We also recently had our first injury-related urgent care visit for a child! Adam took a tumble on the stairs and ended up with a couple of head wounds that we decided to have looked at. Turns out, he was fine. And he handled the entire ordeal like champ, maybe even too well, since he’s since excitedly asked several times whether certain wild behaviors would result in him needing to go to the doctor for a bandage. We then need to talk him out of it, without making him scared of going to the doctor!

Now, one thing he shouldn’t be needing a bandage for again is tripping on the concrete and tiles out back. When we moved in, we didn’t think much of the slab of concrete in the back yard, and even kind of liked the tile layout. As time went on and the kids started getting old enough to play out there more independently, they’re looking less great. The tile has started cracking and coming up, and the concrete slab is a magnet for the kids tripping and there have already been a couple minor skinned knees as a result. With Aaron walking now, and one caretaker routinely being out back with both boys, I decided to do something about how precarious it had become. I looked into a few options for covering it all, but it was all coming up kind of expensive, especially for a back yard area that we hope to get replaced in a year or two with a landscaping remodel. I landed on going with some fake grass, which has the price sweet spot of 6×8 foot segments. As a temporary measure, I had no illusions that it would look good or work particularly well, but it actually came out better than I expected. Even with some windy weather recently, I had to go out and fix a few corners, but it was easy and quick to do and it still looks fine. Plus, it works, no injuries! And it’s made the whole back yard a more pleasant place to be.

We’re taking advantage of the nice weather by going out to local parks as well. I took both boys to the Hayward Japanese Gardens a few weeks ago, with the intention of pushing Aaron in the stroller while Adam walked around. Unfortunately I underestimated Aaron’s new-found mastery of walking and his desire to follow his big brother in everything he does. Within just a couple minutes it became clear there was no way I would be able to keep him contained in the stroller. Chasing two toddlers around a park with a big stroller in tow was technically doable, but not an experience I was keen to repeat. The next time we went, we went as a family so MJ could take Aaron while I chased Adam around everywhere.

Beyond the Japanese Gardens, I’ve taken the boys to a few other parks and playgrounds both with our au pair and MJ. It’s become quickly apparent that little Aaron is a playground fan, and Adam prefers going “hiking” everywhere we go. It usually means we each get an assigned kid for our outings so they can do the activities they prefer. Even during an outing to a local community center that’s 90% playground, Adam managed to find a trail and discover some interesting trees with me.

We observed Passover exclusively at home for the third year in a row. The first night Seder is traditionally held at home with your immediate family anyway, so it was nice to have that with the boys. With a lull in COVID-19 cases and broadly available vaccines for healthy people over five, a lot of folks went back to in-person second night Seders, so we didn’t do a virtual one this year, as we had in 2020 and 2021. But with all of us going through the round of colds, I was fine with sitting the second night out.

We were also quite sick on our 9th wedding anniversary on April 28th. We had reservations for outdoor dining at one of our favorite restaurants in Sausalito, but we didn’t want to spread whatever cold we had, and we weren’t feeling well enough to enjoy it anyway. It’s now been put on hold for about a month, but we’re determined to get back to it. With two little ones at home and not a lot of support due to the pandemic, it’s incredibly difficult to find time together, and we both know how important it is not to forget “us” right now.

Mother’s Day was more of an event. Adam picked out some flowers when I took the boys to the Farmers Market as usual on the day before, and then we took the boys to the nearby Oakland Aviation Museum. It’s on the smaller side for an aviation museum, but the perfect size for a couple toddlers, and they really loved it. Plus, we could keep our stay on the shorter side and get them home before they needed lunch and naps. It was also pretty empty since it was Mother’s Day, so while we’ve tended to avoid indoor public spaces with them, we were OK bringing the boys inside hanger-like museum part, as well as spending about half our time outdoors.

In other life news, we bought a new car. After selling my beloved Maserati, our plan was to get a minivan for our next car. Our Hyundai Santa Fe (3-row SUV) is getting tight, especially as Aaron rapidly outgrows his infant seat (which is removable, and allows someone to easily sit in the middle seat). At first, we thought we’d take our time, but as we started shopping we were in for a shock regarding the new car market. We knew what we wanted, but no dealerships have inventory. Even ones that had cars coming in the next month were already spoken for, and the one we found that wasn’t had a $5k mark-up that was enough to throw off our budget and we were generally reluctant to do. Unfortunately, we had also started feeling the pinch of only having one car our au pair could drive, so we decided to get a “temporary” car that would be safe and enjoyable for all of us to drive when the SUV was needed for the kids.

