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Philadelphia Software Freedom Day!

Sunday, Sep 20th, 2009 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

Yesterday the Ubuntu Pennsylvania Team hosted a Software Freedom Day event.

We arrived at the Philadelphia Area Computer Society‘s meeting space in the community center of Giant grocery store in Willow Grove around 8:30AM and spent the morning in the lobby with several computers. We answered questions and chatted with folks coming through about everything from the LTSP systems we had set up, to documentation formats, to Ubuntu on netbooks.

Thanks to Andrew Keyes for this photo

One of the great things about hosting an event above a grocery store is easy access to all kinds of supplies – including helium for balloons! Crissi (our latest Kubuntu convert!) and I took a dozen Software Freedom Day balloons downstairs to be filled for the event.

Jim Fisher has been working hard on some LTSP deployments for an upcoming project, in the picture above our young tester Josh is playing a game. In the course of testing these LTSP servers we even found an LTSP+Open Office bug! Later in the day Jim also gave me a demo of partimage on his laptop, which we’re hoping to use on our projects with Free Geek Penn.

Thanks to Andrew Keyes for this photo

The presentation of the day was given by David Harding. He came to speak on MythTV and did an excellent job comparing Myth to other consumer products, reviewing the basics and discussing the options available to folks looking to build a MythTV server. During the presentation the question of controlling the MythTV front end via iPhones, turns out there is an app for both the iPhone and G1 as we demonstrate here!

Following the presentation we set up in the back of the room and were made available for questions about free software from everyone in the audience.

We ended up giving pamphlets about Ubuntu Pennsylvania itself (I printed these out on cardstock, worked very well!), papers with our upcoming MythTV Jam information, Ubuntu CDs, copies of The Open Disc and of course we all spoke to folks about using Ubuntu and other free software.

There were lots more photos of the event, ones I took are here and more from Andrew Keyes are located here.

Very fun event, thanks to everyone who made it a success!

Filed under: events, philadelphia, plug, ubuntu planet

Pink keyboard, beer and SFD

Friday, Sep 18th, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Tonight I was at Staples picking up some last-minute items for the Ubuntu Pennsylvania Software Freedom Day Event tomorrow morning. While I was there I was seduced by the OmniTech Flexible Keyboard, in pink. Teri Solow had pointed me in the direction of a similar one a couple months ago, but the price tag for something so fun and silly was prohibitive. This one at Staples was marked down to $10. Yeah!

OK, so it’s not a great keyboard, in fact I can’t quite think of when I’ll use it (it’s plugged into my pink mini9 here). But fun! Pink! Isn’t that enough?

I also snagged a few beers while I was out this evening. I was prompted by a craving for a pumpkin ale, and the place I went to only had the Hoppin’ Frog Frog’s Hollow Double Pumpkin Ale, which while nothing to write home about pumpkin-ale-wise, it sure has hit the spot. The other two were impulses, but I had to snag them when I saw them. The first is one Jan Claeys recommended I try, the Hanssens Oudbeitje – it’s a strawberry lambic, made in the old style of lambics so apparently it’s quite sour – no fruity sweet beer here, I’m looking forward to trying it soon. The last is a Cantillion (love!) I’ve never tried before, the Saint Lamvinus, made with Merlot grapes I’m also quite looking forward to cracking this one open.

Finally, in preparation for the event tomorrow I threw together a few things tonight – a poster, picture frame with Matt Rosewarne’s photos and a donation glass. The event is being dedicated to Matt and all proceeds from the donations are going to be donated to the EFF at the request of his family. I still need to print off some info about Ubuntu Pennsylvania to hand out to folks, but right now we’re looking pretty good!

Filed under: beer, events, philadelphia, pink, plug, ubuntu planet

ABE.pm and PHL.pm at Victory and the rest of my weekend

Monday, Sep 14th, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

On Saturday I headed down to Victory Brewing’s brewpub to meet up with the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton Perl Mongers (ABE.pm) and the Philadelphia Perl Mongers (phl.pm) for a joint meetup to check out the Victory tour and hang out. I boringly just had a Hop Devil, and only one at that since I had to drive home, I’m a serious lightweight these days!

