Thanks to Nathan Handler for getting a picture during the meeting (source)

Later that week I met up colleagues early Friday morning in San Francisco for a team off-site in Sonoma and day of wine tours. We stopped at Benziger for a quick tram tour, then went off to Imagery to enjoy a boxed lunch at a table I’d used my membership to help arrange. From there we went to Petroni, which was a new one for me, and enjoyed a wine tasting and stories of the history of the family and winery in their caves. It was a nice to get to know some of my colleagues who I don’t work with every day, and in spite of being on the warm side, Sonoma is always beautiful and a pleasure to visit.

At the end of June we flew out to Philadelphia for a week. The trip was aimed at spending time with family and going through lots of stuff to organize and decide what we’re keeping there at the townhouse and what we’re going to ship out west to use and store here at the much larger house in California. It was an exhausting week, so I’m glad we took a nap on Saturday afternoon after stepping off our flight and spent the first evening with MJ’s sister Irina and her husband Sam over at Longwood Gardens. I went with a friend last year to see their fountain light show, and it featured a delightful mix of classic jazz. This year they changed it! Instead of the standard spot for viewing the show, we stood on the bridge in the middle of the fountains and they had switched to a soundtrack of pop music reaching back to the 70s. I was a big fan of the Pinball Wizard bit. The company was good as well, it was nice to grab some dinner at their outdoor beer garden, wander through some of the gardens, and generally catch up for a couple hours.

Mid-week my cousin Melissa was driving down the east coast and stopped by for a visit and dinner. She’s one of the cousins I see the most because we both travel and our paths cross often, especially when work or events bring her out to San Francisco every couple of years. She had her dog with her so I scoured restaurant reviews to find one with an outdoor area, and we lucked out with a 5PM thunderstorm that broke the heat wave a bit just before she arrived. We had a lovely dinner outside in the freshly minted 75 degree post-storm weather, which had earlier been in the 90s and humid.

The 4th of July was spent at MJ’s father’s house with BBQ and some extended family joining us as well. Plus, there was cake! We also got to meet up with family later in the week for a birthday at a nearby hibachi restaurant.

All the family visits aside, those boxes of stuff were front and center in this trip. We were able to get through everything and now have a solid inventory of it all with decisions about what we’ll be sending out west. We’re a bit concerned about whether everything will fit into the container we ordered to ship everything out, but we’ll find out next week. We’re taking another Friday night flight to get us into Philly around 8AM on Saturday, then spend the weekend finalizing what we need to do before the movers arrive. I will be so thrilled to have most of the boxes, totes and extra furniture finally out of the den we’ve designated as our shared office, in no small part because of all the comments and questions I get when I’m on work video calls about the sea of boxes I live with.

Our trip concluded by taking SEPTA down to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia where MJ had lunch before parting ways. He was headed out west on a plane for a quick work trip and I was taking the Amtrak Acela north to Boston for work of my own.

Our week was pretty busy. MJ had plans to stay through Sunday and I was staying another week beyond that. I work remotely much of the time, and so a full time remote schedule when I’m back east isn’t disruptive to my routine, and I end up getting a lot of work done before my west coast colleagues wake up. Work-wise I had a very productive couple of weeks!

We did have a revolving door of contractors visit us throughout the week though. The townhouse is new, but there are a number improvements we wanted to make that weren’t offered when we bought and a few closing items that needed to be completed by the builders. The first was getting some electrical work done, including some lights above the shower stalls upstairs, and a few more outlets put in key places, like directly behind the TV and in the utility closet. Later in the week we had a tankless water heater installed (and the nearly-new tank heater we replaced successfully sold on Craigslist!) and a whole house humidifier that my sinuses will be grateful for come winter. There’s still work to be done on the place, and things to figure out but I am very happy with how much was completed.

We had a few lovely dinners with friends and family. I was able to make time over the weekend to clean up the little garden out front, though I expect when we return it’ll be overgrown with weeds again, one of those things we haven’t quite figured out yet. I met the neighbors and had a great chat about involvement in the HOA and issues concerning the neighborhood.

When we were planning this trip, we happened to look at the schedule for Citizen’s Bank Park and learned that our SF Giants would be playing the Phillies while we were in town! We snagged some great Diamond Club seat tickets for Saturday and went with our friend Danita.

Now, it would have been better Giants-fans-wise if we had gone to a game the night before, when we watched the Giants shut out the Phillies 10-0 while having dinner with MJ’s sister and her husband at a local restaurant. Alas, we went on a day that the Phillies won 5-3. It was a fun game though, no clear winner as you got to the later innings, with the Phillies getting 4 runs in the bottom of the 7th and the Giants trying to come back with 2 runs at the top of the 9th. It was a gorgeous day to be at the park for a 4PM game, warm, but not too humid, and the sun was out. On the way home we stopped for some Rita’s water ice.

