It took me a long time to put a sticker on a laptop, but it finally happened with my beloved pink mini9 when my abuse of the poor netbook caused very visible scratches to form.

So, why the sticker story? Custom stickers!

Of course I knew services providing custom stickers existed, but it never really thought much about making my own until I snagged a LivingSocial deal for Vistaprint last month. Upon reviewing their offerings I was impressed by their little round stickers (“Small Sticker – Circle” in their catalog), so I ordered 5 sheets of them with the Ubuntu Women circle logo and paid a $.99 per sheet extra for the “Glossy Sticker Stock” which I figured would hold up better on laptops.

I received my first shipment on June 28th!

I immediately shipped out a sheet of stickers to Valorie Zimmerman and one to Cheri Francis for upcoming conferences they are attending. The quality of the stickers is pretty good, but I don’t know how it’ll hold up on laptops, the gloss isn’t quite what I’ve seen on the more durable stickers. Time will tell! I’ve had one on my netbook since I received them and it has been doing alright so far.

Since I was happy with the order and they had offers for some free goodies, I went ahead and ordered 3 more sheets of stickers.

And also ordered 500 business cards, 100 post cards and 25 magnets, which were all “free” in my order – just paid the fee to upload a custom image ($5 – and the image could be reused across products, so business cards and post cards had the same image). The cards will be super useful but I have to admit that the simplicity of the written logo on the magnet has really captured my enthusiasm. In all it ended up being quite a good deal, so I highly recommend taking advantage of these deals from Vistaprint when they come up.

This whole blog post is not actually a Vistaprint love fest, they aren’t the only sticker game in town! I ordered business cards from MOO several months back and received an email from them advertising a discount on stickers. So, what other project am I involved with that could use some inexpensive publicity? Partimus! So for about $10 shipped I ordered a little book of 90 stickers.

The options for stickers are certainly limited with MOO (no small round ones, for instance) and the price is a bit steep when compared to a place like Vistaprint, but the quality is top notch. I have no worries about how well these stickers will hold up. I was able to meet up with fellow Partimus volunteer Grant this week and give him a pile of them to sticker up the town with.

NEW KEY

pub 4096R/BC2349FC 2011-05-17
Key fingerprint = F1A1 2FEF 82A5 666C F9A4 A748 2FC7 6319 BC23 49FC

This means my old 1024-bit DSA key is on the way out.

OLD KEY

pub 1024D/BC9AC50C 2003-07-10
Key fingerprint = C058 1828 40C6 1A14 C641 70EC A353 ABF3 BC9A C50C

Signed my old key? Check out my transition statement signed with both the new and my previous key: key-transition_20110517_asc.txt

Still using a 1024-bit key yourself? Check out these useful resources for transitioning:

• http://keyring.debian.org/creating-key.html
• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/GPGMigration
• http://www.debian-administration.org/users/dkg/weblog/48

Drop me an email with your address if youâ€d like one: lyz@princessleia.com (Please put “Holiday Card” in the subject so I can filter it appropriately).

Typical disclaimer: No, I’m not a Christian even though I do tend to celebrate a secular “Christmas” with pretty lights, and the cards will non-religious in theme (just like last year, they’ll probably be pink, or have penguins, or both).

Last month while I was visiting Google Mountain View, I snapped a picture of the building with the giant Android and the collection of dessert statues!

And one of me next to the giant frozen yogurt :)

As reported here the OTA upgrades started on Monday. The upgrade for Froyo hit my phone a few hours ago, just in time for a road trip to Las Vegas this weekend. Awesome! Have wifi, will travel… more.

Going back all the way to the beginning of the month, when my friend MJ was in town we headed down to Philadelphia to see Star Trek at The Franklin Institute Omnimax. So it wasn’t optimized for the hugemongous Omnimax screen so it ended up looking a bit warped, and I’m glad I’d seen it prior to seeing it there so I didn’t miss anything, but it was quite a fun experience. And while mentioning MJ, I was quite pleased with myself to have gotten him in touch with the Ubuntu Ireland team while he was in Dublin so he could snag a couple pints with them. What an awesome team to extend such a welcome to a visiting American… or do the Irish simply use any excuse to have a pint? :) I will have to make it out to Dublin one of these days to see for myself, I’m jealous of everyone involved in said pint night.

Blinker is fixed again! Getting the mechanism in the door for the window ended up costing me a bit over $200 (ouch) but it’s nice to not be holding up the window with masking tape anymore, a week and a half of that was more than enough for me. Inspection on the car is due next month, I’m really hoping it’ll pass without too much trouble and that nothing else goes wrong with it for a while.

I’m in love with my G1. I was glued to it for the trip down to the Southeast Linuxfest last weekend so we had hours and hours to bond. Since I’ve never had a smartphone before just about everything is novel. Linux kernel on my phone? Squee! Maps on my phone? Glee! Traffic too? Beautiful screen? Yeah! Awesome interface! And the best? An excellent ssh client so I can hop onto IRC from anywhere. Oh, and when I’m on call at work I can easily forward calls to it and tunnel into work servers to check email. Oh, and it’s a phone too! Not a bad one, for that matter. Tomorrow I think I’ll skip down to King of Prussia to get a screen protector, and see if any of the shops down there have pink G1 covers before I start looking online. The only complaint about the phone is the backlit keyboard. On the black version of the phone it’s not much of an issue, I bet, but the white one has a grey keyboard which is a bit unfortunate in medium light: without backlight I can see keys fine, with backlight I can barely see them! But I figure as phone complaints go, this is pretty mild.