I was a bit disappointed by their new revision of the tour, they’ve shortened it a lot, you don’t get to see the bottling line or the warehouse where they ship beer from anymore, bummer. But I hadn’t been to Victory since they renovated, so that was a big surprise. No longer is it a total warehouse-looking place inside, they’ve spruced it up and expanded the dining area considerably (I’d say it’s over twice the size now) and moved the bar. I do kinda miss the old place, but the new feel is cool too. Plus we got to see their spiffy new growler filler.


ABE and PHL Perl Mongers! Photo from Ricardo Signes, more of his photos here.

Sunday morning I went for a short bike ride. I have to say, I really do like Nessy’s new tires for riding on the road, they aren’t street-bike enough so that I crash upon encountering the slightest debris (of which there is plenty on the roads around here!) or having to go off the road for a bit but they aren’t so heavy and resistant as the giant mountain bike tires I had on it before. Made for a nice, easy ride.

The rest of the weekend was pretty mellow. I headed down to the King of Prussia mall Sunday afternoon to get a new pink case for my g1 (the other case cracked after I dropped it on the ground at the wedding a couple weeks ago, oops, at least the phone was fine). Snagged some delicious Indian food on Sunday evening before hanging out and hosting a Harry Potter marathon for myself while I dug into some more Exim documentation. I also spoke with my mother for a bit to check in, she was in a car accident last weekend where the car was totaled, but thankfully the only damage to her was a minor break in her left hand (probably from the airbag) and a couple sprained fingers on her right hand. She still needs to see a surgeon for the break, but is otherwise doing fine and only had to take one day off from work.

I’ve got a pretty quiet week this week, my only real plans are to see if I can drag a friend out for a dinner for his birthday. Next week is another story, starting with Software Freedom Day on Saturday. Then I decided to give another PLUG presentation this upcoming Monday at PLUG West, I’ll be doing my “Expanding Involvement in F/OSS” talk, which is pretty much the same one I gave earlier this month at PLUG Central but I dropped my s/Women/People gag this time. Then I’ve got PLUG into Hive on Thursday the 24th where we are working on a disk imaging server and some LTSP stuff. Then the next day, on Friday, I am wrapping up work early to hop on a plane for a long birthday weekend in San Francisco!

Now I think I’ll wander off to watch some more House and probably get to bed soon.

Filed under: events, life

Remembering Matthew Rosewarne

Friday, Sep 11th, 2009 by pleia2 | 5 Comments

Last night I received an email from his father telling me that Matthew Rosewarne had passed away. It was my responsibility to pass along the notice of his passing to the rest of PLUG, so with much difficulty, I did. His obituary is online here, reposting:

MATTHEW ROSEWARNE, August 23, 2009 of Philadelphia PA. Tragically lost after a prolonged illness. Remembered with abiding love by his parents Dr. Sidney Kahn and Clare Kahn Mozes; his sister, Ellie; stepfather, Sandy Mozes; step- brothers, Dan, Jon and Eric Mozes; extended Kahn, Rosewarne, Mozes and Harary families and many loving friends. Relatives and friends are invited to Services Tuesday, 1:30 P.M., at JOSEPH LEVINE AND SON, N. Broad St. above 71st Ave., Phila. Int. Montefiore Cem. The family will return to the residence of Dr. Sidney Kahn and request that contributions in his memory be made to Electronic Frontier Foundation, 454 Shotwell St., San Francisco CA 94110 (www.eff.org) or to the Cousteau Society, 710 Settlers Landing Rd., Hampton VA 23669 (www.cousteau.org)

There isn’t a post I could write that would do justice to his memory, so I won’t even try. Instead I’ll just reflect on memories and the contributions to F/OSS that I was directly aware of.