More photos from the game here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157684649648515

Come Sunday MJ was on his way back west, but first we snagged some east coast Chinese food before getting him packed and on the way to the airport.

The week that followed for me was also pretty busy. On Monday I saw Wonder Woman with my best friend, and it was awesome! On Tuesday I hopped on an Amtrak up to New York City to meet my boss for a meetup at the WeWork space near Union Square on “Managing Microservices & Fast Data w/ Apache Mesos & DC/OS.” The weather was nice, so I walked from Penn Station to Union Square, grabbed a coffee as I got some work done, and then met up for the meetup.

\
Flatiron Building in NYC, during my walk to Union Square

I was in charge of a section of the presentation but primarily, the live demo, which went quite smoothly. Slides from the presentation are up here (PDF).

Thanks to Clint for taking a picture during my part of the talk! (source

A local friend, and former co-worker, from Brooklyn also came out to the event. It was really nice to see a familiar face in the crowd, have some time to catch up and to have a local buddy to meetup with for drinks in Brooklyn afterwards before retiring to my hotel for the night. The next morning a subway whisked me back to Manhattan where I had a leisurely breakfast at The Harold before catching a train back to Philly.

A few more photos from the evening can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157681823948402

Back in Philadelphia, I spent the afternoon working from a library not far from the next meetup on our schedule, the Philadelphia area Linux Users Group (PLUG). But before the meeting, I had dinner with long time friend and open source colleague Nithya Ruff and one of her colleagues from Comcast, Prabha.

Selfie with Nithya and Prabha (source)

With nice, spring weather awaiting us outside, we made our way from Mad Mex to the PLUG meeting. I used to attend a lot of PLUG meetings, and coordinated the group for a while before I moved to California, so I have a lot of good friends and acquaintances who frequently attend. This meeting was no exception, upon arrival there was a flurry of hugs as I greeted familiar faces and met some new folks. My boss arrived soon after I did and we settled in for the meeting.

The talk was very similar to what we had done in NYC the night before, but shifted slightly for a more Linux-focused audience. Unfortunately the demo didn’t go as planned, but as we were running out of time we discovered that it was because of the university WiFi we were on, blocking everything. After the meeting we met for food and drinks nearby and I was able to bring it all up on my laptop, working, hooray! Slides from this meetup are here (PDF).

I had a lot of fun at these events with my boss, we learned a bunch about the fast data demo we presented, I was able to spend some time on Friday at work making some improvements to it.

And with that, the week was winding down! On Friday night I met up with a friend and went to Longwood Gardens out in Kennett Square. I’d only ever been once, back in 2008, when the weather failed to cooperate and the rain made it so we only really saw the greenhouses. This time was different! They were on summer hours, which means we could stroll in at 7:30PM and spend nearly two hours exploring the grounds before it got dark. It’s a beautiful place. There are the gardens of course with lots of flowers, but also an Italian water garden with a series of fountains, three tree houses spread throughout the grounds and some relatively new areas that wind through a large meadow and near some ponds. A quick stroll through the greenhouse brought us to a row of beautiful bonsai trees.

The highlight of these weekend nights during the summer is the array of giant fountains near the entrance, which they light up in various colors and choreograph to music for a half hour show once it get dark, just before closing. It’s spectacular, absolutely worth doing. I held off until after the show to take pictures, getting much better ones as we walked around the lit up fountains as they started corralling everyone out of the gardens.

Piles more photos of the gardens and fountains here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157681958162333

My trip wound down after that, with Saturday spent at the townhouse closing things up and then grabbing a quick dinner. A flight at 8:30AM on Sunday morning brought me back to San Francisco on Sunday afternoon so I could relax a bit and get some Caligula kitty snuggles before getting back to work on Monday.

But first I happened to be out getting my nails done with a friend on Sunday before my talk. Since I was there, I decided to Ubuntu theme things up again. Drawing freehand, the manicurist gave me some lovely Ubuntu logos.

Girly nails aside, that’s how I ended up at The ATS Group on Monday evening for a PLUG West meeting. They had a very nice welcome sign for the group. Danita and I arrived shortly after 7PM for the Q&A portion of the meeting. This pre-presentation time gave me the opportunity to pass around my BQ Aquaris M10 tablet running Ubuntu. After the first unceremonious pass, I sent it around a second time with more of an introduction, and the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo so people could see convergence in action by switching between the tablet and desktop view. Unlike my previous presentations, I was traveling so I didn’t have my bag of laptops and extra tablet, so that was the extent of the demos.