We ended up with a 2019 Mercedes GLC 350e. Going with a luxury car meant that we’d get all the safety features we wanted, and used meant the price was within our budget. Being a “pandemic car” it also only had around 15k miles on it! It’s also a plug-in hybrid, and though the battery is small, it’s a nice starter hybrid for us and will likely cause is to start moving on the EV charger a bit more quickly than planned, which is actually a good thing. The infotainment system takes some getting used to, but over all I am happy with it.

Work has been going really well. The IBM z16 release happened in early April and consumed a ton of my time, but it was fun to celebrate, even if that meant getting a little cake at home and sharing pictures on social media. It wasn’t just me though, all the events were pared down due to continued pandemic caution, and there was no release event at my office, like their was for the IBM z15 in 2019. It’s also caused me to spend a lot of time learning about the new hardware and then converting that into training seminars for folks in our communities. This is one of my favorite parts of my job.

I also had the opportunity to “meet up” with my friends from the Philadelphia Linux Users Group for a virtual meeting where I gave a quick introductory talk on the status of modern COBOL. It was mostly sharing statistics from the Open Mainframe Project poll that attempted to figure out how much COBOL was still out there. It continues to be astonishing to me, with my cloud-native background, how much technology I simply wasn’t exposed to on the enterprise side, and that includes the billions of lines of COBOL that are out there, running well and doing the job better than anything else could. It also means that I love sharing this knowledge with folks like me.

We had dinner at the nearby Toscana 52 Italian restaurant before settling in for the night. I saw them off the next morning before starting my Friday morning of work. That evening my friend Danita came over to spend the night, a weekend trip to New York City together, which I wrote about here, beckoned!

Monday arrived much too quickly. The day was spent once again working from the townhouse, which is working out really well. My office may be where we are storing piles of boxes, totes and furniture (most of which will end up in California), but in the midst of all that I have a really comfortable setup with everything I need to be productive. I just plug in my work laptop and go. Unfortunately during this trip I learned that the personal laptop that I keep there as my desktop has finally failed. The blink codes indicate that it’s the CPU or motherboard, which essentially means the laptop has reached the end. I’ll have to bring out a replacement next time I come into town.

However, Monday was eventful for another reason, it was August 21st, total solar eclipse day! I had piles of friends who braved the crowds to experience the totality zone, but in Philadelphia we just had a partial eclipse. During much of it we had cloud cover, but after the high point the clouds parted and I was able to get some nice glimpses through my pinhole camera box as I sat on the back porch. While sitting out there I flash backed to being 12 years old after school and doing the same thing. I have always enjoyed a good eclipse.

Monday evening I drove out to PLUG West to give an Introduction to DC/OS presentation (slides). Surprisingly, up until this point most of my DC/OS presentations had been more goal-oriented, so I really enjoyed doing a more holistic presentation about the “datacenter operating system” space, getting able to dive into more of the infrastructure geek bits of how DC/OS works as a platform on top of Linux for my fellow Linux-loving attendees present that evening. I also still know a number of folks who have attended PLUG meetings over the years, so it was nice to catch up and meet some new folks as a number of us adjourned to a nearby restaurant for a late dinner.

My next two evenings gave me time to catch up with friends over dinners, Tuesday night I had dinner with my friend Crissi. It had been a little while since just the two of us caught up in person, so it was really nice to get that time. Thursday I met up with my friend David to see RiffTrax Live: Doctor Who – The Five Doctors. I’d really been looking forward to this, and almost bought tickets for the actual live event in Nashville when they went on sale in the spring. This was actually a replay from the previous week, but as a Fathom Event in a theater, it’s hard to tell the difference. It was totally worth seeing. I don’t remember if I’d actually seen The Five Doctors before, I have seen a lot of old episodes but this movie is a bit ridiculous, even by old Doctor Who standards. A replacement of the first doctor (who had died a decade earlier), a cameo of the fourth doctor taken from footage shot for another production, and plot holes and continuity problems rounded out the basics of what made it so amusing. The Rifftrax of it was hilarious, even if they frequently took the opportunity to make fun of us old school Whovians.

