th and spending a week at my sister’s place. I’ll be working while I’m there, but simply spending time with my family will be nice. Also hoping to swing by a few of my favorite places, including L.L. Bean down in Freeport.

Finally, this weekend was Valentine’s Day weekend and yesterday was the anniversary of my move to San Francisco. Unfortunately due to the bad weather on the east coast, MJ’s Thursday flight was cancelled and the first flight he had on Friday was delayed, causing him to miss his connection and ultimately not make it home until almost midnight on Valentine’s Day. He did send me roses though, which I am continuing to enjoy!

Anticipating the potential issue with making it home on time, I took to twitter and was subsequently contacted by a reporter who I had a chat with. She was working on a story about storm delays around holidays, and the result is here: Stormy Weather Again Hampering Holiday Flights. That Elizabeth Joseph is me, and we did indeed miss our fondue dinner on the first Valentine’s Day as a married couple! Fortunately we were able to get reservations at The Melting Pot last night instead and they still had their yummy Valentine’s day menu.

I’ve made it through a nice chunk of those recommendations, but as I read more these days I’m finding that I really enjoy balancing non-fiction books I’m reading with some of the lighter side of scifi and fantasy.

I’m currently reading The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett (big fan!) and Stephen Baxter, and enjoying it thoroughly. To get an idea of what else I like, I just searched through my collection for authors I’ve already read a fair amount of fantasy-wise:

• David Eddings
• Neil Gaiman
• Larry Niven
• Neal Stephenson
• William Gibson
• Douglas Adams
• Orson Scott Card
• Robert A. Heinlein
• Frank Herbert
• Robert Jordan
• Robert Asprin
• Roger Zelazny
• Anne McCaffrey
• J. R. R. Tolkien

That said, with the exception of Orson Scott Card, Douglas Adams and Tolkien, I haven’t read everything from these authors, and have mostly just read Discworld stuff from Pratchett.

I’m about to leave on a couple of big trips and want to load up my Nook. Recommendations? :)

I realized that I never mentioned it here, but I was interviewed on a podcast earlier in the month about Xubuntu, available here: Frostcast Episode 084. While the 13.10 release for Xubuntu didn’t quite make a big splash feature-wise, it was great talking about some of the work we did this cycle around XMir testing.

On October 19th I had the pleasure of going with my friend Steve (recently imported from Boston) to see a Cinematic Titanic double feature, which was sadly part of their farewell tour. It was a fun night and as Steve and I met in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 chat room years ago so it felt fitting as our first adventure together in this city since his move.

I also began taking an Islam and Judaism Course at the synagogue this month. Unfortunately of the six classes I’ve only been able to attend two so far and will attend the final one in a couple weeks, but it’s still been a fascinating class given my very limited knowledge of Islam. I missed the class that talked about the holy books specifically so I might need to do a bit more reading myself about the Quran (of which I’m now the proud owner of a copy of).

Last week I ended up with a cold that slowed me down for a few days, but after recovering over the weekend I was able to spend this week running around to events in the evenings. Monday it was off to the CNET offices to hear Lavabit’s Ladar Levison talk about the actions by the FBI that led up to him shutting down the Lavabit email service. Story-wise it was very similar to his recounting for NANOG earlier in the month that MJ attended (video here, worth the watch!), but it was good to get out and I had some interesting conversations that night. Tuesday as the Islam & Judaism class and then last night I attended an event put on by Double Union, the new feminist hackerspace opening up here in San Francisco. There were a lot of interesting topics throughout the night, and although I long ago realized that my own feminism is much more passive than that of many of these strong women at these events, I’m always happy to see folks working for equality.

Tonight, on Halloween, I’m staying in. I finished off the 13th episode of the Hammer House of Horror television series that I had expected to really campy, but turned out to actually be quite well-paced and good, particularly for a series produced in 1980. I’ve also spent some time lately going through the classic Doctor Who episodes on Netflix. Like many casual fans my age, I’ve seen all the new episodes, but my classic Doctor Who exposure came from the late night runs on PBS channels, and in my case my father’s interest in the show when I was young (hello Dalek nightmares as a kid!). As such I don’t remember a lot and I lack continuity. It’s been interesting watching the sampling of shows on Netflix in order, and setting me up for exploring beyond their collection in the future.

In free moments I’ve been making time for reading more. Carrying around my NOOK in my purse even when I don’t plan on reading has led to me reading things I want to rather than idlying checking Facebook/Twitter/G+ during spare moments, which has been a healthy change. My stack of magazines has a nice dent in it too, I hope to improve that further on some upcoming flights. I’ve also been watching the fascinating lectures from A Brief History of Humankind by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari. I’ll be loading up the ones I don’t finish onto my tablet to take along on my trip to Hong Kong.

Which brings me to Hong Kong! I’m leaving for the OpenStack Design Summit tomorrow night. It will be my first time in Asia so I’m really looking forward to it, even if there is some “new place” stress building up. I got a direct San Francisco to Hong Kong flight that will take about 15 hours, putting me in Hong Kong on Sunday morning. I have plans lined up for much of the time prior to the summit, which starts on Tuesday, including a Women of OpenStack boat tour on Monday. Here’s hoping the other-side-of-the-world jet lag doesn’t hit me too hard.