I met Matt a few years ago through PLUG. His first talk at PLUG was on February 7, 2007 on KDE – “Here Be Dragons: The Path to KDE4” (slides). In May of that same year he participated in a series of Lightning Talks, his being on Nethack – the original and recent incantations (slides). He was the first presenter that PLUG North officially had upon joining PLUG (prior to this we were MontcoLUG), speaking on Building Debian Packages with the Common Debian Build System (slides), which he also gave a later talk on at PLUG Central in October of that year. In 2008 and 2009 he participated in more Lightning Talks, this time focusing on KDE apps more with a short talk on Krita in June of 2008 and one on Semantik (formerly Kdissert) in January of 2009. In addition to presentations for PLUG, he also contributed the Keysigning with the GNU/Linux Terminal page for our website, which we use for our keysignings.

Even without all this work, he was a valuable member of PLUG for the excitement he brought to the group regarding Debian, KDE and Free Software in general. Outside of PLUG he was involved with Debian package maintaining as a member of the Debian KDE team (http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mrosewarne@inoutbox.com) and I could always count on him to get me up to speed with the latest Debian politics and policy decisions. I was never a KDE fan, and our playful sparring regarding his passion for it is something I will never forget. When KDE was mentioned at PLUG, we all thought of Matt.

On a personal level, Matt was a friend. In the winter of 2008 he joined a bunch of us for the Philly Linux LAN Party put together by Ubuntu Pennsylvania, an unforgettable event that Matt played a huge part of. In August of last year we carpooled together to the New Jersey LoCo August Linux LAN Party, following which he didn’t feel like going home, so we spent the night wandering around Philadelphia. That night he introduced me to Continental in Philadelphia and their crazy martini menu (my martini had Smarties in it, his was made with Tang!), and the wonders of late night food at Wawa. For my birthday last year he got me a pink elephant, so I could have the pleasure of seeing them when I’m sober too, hah!

The Ubuntu Pennsylvania Team has decided to dedicate our Software Freedom Day at PACS event to Matt, where will have a collection for a donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in his memory. We’ll also have a toast to his memory at the Philadelphia Perl Mongers trip to Victory Brewpub tomorrow.

Thank you for everything Matt, for being part of my life, for being part of the community. You are missed.

Filed under: life, plug, ubuntu planet

Nessy back from shop!

Tuesday, Sep 8th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I brought Nessy over to Tri-County Bicycles last week to get her gears looked at. The guy at the shop was able to realign everything (nothing broken, yay!) and get me sorted for pretty cheap. So I went ahead and got the hybrid tires he had shown me, and luckily was able to use the same tubes as from my regular mountain bike tires. I also went ahead and put the pink streamers I received as a gift (thank you!) on:

Yes, I realize I am an embarrassment to myself and everyone who knows me.

Oh, and I was informed last week that I needed a headshot for the conference profile. Eek. After much heartache and digital camera finagling, I got a nice shot. But I think MJ has successfully convinced me to get one professionally done for the next conference.

Filed under: life, pink

Ubuntu US and Pennsylvania updates

Monday, Sep 7th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Ubuntu US Teams

On August 26th the USTeams Project had a meeting:

Huge thanks to everyone who attended! There were a couple of major topics that came up:

Visibility of the team itself, how do State teams know they can come to us for help?

Some thoughts that were floated including getting ourselves listed on the Solar System of Planet Ubuntu, blogging more about the team (oh, hi!) and making direct contact with some of the teams out there (this is something one of our former board members had begun to do)

Thoughts for the upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam, as a mentoring project, how do we help increase the number of US teams participating?

We’ve found that frequent issue with the quieter teams in the US is when you’re not near a major metropolitan area, you can feel isolated and “the only Ubuntu user in the area!” so we have suggested a participating element of Ubuntu Global Jam that you can do from home, and join #ubuntu-us and chat with us, and help your team: US Teams Wiki Doc “Day” 2009! During the Ubuntu Global Jam weekend we’re encouraging teams to fix up their wikis, inviting them to review and offer suggestions on the USTeams wiki, and do reviews of the LoCoTeams wikis in general.

For folks who don’t wish to use an IRC client, I’ve also set up a freenode chat gateway on our website so you can join the #ubuntu-us chat easily via your web browser:

http://ubuntu-us.org/chat

Along with the wiki page describing the event, I published a new article on Ubuntu-US.org. Amber Graner was also kind enough to contribute an article:

Thanks Amber! We’re always looking for new ideas and submissions for articles on the site, so please email me if you have any suggestions!