The meeting was very well attended and the talk went well. It was nice to have folks chiming in on a few of the topics (like the transition to systemd) and there were good questions. I also was able to give away a copy of our The Official Ubuntu Book, 9th Edition to an attendee who was new to Ubuntu.

Keith C. Perry shared a video of the talk on G+ here. Slides are similar to past talks, but I added a couple since I was presenting on a Xubuntu system (rather than Ubuntu) and didn’t have pure Ubuntu demos available: slides (7.6M PDF, lots of screenshots).

After the meeting we all had an enjoyable time at The Office, which I hadn’t been to since moving away from Philadelphia almost seven years ago.

Thanks again to everyone who came out, it was nice to meet a few new folks and catch up with a bunch of people I haven’t seen in several years.

Saturday was FOSSCON! The Ubuntu Pennsylvania LoCo team showed up to have a booth, staffed by long time LoCo member Randy Gold.

They had Ubuntu demos, giveaways from the Ubuntu conference pack (lanyards, USB sticks, pins) and I dropped off a copy of the Ubuntu book for people to browse, along with some discount coupons for folks who wanted to buy it. My Ubuntu tablet also spent time at the table so people could play around with that.

Thanks to Randy for the booth photo!

At the conference closing, we had three Ubuntu books to raffle off! They seemed to go to people who appreciated them and since both José and I attended the conference, the raffle winners had 2/3 of the authors there to sign the books.

My co-author, José Antonio Rey, signing a copy of our book!

Making my way closer to home, I continued my tour of Ubuntu 16.04 talks in the San Francisco Bay Area. A couple weeks ago I gave the talk at SVLUG (Silicon Valley Linux Users Group) and on Tuesday I spoke at BALUG (Bay Area Linux Users Group).

I hadn’t been down to an SVLUG meeting in a couple years, so I appreciated the invitation. They have a great space set up for presentations, and the crowd was very friendly. I particularly enjoyed that folks came with a lot of questions, which meant we had an engaging evening and it stretched what is alone a pretty short talk into one that filled the whole presentation time. Slides: svlug_ubuntu_1604.pdf (6.0M), svlug_ubuntu_1604.odp (5.4M)

Presentation, tablets and giveaways at SVLUG

At BALUG this week things were considerably more casual. The venue is a projector-less Chinese restaurant these days and the meetings tend to be on the small side. After family style dinner, attendees gathered around my big laptop running Ubuntu as I walked through my slide deck. It worked better than expected, and the format definitely lent itself to people asking questions and having discussions throughout too. Very similar slides to the ones I had at SVLUG: balug_ubuntu_1604.pdf (6.0M), balug_ubuntu_1604.odp (5.4M)

Setup and giveaways at BALUG

Next week my Ubuntu 16.04 talk adventures culminate in the event I’m most excited about, the San Francisco Ubuntu 16.04 release party at OpenDNS office located at 135 Bluxome St in San Francisco!

The event is on Thursday, July 28th from 6:30 – 8:30PM.

It’s right near the Caltrain station, so where ever you are in the bay it should be easy to get to.

• Laptops running Ubuntu and Xubuntu 16.04.
• Tablets running the latest Ubuntu build, including the bq Aquaris M10 that shipped with Ubuntu and demonstrates convergence.
• Giveaways, including the 9th edition of the Official Ubuntu book (new release!), pens, stickers and more.

I’ll need to plan for food, so I need folks to RSVP. There are a few options for RSVP:

• LoCo Team Portal
• Meetup.com
• email me at lyz at ubuntu.com

Need more convincing? It’ll be fun! And I’m a volunteer whose systems engineering job is unrelated to the Ubuntu project. In order to continue putting the work into hosting these events, I need the satisfaction of having people come.

Finally, event packs from Canonical are now being shipped out to LoCos! It’s noteworthy that for this release instead of shipping DVDs, which have been in sharp popularity decline over the past couple of years, they are now shipping USB sticks. These are really nice, but the distribution is limited to just 25 USB sticks in the shipment for the team. This is an order of magnitude fewer than we got with DVDs, but they’re also much more expensive.

Event pack from Canonical

Not in the San Francisco Bay Area? If you feel inspired to give an Ubuntu 16.04 presentation, you’re welcome to use my slides, and I’d love to see pictures from your event!