I did a talk on Contributing to Open Source Projects at PLUG North this month which I think went quite well. A huge thanks to MJ and David A. Harding for offering fantastic review of my slides prior to the presentation, their input and content additions really put the polish I needed into the presentation. I finally got around to uploading my slides here (they are actually somewhat useful if you check out Note view in Impress). Which reminds me, I hadn’t written a presentation in a long time, the last time I did I used S5. I was geared up to use that again until I read Emma Jane’s OpenOffice.org: an outline for preparing your slides, with the guidance from that post I had a very pleasant Impress experience, and I suspect I’ll be using it in the future. The only snafu? My desktop is running Ubuntu 9.04 with OpenOffice.org 3, while my mini9 that I did the presentation on is still running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS with OpenOffice.org 2.4, the version difference caused my pretty pink bullet points to disappear on 8.04, which I had to scramble to fix prior to heading out to the meeting.

I finally picked up a Wii Fit a couple weeks ago. It’s actually been quite fun so far. Plus I’m riding my bike some and being pretty good about eating better (the Southeast Linuxfest weekend being a gigantic exception, wahoo southern food!). I’m really looking forward to when the pool here at the apartment complex opens, it’s almost July, what are they waiting for? I’d love to be able to skip down to the pool for a little while each nice day for a swim. Love swimming.

What else… okay, so I did spend pretty much this entire week hermited in my apartment with my cats. Except for today, when I had lunch with Stephen. Oh how I adore the swiss and mushroom burgers at Stoudt’s, and wrapping up the afternoon with a brownie and coffee ice cream sundae at The Udder Choice in Ephrata was awesome. Plus it was very nice to get out and get my mind off a recent break up that’s had me down.

Now I’m going to try and get some sleep and hope this miserable, humid weather goes away soon.

The window? Well, I can’t afford to fix it at this moment since they’ll need to take apart the door to even diagnose it so I’m bringing it back on June 8th. Then I get to bring it back for inspection in the beginning of July. Blinker really needs to stop breaking and behave.

Tonight my sister and I will probably be chilling down at the North Coventry Mall and then have some dinner. I drive her to the airport tomorrow morning, and am a bit sad to see her go!

Hopefully this super-late night won’t put too much of a dent in the weekend. Planning on just chilling out, possibly hitting the mall and meeting up with some people tomorrow. Sunday is Philly day (South Street, Penn’s Landing). Monday we were invited to a BBQ. Should be a fun weekend.

Oh, and Blinker is fixed! It’s amazing how satisfying this repair is. Since I bought this car a year ago (wow, it’s been a year, just renewed my registration tonight) it’s been making a noise related to the compressor, the complete failure of the A/C is only the latest manifestation of this ongoing problem. But now the noise is gone! Blinker runs beautifully and quietly! Well, as quiet as a 9 year old car with 150K miles on it will run :)

My sister’s flight finally departed at 10:04! Estimated arrival at 11:24PM, so I’ll be heading down pretty soon.

I hit Cabela’s on Saturday with a friend for fun and brought home a stuffed animal deer head for my wall. I can’t quite explain the impulse, but when I saw the silly thing it made me laugh a lot. I need to laugh more, so home it came.

So all attempts (ok, I didn’t try that hard) at making it look like an adult lives here failed. The Star Wars toys, Wallace and Gromit Toys, and Disney toys are now out of their storage boxes and decorating the tops of my bookcases in my living room. I linked giant resolution photos of each bookshelf so you can browse my expected, stereotypically nerdy library. Ooh fun.

And a picture of my TV. I pondered getting cable, but the $199 installation fee turned me off to that really quick – even if they offered to add the service itself to my business account for free otherwise. Instead I have a VCR, DVD player (pink!), PS2, and an Inspiron 7500 running Ubuntu w/ fluxbox as a media PC to keep me entertained… and so I get to do things like watch Star Trek TNG. Oh and I signed up for NetFlix.

Maybe I’ll get some ballpen balls.

I still have a bike in my living room though. Should do something about that at some point, I think one of my Christmas presents to myself will be an indoor trainer and set it up in my bedroom. Exercise AND having it not look so horrible sitting in my apartment (it’s got an indoor trainer, it’s supposed to be there!), hooray. Also considering getting a Wii (and Wii Fit, for exercise, I swear!)

I also saw Quantum of Solace on Friday evening, following dinner with my friend Mike at Rock Bottom in King of Prussia. Good dinner, good movie. Not enough gadgets, but I liked it a lot more than Casino Royale, which I thought was a bit slow and sometimes lame for a Bond film (really, the first car he drives in a movie can’t be a Ford).

And now the weekend is coming to an end, I’m sitting here on the couch with the cats snuggled up. Heading to bed soon.

Drop me an email with your address if you’d like one: lyz@princessleia.com (Please put “Christmas card” in the subject so I can filter it appropriately).

Typical disclaimer: Nope, I’m not a Christian, and the cards will non-religious in theme even if they happen to use the word “Christmas” – not going to bother restricting myself to just the “Happy Holidays” ones.

I’m trying to think of what I’m going to do for Christmas. This will be my first Christmas alone, but I don’t want that to mean I’m not going to bother doing anything. Seriously considering even getting a small real tree, I love having a real Christmas tree in the house, and so does Caligula :)

jadoba was in town for the weekend so I dragged him along too.

..and he took one for the team.

I got to hold a live giant cockroach, which really wasn’t that horrifying, it was kind of cute. Even so, if I ever see anything like that anywhere in my living space I’m going to flip.

It wasn’t the most spectacular nature museum I’ve been to, but it wasn’t crowded (like when I went to the Smithsonian to see the dinosaurs) and their dinosaur exhibit was quite nice.

I also got to go to Reading Terminal Market for the first time, where I got some seriously nommy cookies and peaches.

So that makes two more Philadelphia touristy things down, how many more to go? I’ve still never been to Pat’s or Geno’s…