On Friday morning MJ got into town! He flew in to visit for a few days, attend FOSSCON and so we could depart together on our trip to Ireland Monday night after work.

It’s hard to believe I was in Philadelphia for almost two weeks during this trip. With every visit the townhouse feels more like a home, I can relax and really feel comfortable there. Not sure yet when we’ll be back, but the end of year holidays are always a good opportunity since we have some off from work.

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.

Some flurries awaited our arrival Saturday night and there was already snow on the ground due to past precipitation, but it was nothing too worrying. Fortunately the weather was pretty clear for most of our visit.

On Sunday we met up with my Maid of Honor, Danita, and did the tasting at the wedding venue. Monday morning we kicked off the first of several vendor appointments.

Monday was also New Years Eve! The evening was spent with our friends Tim and Colleen as we met up for a late dinner at Marmont Steakhouse in Old City Philadelphia, just a couple blocks from Penn’s Landing where the fireworks display would be. Unfortunately there was a mix-up in reservations and we ended up waiting for about an hour to be seated, which made for a rather rushed (but delicious!) dinner.

We did make it outside in time for the new year, and Tim took our picture during the fireworks.

Being a holiday, new years day was a light day for us and I ended up being able to catch up with a lot of project work and email during the day before dinner with family.

Wednesday was busy. We had two vendor appointments and then drove downtown so I could give a presentation at the Philadelphia area Linux Users Group (PLUG) about the trip to Ghana. I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for the talk, so I tried to prepare the group for what I was calling an informal talk, and then was surprised when Dave Sevick, the Executive Director of Computer Reach who led our team in Ghana said he’d fly out from Pittsburgh to attend and participate! No pressure!

To my delight, the talk went very well. My “slides” were just a series of photos but I was confident in the material and I was able to introduce Dave at the beginning of my talk and invite him to pitch in throughout to answer any questions I was uncertain about. It all ended up being quite discussion-driven and what was probably only 30 minutes of speaking material led to an engaging time that lasted over an hour.

Lyz and Dave at PLUG

Thursday we drove to Harrisburg to handle some paperwork, but I brought along a laptop and was able to work on catching up with email during the drive, win! And that evening made time for another last minute vendor meeting.

Friday was the cake tasting and selection! We went with Bredenbeck’s for the cake and the woman we worked with was able to sketch out a cake design based on our specifications while we did the tasting. I was really happy with the experience, and am excited about our cake.

The last visit of our trip was to the Joseph Ambler Inn where we’ve reserved a block of rooms for guests coming to our wedding from out of town. We stayed there during our last trip but due to scheduling issues weren’t able to get the full tour that time – this time we did! I’m even happier about our decision to go with them following this tour. We wrapped up the tour by having a late lunch with family there at the inn. And the day wrapped up with another dinner with local family.

Sunday it was time to go home. In all it was a very productive trip, if not quite as relaxing as I had hoped. We have a lot to do before the wedding and we’ve been super busy with other life stuff. This week we’ve really had to hunker down and put together a schedule so we can meet all the deadlines. No wonder people hire wedding planners.

UDS Day 4

– Encouraging A Diverse Community –

This was a really interesting session as it focused less on tackling the diversity issue directly and instead focused on getting folks involved in general. Amber Graner drew a picture of a ladder and a lattice to describe contributing to Ubuntu. The point? There isn’t a “top” goal to reach when it comes to contributions. Contributors can start at any point and move to any other point in the project. You can start in your LoCo team drift into Development and end up spending most of your time in the Artwork team – all these contributions are important, none valued higher than others within the community. By cultivating this community where all kinds of contributions are highly valued and encouraging all kinds of people to contribute, the hope is that diversity will come.

– Team Leadership Workshop –

This ended up being a really great brainstorming session with several leaders within the community. A couple of lists where generated regarding leadership within Ubuntu, but which extended into leadership everywhere. The topics covered where signs of a good leader, and the challenges that face leaders. The usual staples of good leadership where addressed (trustworthy, good communication skills, having purpose, ability to delegate), but also a couple that were less obvious: having had an influential mentor/role model in the past and being aware of burnout (as described by Jono Bacon here, or nicely outlined by Thomas Thurman here). As far as challenges go, there was a contentious discussion regarding “Protecting people working for/with you from higher level cruft” which led to concerns about transparency, at what point do you take leadership problems within a community behind closed doors? At which point does public squabbling amongst leaders and members of a project start harming the project more than full transparency helps? It’s something that’s come up with a project I’ve been working on, and I think the answer really depends on the community, with a tendency to lean toward transparency whenever possible.