I brought along my demo systems:

• Lenovo G575 running Ubuntu 16.04, which I presented from
• Dell mini9 running Xubuntu 16.04
• Nexus 7 2013 running Ubuntu OTA-11
• bq Aquaris M10 running Ubuntu OTA-11

All these were pristine systems so that I didn’t have any data loaded on them or anything. The Nexus 7 took some prep though. I had to swing by #ubuntu-touch on freenode to get some help with re-flashing it after it got stuck on a version from February and wouldn’t upgrade beyond that in the UI. Thanks to popey for being so responsive there and helping me out.

The presentation was pretty straight forward. I walked attendees through screenshots and basic updates of the flavors, and then dove into a variety of changes in the 16.04 release of Ubuntu itself, including disabling of Amazon search by default, replacement of Ubuntu Software Center by GNOME Software, replacement of Upstart with systemd (new since the last LTS release), ability to move the Unity launcher to the bottom of the screen, inclusion of ZFS and the introduction of Ubuntu Snappy.

Slides from my presentation are available for other folks to use as they see fit (but you probably want to introduce yourself, rather than me!): feltonlug_ubuntu_1604.pdf (3.1M), feltonlug_ubuntu_1604.odp (5.4M). If you’d like a smaller version of this slide deck, drop me a message at lyz@ubuntu.com and I’ll send you one without all the flavor screenshots.

After the presentation portion of the event, I answered questions and gave folks the opportunity to play with the laptops and tablets I brought along. About half the meeting was spent causally chatting with attendees about their experiences and plans to debug and flash the Ubuntu image on supported tablets.

Huge thanks to the group for being the welcoming crowd they always are, and Bob Lewis for inviting me down.

I’ll continue my presentation roadshow through July, presenting on Ubuntu 16.04 at the following Bay Area groups and events where I’m also bringing along Ubuntu pens, stickers and other goodies:

• Wednesday, July 6th: Silicon Valley Linux Users Group in Mountain View
• Tuesday, July 19th: Bay Area Linux Users Group in San Francisco
• Thursday, July 28th: San Francisco Ubuntu 16.04 Release Party, RSVP here or on Meetup.com

Bonus: At the release party in San Francisco I’ll also have copies of the The Official Book, 9th Edition which I’ll be signing and giving away!

Looking forward to these events, it should be a nice adventure around the bay area.

Our mission: Deal with our east coast storage. Without getting into the boring and personal details, we had to shut down a storage unit that MJ has had for years and go through some other existing storage to clear out donatable goods and finally catalog what we have so we have a better idea what to bring back to California with us. This required movers, almost an entire day devoted to donations and several days of sorting and repacking. It’s not all done, but we made pretty major progress, and did close out that old unit, so I’m calling the trip a success.

Perhaps what kept me sane through it all was the fact that MJ has piles of really old hardware, which is a delight to share on social media. Geeks from all around got to gush over goodies like the 32-bit SPARC lunchboxes (and commiserate with me as I tried to close them).

Notoriously difficult to close, but it was done!

Now admittedly, I do have some stuff in storage too, including my SPARC Ultra 10 that I wrote about here, back in 2007. I wanted to bring it home on this trip, but I wasn’t willing to put it in checked baggage and the case is a bit too big to put in my carry-on. Perhaps next trip I’ll figure out some way to ship it.

SPARC Ultra 10

More gems were collected in my album from the trip: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157651488307179/

We also got to visit friends and family and enjoy some of our favorite foods we can’t find here in California, including east coast sweet & sour chicken, hoagies and chicken cheese steaks.

Family visits began on Monday afternoon as we picked up the plastic storage totes we were using to replace boxes, many of which were hard to go through in their various states of squishedness and age. MJ had them delivered to his sister in Pennsylvania and they were immensely helpful when we did the move on Tuesday. We also got to visit with MJ’s father and mother, and on Saturday met up with his cousins in New Jersey to have my first family Seder for Passover! Previously I’d gone to ones at our synagogue, but this was the first time I’d done one in someone’s home, and it meant a lot to be invited and to participate. Plus, the Passover diet restrictions did nothing to stem the exceptional dessert spread, there was so much delicious food.

We were fortunate to be in town for the first Wednesday of the month, since that allowed us to attend the Philadelphia area Linux Users Group meeting in downtown Philadelphia. I got to see several of my Philadelphia friends at the meeting, and brought along a box of books from Pearson to give away (including several copies of mine), which went over very well with the crowd gathered to hear from Anthony Martin, Keith Perry, and Joe Rosato about ways to get started with Linux, and freed up space in my closet here at home. It was a great night.

Presentation at PLUG

Friend visits included a fantastic dinner with our friend Danita and a quick visit to see Mike and Jessica, who had just welcomed little David into the world, awww!

Staying in New Jersey meant we could find Passover-friendly meals!