Finally, I’ve also booked my trip to Perth for linux.conf.au in January. In another first, this will be my first time in Australia. I’ll be speaking on Wednesday on Systems Administration in the Open and have also submitted proposals for short talks to two of the miniconfs on Monday and Tuesday so I can make the most of my trip there.

And now, time to finish up laundry and get packing!

They were both a lot of fun. I was very amused to see that the story takes place on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I just spoke for a conference. It was amusing to watch the characters navigate the reality of a zombie outbreak, as they are all aware of zombie popular culture and made many references to it, particularly during their struggle to convince people that it was real and in making plans (don’t go to the grocery store!). I absolutely did appreciate the geekiness of the volumes too, they’re using Ubuntu and have a very college geek way of handling themselves so I often found myself saying “why on earth would they…? Actually, that’s what I’d expect from college geeks.”

However it’s good to be aware that they aren’t complete stories, volume 1 will leave you wondering what happens next in volume 2 which continues the story, and volume 2 does the same. I did find some minor grammatical issues which made me wish the book had a bug tracker (hey, it’s a .deb!) but reporting directly to the author via email was easy enough. I’d also mention that as a geek I appreciated the technical references, and some were explained, but my average cousin wouldn’t know what to make of the phrase “Daniel logged off of IRC” even though it’s obvious to me.

You can purchase both volumes via the Ubuntu Software Center:

• ZHackers: Volume 1
• ZHackers: Volume 2

And they are generously licensed Creative Commons – Attribution Share Alike, so you can share with your friends!

It was also cool to see that volume 2 came with some bonus features, including a 3D version of the cover and a short story. It got me thinking a bit more about self-publishing in the Ubuntu Software Center and how it’s been opening doors for niche authors and given opportunity to expand content that’s shipped with an ebook.

Doing laundry.

Taking pictures of street cars as I wander around downtown.

Making raisin challah when I’m in town to do + enjoy it!

Getting a new bedroom set (the mattress came a day later).

Hosting Ubuntu Hours, during one of which a kid dropped by our table and asked the unforgettable “Who do you think would win in a fight, a salamander or a penguin?”

And enjoying oysters by the bay.

I love San Francisco.

We also managed to get out to the movie theater to see Iron Man 3 last month. I’ve been going down to Mountain View a couple times a month too in order to meet up with MJ and some Google folks for dinners, which has been fun and a nice distraction from being in the city all the time. Plus, train ride! Say what you will about Caltrain, it is fine for the occasional jaunt down the peninsula.

I also gave my Introduction to Ubuntu talk at ITT Tech in Concord again in July. It had been a year since I’d done so and it was pretty astonishing to see that the class this time was really interested in learning about Linux and Open Source in order to pursue a career in that direction. I was also interviewed during OpenStack’s 3rd birthday flurry of blog posts in July: OpenStack Blog: Open Mic Spotlight: Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph which ended up causing a quote of mine about in production adoption being passed around a couple of articles. I had a chat with Rikki Endsley about the best advice I’ve gotten as a sysadmin, which ended up in her article Advice from sys admins, for sys admins.

Throughout all my crazy travel I’ve been releasing the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter each week, worked with UnixStickers.com to get them to begin selling Xubuntu stickers and helped coordinate the XMir testing, which was a lot of fun because it engaged so many more users than our standard testing does, even if we didn’t end up defaulting to it in the end. These past couple weeks in Ubuntu Women land we launched both a Project Survey and a new competition in the form of a Fact Finding Scavenger Hunt.

Books! On the fiction side I’ve not read much, but after a recommendation I did pick up Everything Matters! Ron Currie Jr. which was great, even if it defied my moratorium on apocalypse books (and satisfied the reason why I imposed such law upon myself). For non-fiction I picked up Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan, which is turning out to be very good for me since my tech brain is very skeptical of all this meditation stuff, it’s nice to have an author who gets that and offers up studies backing up his claims. I also have been browsing a couple of time management books, so far Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think has been the most useful as far as perspective changes go, she reminds me that I really do need to start making time to go to the gym again. Travel time has also afforded me the ability to make a nice dent in my magazine stack.

It was really great to have our friend Danita in town last weekend. In addition to the penguin breakfast and our California reception, she joined us on our first visit to the new Exploratorium, now located at pier 15 on the Embarcadero. It was really crowded, so we may consider going on a calmer day some time, but I was really struck by how many adults without children were there – and not only were they there, they were right there along with the kids trying out the science exhibits! As an adult who did this but always felt a bit awkward at science museums back east, it was nice to see a science museum here that was so engaging to everyone. I’ve uploaded photos of our Exploratorium adventure here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157635136622926/

Last Monday shifted my schedule up an hour so I could join MJ and Danita in Santa Cruz where we spent the evening riding on rides, including my favorite roller coaster, the Giant Dipper! We also played some mini golf and I ate too much salt water taffy.

Which brings us to this weekend! Our wifi router has been going bad. It completely fell over a couple weeks ago and we left it unplugged for about a week (no wifi at home at all!) and then plugged it back in while Danita was visiting and it magically worked for a few more days. MJ decided to take the opportunity of this failure to redo our entire network this weekend. It’s been a fun weekend of rewriting and reorganizing our computers and network. There is still more to do (like install a faster secondary NIC in my desktop, replace my speakers and add a KVM switch for my new work desktop) but things are coming along nicely as far as the network configuration goes, and we have wifi back. Hooray for a formally planned network strategy!