– Texas Team –

At noon I met up with several folks from the Ubuntu Texas team who drove out to meet up and dicuss the future of the team. I attended in my capacity as a US Teams mentor to hekp things along, and it was a pleasure to meet up with some locals while I was there in Dallas. The team made great progress at the meeting that they will share and discuss with folks who were unable to attend and even selected a new team contact! I am hopeful that future meetings on IRC where geography is less of a problem can be just as fruitful.

– Lucid Governance Changes Roadmap –

We really wanted to knock out all the doubts the community had regarding governance within Ubuntu. Having grown so organically it’s come to our attention that some of the procedures weren’t as transparent as we would have liked, lots of sessions on this subject really helped us identify and work toward ironing these out.

– Organised Writing for Ubuntu Learning –

Martin Owens and I led this Learning Team session where we primarily workes to introduce attendees to the project and outline some steps forward. This project is quite dear to me, and while I don’t think a lot was actively accomplished in this session itself, Martin’s aggressive push of this project throughout the week and demos of his new gui application to log into launchpad and configure bzr with a few clicks did great things for the project. Onward and upward!

– Ubuntu Governance –

More governance! Continuing discussions from earlier.

After the sessions wrapped up 7 of us piled into an SUV limo to head out to the firing range! It was the second trip Ubuntu folks took to the range that week, the first of which I missed due to not arriving in Dallas until late Monday evening. I got to shoot a gun for the first time in my life! A glock… something, it was black.

After the shooting range we walked over to a local sushi place for dinner before heading back to the hotel.

UDS Day 5

– IRC Council Lucid Plans (3rd session) –

Do we really need 3 IRC meetings? As I mentioned in my last post, lots of progress was made! And the fruits of this progress have already started to come about, with the recent Renewed call for nominations for the IRC Council to dig deeper into the IRC community for candidates.

– Ubuntu LoCo Leadership Series –

Amber Graner led this session with her fantastic plans for a comprehensive leadership document. There was such overwhelming support for her document outline that the discussion immediately went into how we’d go about collaboratively editing and distributing it. The session ended on distributing the leadership document via the “How to Spread Ubuntu” section of the Ubuntu Community Learning Project.

– LoCo Member Recruitment Workshop –

Grant Bowman led this great session where I learned about the Ubuntu Hour idea from Fabián Rodríguez, what I fun idea! *starts scheming*

– Unify Council Restaffing Process –

Honestly? We were all a bit giggly at this point. The Community Council had already loosely put together some ideas for unifying the restaffing process where predictable timelines are set for elections and appointments – it’s still on my ToDo list to put this into a pretty form for sharing. I should do that. The rest of the session was spent doing a wrap-up of the Community Track that week to tie off loose ends.

– Next steps for the Ubuntu Women project (3rd session) –

In this last session of we solidified our Lucid cycle roadmap.

And UDS is over! Well… except for the evening BBQ and Allstars entertainment. Fun times were had by all, as you can see by Chris Crisafulli’s party photos can attest to, including this gem:

Oh bother, here I am with drinks and guns all in a single post! I blame Texas (besides, ice skating was still more dangerous!).

My flight came in Monday evening, grabbed a taxi and checked in to my room (very nice, on the 29th floor!). Then headed down to the bar where I was grabbed by Mackenzie Morgan and finally was able to meet Mark Shuttleworth, Laura Czajkowski, Jono Bacon, Alan Pope, Dave Walker, Mike Basinger and others over dinner. It ended up being quite a late night!

Tuesday morning I woke up bright and early to have a delicious breakfast (they feed us a lot at UDS!) and was able to finally meet Martin Owens, all decked out in his hat and suit. After breakfast the sessions started! I ended up mostly on the Community Track, so attended the Community Roundtable each morning first thing. I’m going to try to give key highlights from sessions for each day, but I’m sure I’ll miss some important things, so be sure to follow up with blueprint for more details on each of these sessions.