Our next team meeting is scheduled for this Wednesday in #ubuntu-us: September 9th 2009 @ 10pm EDT, 9pm CDT, 8pm MDT, 7pm PDT

Ubuntu Pennsylvania

The Ubuntu Pennsylvania team is ROCKING! Events are scheduled just about every other weekend for the next few weeks, with ongoing projects like the collaboration with FreeGeekPenn starting to come together, and an LTSP project that Jim Fisher is leading up as a joint venture with the PLUG Into Hive76 crew.ubuntupennsylvania.org

I have to say that aside from having an awesome core team of motivated folks, getting into contact with other groups in the area has been the most beneficial thing to the Pennsylvania Team. We work with our local LUGs, hackerspaces, tech-related non-profits, conferences and local tech groups who don’t have for specific angle but will welcome Ubuntu demos and presentations. Of the upcoming events we’re having, only the Global Jam event is one we’re doing ourselves, and the fellow from the company hosting it one I met through the local LUG – and I asked him if the space was available during a LUG meeting.

So, upcoming events!

September 19: Software Freedom Day

We’ll be out at the Philadelphia Area Computer Society celebrating Software Freedom! The main event of the day is a MythTV presentation by David A. Harding. The rest of the team will be doing demos of Ubuntu and other Free Software, giving out Ubuntu swag and CDs loaded up with free software for Windows.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/PhillySFD2009

September 25: PLUG into Hive76 imaging server training

Jim Fisher and I will be attending the next PLUG into Hive76 meeting to collaborate on running an imaging server. Well, actually, Jim will be graciously imparting his knowledge to me so I can go forth and share it with Free Geek Penn! Awesome example of LUGs working with hackerspaces working with LoCo teams working with non-profits!

October 3: MythJam

As a follow-up to our Software Freedom Day event on September 19th we’ll be hosting a “MythJam” where we bring in our Myth experts to help people build their Myth systems. We’re doing this event as part of the Ubuntu Global Jam, so we’ll also be participating in Bug Squashing and the US Teams Wiki Doc “Day”

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/PhillyMythJam2009

October 17: CPOSC

The Harrisburg regional team is working with some folks making the trek out from Philadelphia to populate at able at the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference. Bret Fledderjohn ordered a Conference Pack and organized raising the money needed for a table. Thanks to donations from team members, we were quickly able to raise it.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/CPOSC2009

Should be a fun month :)

Filed under: computers, events, philadelphia, plug, ubuntu planet

PLUG into Hive76, my PLUG Central talk and OpenHatch.org

Saturday, Sep 5th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Thursday the 27th we hosted the first real PLUG into Hive76 meeting! We had 15 people show up from the groups involved (Hive76, PLUG, Linux Meetup) and brainstorming plans went well. Dan posted a little info about the meetup on the Hive76 blog: PLUG Into Hive76 == Success!

Plus, Jim Fisher brought OREO CAKE!

We now have a formal wiki page up for the project, which we’ll be using to post project ideas: http://wiki.hive76.org/PLUG_Into_Hive76 and we’ll probably be using launchpad for the core project tracking itself.

We were also able to check out their new makerbot under construction:

The makerbot (3D-P0) is pretty cool, they uploaded videos of it in action this past weekend: 3dPO Lives!

I committed to my PLUG Central talk on Expanding Involvement of Women in F/OSS prior to pulling back from the debate and discussion on the issue, but I think the perspective I gained by being out of the trenches these past few weeks helped me craft a message with more impact. I quickly realized that my talk couldn’t specifically focus on women because that wasn’t actually my message. My core message was that F/OSS can be critical, intimidating, and downright mean sometimes, this is a culture that puts off a lot of people who could potentially be contributing, the fewer people in general contributing, the fewer women you’ll see, so work to increase the pool you draw from by being nice to each other! This is a culture I’ve seen be reversed in LinuxChix and often Ubuntu, which is where I draw my “positive solutions” from. So I kept the original name of my talk… for the first few slides, and then punked the audience by introducing a new title slide on slide 4:

My full set of sides are here. There are other solutions to the lack of Women in F/OSS problem, but focusing on involvement in general is where I currently feel my time is best spent. Which reminds me, I still need reviewers for my CPOSC talk on Contributing to Open Source, so please let me know if you’re interested! Other than that, my talk went pretty well, even if I’m still not quite a world class public speaker, this is a far cry from the near paralyzing shyness and anxiety I used to have.