Sunday wrapped up with a late night at storage, finalizing some of our sorting and packing up the extra suitcases we brought along. We managed to get a couple hours of sleep at the hotel before our flight home at 6AM on Monday morning.

In all, it was a productive trip, but exhausting and I spent this past week making up for sleep debt and the aches and pains. Still, it felt good to get the work done and visit with friends we’ve missed.

The talks were a full talk version of the mini talk I gave at the release party in San Francisco last month, covering:

• Unity Desktop
• Server
• Phablet
• Xubuntu

I’m a member of the Xubuntu team and use it primarily myself, which is why that flavor got special treatment ;)

The first talk was on Saturday for FeltonLUG down near Santa Cruz. Since I had a series of laptops already installed and set up from when we did the release party , I packed them up and brought them along with me.

We had a small group, so the meeting was a bit more on the informal side and folks had a lot of great questions and comments throughout the presentation. Given the group size it was also possible to have everyone give my Nexus 7 with Ubuntu on it a try, which folks had a lot of questions about.

Thanks to Bob Lewis and Larry Cafiero for being such great hosts, at their scenic drive recommendation my husband and I had a wonderful trip up route 1 along the coast on our way home.

Last night I joined BALUG here in San Francisco. I brought along my trusty tahr and pile of demo laptops for this presentation as well.

In addition to the great questions about the direction of Ubuntu in general (desktops! servers! clouds! tablets! phones!) I was really happy to have server folks in my audience for this talk who were eager to hear about the changes to virtualization technologies and such on the server side. I even was able to have a chat with a sysadmin who is doing a lot of virtualization and told me that her team is looking at deploying OpenStack in the near future.

Slides from both presentations are available online, the BALUG one includes some screenshots from Xubuntu since I was using a Unity-based laptop to present there:

• FeltonLUG: 14.04: What’s new? (93K pdf)
• BALUG: 14.04: What’s new? (219K pdf)

The .odp versions of these slides are also available, just swap out .pdf for .odp in each url.

The talk was an updated version of the one I gave at OSCON in July (video here). I was able to update the talk to include our use of gearman and multiple jenkinses, elasticsearch, the new git.openstack.org and some of the latest things I’ve learned as we continue to refine our infrastructure and ability to share it with other projects and organizations.

It was also great to have an engaging audience and have my comments on the merits of code review changes to the infrastructure echoed by attendees who also have experience with it in their day jobs. There was also discussion about the general lacking of fully public, open source-based software testing in the open source community and people were quite pleased to see OpenStack leading the way here. It’s certainly something I’m proud to be a part of.

Thanks to everyone who came out!

Slides here: Code Review for Systems Administrators

Unfortunately for my audience, I came down with round 2 of my Epic Cold of 2013 on Monday night. I ended up skipping dinner with the BALUG crowd and just doing the presentation in an effort to not spread my plague. I arrived around 7:45 to get set up.

The talk went well, aside from the sniffles, and as with all these talks I’ve had some great conversations following it both at the meeting and via the mailing list afterwards.

This morning I learned that my interview for Diablo Valley Linux Users Group‘s podcast had been published. I primarily talked about my work with Ubuntu Women and similar projects. More info and download available here: Share The Bytes: Episode 10 – Women of Ubuntu

Finally, I made some improvements to my little Dell Mini9. I’ve been thinking over this past year or so that I’d be replacing it with something “any day now” but I really do love netbooks and am quite saddened that the market for them has dwindled so significantly. I do like my work-issued ultrabook for the sleek design and weight, but it doesn’t fit in my purse, which is one of my hard requirements. So I ended up buying 2 gigs of RAM to replace the 1G chip, and a new battery to replace the lousy “high capacity” one I bought last year (aside from being huge and heavy, it never was very high capacity and it took hours to charge).

I’m now sitting in the airport waiting for my flight to Los Angeles. I’ll be attending the Southern California Linux Expo 11x and presenting tomorrow at Ubucon on Ubuntu in the Cloud. Very much looking forward to it, and hoping this cold I’m continuing to battle doesn’t make too much of a mess of my trip!

The group was incredibly welcoming and engaged during my presentation, asking interesting questions throughout. At the end I was able to give a demo of the Xubuntu 12.10 daily build from the 13th so I could show off some of the new features of Xfce 4.10.

Slides: PDF, ODP
Slide template: http://spreadubuntu.org/en/material/presentation/xubuntu-presentation

Thanks again to Bob Lewis for inviting me to speak and afterwords taking me out to visit nearby Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park where I got to see some huge trees and Roaring Camp Railroads (I’ll have to go back some time to actually ride the trains!).