UDS Day 2

– LTSP goals for Lucid –

The Linux Terminal Server Project is a really great one and one we’ve used in the Ubuntu Pennsylvania Team. One of the things the team is working that caught my interest on a LiveDVD version of LTSP on Ubuntu so an instant LTSP server could be created by popping a DVD into a networked server. Very cool.

– IRC Council Lucid Plans –

In the first of several sessions during the week, several of us on the Ubuntu Community Council were able to sit down with a couple members of the Ubuntu IRC Council and discuss the status and future of the Ubuntu IRC community. Over 3 formal sessions, and several less formal discussions throughout the week the Councils made considerable progress in both professional and personal relations between the Councils. It’s really a testament to the value of these real life UDS meetings, being able to talk through differences and misunderstandings in the same room really gave us a clear path forward and it was a real pleasure to work with everyone involved to make progress.

– Next Steps for the Ubuntu Women Project –

I have to admit, with the major discussions surrounding Women in F/OSS this year I was nervous about this session. This first session was recorded on video (hopefully will be online soon over at http://ubuntudevelopers.blip.tv/!) and had outstanding attendance. We had voices from several women within the project who have not been very involved with the Ubuntu Women project, and Mark Shuttleworth joined us shortly after we began to offer some viewpoints regarding project goals and team resources. I left this first session feeling refreshed and much more confident about the future of the project.

By the end of the week (we had 3 sessions in total) we had a solid Road Map for the Lucid Cycle. Huge thanks to Amber Graner, Laura Czajkowski, Mackenzie Morgan and Jono Bacon for being instrumental in planning, hosting and making these sessions a success and to everyone who joined us throughout the week to offer support, observations, encouragement and suggestions.

– Community input in board and council elections –

There are a few formal boards and councils exist within the Ubuntu project for handling major segments of the Ubuntu community so that the Community Council can balance the load some. Most of these were created approximately two years ago and we’ve started to have members expiring from the teams and have been working toward finding the best ways to restaff them. We tend to want to lean toward votes from the community in all cases we can, but sometimes the pool of members is unclear (who can vote for LoCo Council? IRC Council?). Further solid structure surrounding restaffing also needed to be discussed (What steps are required? How long should we leave open nominations, shortlisting and voting? etc). This session was the first of a few Governance sessions throughout the week.

– Decide New Bantracker Features –

The new IRC Ban/Issue tracker is going to ROCK! The current one is still functional isn’t very scalable (so the number of people who can use it is limited) and there are a lot more features that the IRC Team wants to see. This was an exciting session where a lot of ideas for the new tracker, including some ideas that could make the Appeal Process within IRC a more obvious process. Benjamin Rubin details some of the new Bantracker ideas here, as well as other things discussed during the IRC sessions.

– Adopt-an-Upstream –

This was a really interesting session regarding improving relations with upstream projects by “adopting” an upstream project to act as a bridge and help handle relations and tasks. It’s detailed on the Ubuntu wiki here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Upstream/Contacts. Fascinating idea, and one that has been done informally for a very long time, it’s great to see a structure and expectations document in place.

This second day was the first for me, and quite a whirlwind! We wrapped it up by having an Ubuntu Women dinner at Monica’s Aca Y Alla Restaurant. We ended up having about 23 people came out (and no one got pictures, d’oh!) and the vast majority of them were women within the project. It ended up being a really fun dinner, after which I turned in a bit early at the hotel to be ready for UDS Day 3!

UDS Day 3

– Debian Relationship Health Check –

I was very happy to attend this session on collaboration upstream with Debian and to see so much work being put into this collaboration. The projects have always been very closely linked, with a lot of folks like myself coming into Ubuntu with a history in Debian, and Ubuntu developers becoming Debian Developers to contribute directly upstream. It was great to see a concerted effort for Ubuntu folks to contribute directly to Debian and to get a review of some of the current technical things being done to track bugs and patches between the projects.

– Next Steps for the Ubuntu-NGO Team –

If there were more hours in the day, I’d totally be working hard on the Ubuntu Non-Government Organization Project. This session covered a lot of the early efforts of solidifying a path forward for this team. Results of this session are up on the blueprint, but their Software and papercuts initiatives particularly caught my interest. Maybe I can find more hours in a day…

– Release collaboration with Debian –

This was a really interesting session discussing some of the issues with software versioning between Lucid and Squeeze with particular focus on the challenges facing Python versions between the two distros. This is also the session where I learned that they’ll be going with the 2.6.32 kernel for Lucid.

– Ubuntu Americas Board Meeting –

Not actually a session, but we hosted a “live” North and South American regional approval board meeting at UDS – which means a bunch of us board members sat together in the Grand Ballroom and spoke in real life about the membership candidates coming before the board in IRC. This was a blast, and talking in real time gave us the chance to move through more candidates than usual. Results have been posted here.

– Next Steps For The Ubuntu Women Project (2nd Session) –
– IRC Council Lucid Plans (2nd session) –

These two sessions were continuations of ones discussed above. I was really pleased with how flexible the scheduling for core community projects was during this UDS, Jorge Castro and Jono Bacon did a phenomenal job with this for us.

We wrapped up the day and a whole bunch of us headed out to The Galleria mall for dinner and… ice skating! Dinner was at Five Guys, yum! And I hadn’t ice skating in years. I was bad at it the last time I did it over a decade ago and I’m still pretty bad at it. At least I didn’t fall down at all, and I did manage to skate without holding on to the railing …eventually!

Unfortunately there were a couple injuries related to ice skating, a concussion that was discovered the next day, and a fellow who ended up limping through the rest of UDS due to what he later discovered was a chipped bone (ouch!).

I’ll be posting about the rest of the week in the coming days, since returning home I’ve been pretty busy between work, MJ visiting, Thanksgiving plans, PLUG and a thousand little things I’m following up with post-UDS.

We left Pennsylvania around 10AM on Saturday and headed out to NY, stopped at Friendly’s in Scraton for lunch and arrived in Seneca Falls, NY around 4PM. The weather driving up was great and the drive itself was an easy one. Upon arrival at the Hotel Clarence (named after the Angel from It’s a Wonderful Life since, as wikipedia reports: “Seneca Falls, New York claims that when Frank Capra visited their town in 1945, he was inspired to model Bedford Falls after it. “) we were greeted by a friendly staff who went out of their way to make us feel welcome – and not just in the traditional way that small, local hotels do! The concierge had been following me on Twitter (taken a cue from the email address I registered with, perhaps?) and the hotel receipt said “VIP – Envoy from Alderaan” – and boy did we feel VIP! The room was on the top floor and gorgeous, and that evening when some of the New York LoCo guys came out they brought out some chairs so we could meet up together in the ballroom that they weren’t using that night.

Meeting up with some of the New York guys Saturday night was fun, first to show up was Charles Profitt, who I’ve worked with on a couple projects within Ubuntu and most recently have been working with on the Ubuntu Community Learning Project. He wrote a charming (and funny!) post about meeting here. He couldn’t make it to the event the following day, so I took the opportunity to pick his brain about the presentations he’s done to less technical crowds (mostly educational groups). He had some really great points about the costs of hardware and software through the years, and was able to point me toward slides for a couple presentations he’s done on the subject. I was also able to finally meet New York Team Leader Jeremy Austin-Bardo who was a primary organizer of the weekend’s events. Also joining us that evening was my fellow presenter for the following day, Donald (Ducky) Newel who’d be doing an introduction to FOSS, so it was great to spend the time collaborating and seeing how my FOSS Involvement talk would fit in with his.

Going back to Seneca Falls was quite an experience for me. I didn’t really manage to stay in touch with anyone from when I lived there 9 years ago, so there wasn’t any visiting, but it was interesting to walk through the old town again. I was able to show Crissi where I used to work, where I used to live, and tell a bunch of stories I now fear were dreadfully boring from when I lived there (bless her for putting up with me, and the chilly weather!). My life then was quite different than it is now, I think going back allowed me to lay some feelings I’d been harboring about my time there to rest and properly say goodbye to that little town. Add in the super comfortable bed that evening and I slept like the dead that Saturday night!

Sunday morning we partook in the complementary breakfast there at the hotel and hung out in the hotel room all morning. We checked out around noon and headed over to the Holiday Inn Waterloo. After setting up Donald did his introductory talk, where he covered what F/OSS is and reviewed a number of applications that ship with default Ubuntu.

I then did a short presentation which I called “Who Uses and Contributes to Open Source Projects (And how you can too!)” which I wrote to both address the prevalence of F/OSS in production use in many industries and to explain how development of F/OSS is accomplished and how anyone can seek to get involved, my slides are online here. After the presentations we enjoyed pizza and soda, Crissi helped with demos in the hallway and we all hung around and got to answer questions and chat about Ubuntu! Jeremy has also blogged about the event here: New York State Release Celebration.

Around 5PM Crissi and I piled into the car and drove back to Pennsylvania. We made great time not having to stop and I managed to get home around 10PM. Thanks again to the New York Team for being such wonderful hosts for our stay!

Huge thanks to everyone who came out, I had a blash, a few of us even dressed up!

And a total of 13 attendees, including one fellow who joined us from the Ubuntu Maryland team since he was in town, and a couple who made the trek over from New Jersey.

More photos: http://gallery.ubuntupennsylvania.org/main.php?g2_itemId=857

We enjoyed lots of chatting about Ubuntu and Karmic, eating french toast and waffles, drinking milkshakes and beer, and indulging in decadent diner desserts.

When I got home last night I ended up taking the plunge on my primary desktop to Xubuntu 9.10 – so far? No issues, a couple “papercut” bugs from Jaunty have been fixed, and in general I’m very happy. Great job Xubuntu crew!

First is the one at my beloved Ubuntu Pennsylvania Team on Halloween. Karmic! Costumes! Cake! Should be a lot of fun

More information about the event is on the wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/PhillyKarmicRelease

While speaking of the Pennsylvania Team, it looks like there might be one held in Pittsburgh too.

The second release party is up in Waterloo, New York. It’s about six hours from here, so while out at a conference planning meeting last week I mentioned that I wanted someone to join me and my friend Crissi was interested. So we’ll be driving up the morning of Saturday November 7th, spending a night at Hotel Clarence in Seneca Falls, catching some drinks with some of the NY folks who are in town, then attending their release party on the afternoon of the 8th before driving back to Pennsylvania.

I’ve been wanting to meet the New York folks for a while now, but as an interesting aside I used to live in Seneca Falls. It will be quite the adventure to lurk around the old stomping grounds again and hopefully meet up with some folks I’ve lost contact with (assuming I can get back into contact!).

We arrived at CPOSC around 8AM to meet up with Jonathan and Crissi Simpson who had also come up from Philly the evening before, and to finally meet Bret Fledderjohn!

Bret did an amazing job with the table, bringing along a demo machine running Kubuntu, a the tri fold foam board to display various Ubuntu-things on and tweaked slides from the Ubuntu Colorado Team for rotation on a computer at the table (ended up on my mini9) giving information about Ubuntu. I added a few things to the table as well, rounding things off nicely at our table for the day. Other tables looked great too, there were some local Fedora Ambassadors, I was able to have a nice chat with the CEO of Anteil and got to kick back a bit with the Zenoss guys (photographic proof!).

Slides from my talk on Contributing to Open Source can be found here. The talk itself went very well, except for being a bit short partially due to my inability to do the demo I had prepared because I lacked internet access in that room (I did preload some pages, but the actual demo I had was interactive). I was able to answer a number of questions from the audience in the free time I had and after the core of my talk and I was approached directly afterwards by several people discussing more questions and ideas about contributing, my slides should be expanded! And how I could I forget volunteer sysadmining in my slides? That’s one of the things I do! It’s ashame my talk was so late in the day (last time slot), I fear I cut some conversations short due to the need to head back to the table and pack up and then head out.

Afterwards a bunch of us headed out to Appalachian Brewing Company for some after conference chatting, food and beer. Great day, thanks to everyone who helped out at our table, and to all the conference organizers for making it such a success. And also big Thank You to my boyfriend for flying out to San Francisco to support me at my first conference speaking engagement, his support and later constructive criticism of my presentation was awesome :)

I’ve uploaded more photos to the Ubuntu Pennsylvania Gallery (direct link here) and I also put some up on flickr to join all the other cposc tagged photos on flicker.

Unrelated, I discovered this morning that along with Sebastian Kügler, my interview primarily covering my involvement in Ubuntu Women for the Pardus-Linux E-Zine conducted by Hüseyin Sarıgül back in August had been published. If you speak Turkish (or if you’re curious!) you can check it out here.