I was also pleased to have Asheesh Laroia in the audience, a new Debian Developer (congrats Asheesh!) and more relevant to my talk, he’s the lead engineer of OpenHatch.org, a new open source involvement search engine. From their About page:

Our core product is an open source software involvement engine. For developers, we provide tools for them to demonstrate and grow their experience and expertise in the open source community. For businesses, we connect them with the code gurus who helped write the software they use to fix their problems or recruit ideal job candidates.

Our vision is to make the open source community better connected, more productive, and well rewarded for its expertise. By gathering the most brilliant, passionate minds in software development in one place and helping them collaborate with one another for love and for pay, OpenHatch will facilitate cross-pollination between open source projects and accelerate open source software development and adoption.

He did a demo of the searching ability to link up programmers to open bugs related to programming languages they are familiar with (it’s seems their major index at the moment is Launchpad bugs, but they also index some other bug trackers). Cool project, I’ll be mentioning it during my CPOSC talk.

Filed under: events, philadelphia, plug, ubuntu planet

Wedding, sick, Nessy, Xen server

Friday, Sep 4th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The wedding I attended on Saturday for Jonathan and Crissi was very nice (photos by Andrew Keyes):

There was nommy cake!

And I told #plug folks once the wedding was done (I met Jonathan through PLUG):

Unfortunately, after arriving home after the wedding I was feeling a bit tired, later in the evening I started feeling achy. By Sunday it was a cold, Monday I saw my doctor because I was concerned about a cold with the ongoing sinus issues and the never-ending cough. Ended up being sick for much of the week, even considered finding someone to fill in for my PLUG talk on Wednesday, but I managed to load up on DayQuil and make it through alright. I’ll blog about that soon, and post slides. I started feeling better late Thursday, and today aside from a few side-effects from an anti-biotic (I’ll need to be very gentle on my stomach this coming week) I’m on I’m mostly recovered from the cold.

This afternoon I took my bike, Nessy, down to Tri-County Bicycles for some work on the gears. The guy at the shop was super-friendly and helpful, they will look at the gears over the weekend and reset them. Assuming I don’t need anything replaced, I’m also going to pick up a couple cheap hybrid tires that I can use on both my trainer and on roads – plus won’t be bad for the infrequent dirt trail biking I do these days, no more need to swap out tires when I go from trainer to outdoor riding!

I also recently snagged a small NVidia 8400 GS PCI card for my Xen server. Unfortunately I didn’t do my research first, it was a cheap impulse buy. After hours of struggling with this silly GeForce, I was still having overscan problems (they yanked overscan fiddling support from the linux driver after the 7xxx series, overscanning isn’t too bad so I’ll live with it), video tearing (annoying, I need to try harder to fix this) and I learned that the proprietary nvidia driver doesn’t play nicely with Xen kernels – so I have to boot into a non-xen kernel to watch movies on my TV. I am not impressed, should have gone with a cheap ATI. Still, even with these issues it’s a much better connected-to-tv system than my old Inspiron 7500 laptop, which served me well but really was too slow to be a reasonable player. I’m also considering tossing Nagios3 on the Xen server, now that it’s always turned on either as my Xen testbed server or as my media PC I figure it’s a reasonable machine to run my currently non-existent monitoring infrastructure from.

And now, bedtime!

Filed under: computers, events, health, life

Movies, friends, attending wedding soon

Saturday, Aug 29th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’m glad I started keeping a calendar last year, I don’t think I’d be able to live without one now. My task list is still an issue though, am currently trying out a few solutions to this, Goog Calendar now has tasks built into it, hmm.

Last week I had a lovely dinner with Crissi, followed by seeing Julie & Julia. Not my typical movie, but I think part of me enjoyed it that much more because it wasn’t. It was a nice evening out, I got to hear about the madness that ensues a week before a wedding (she’s getting married today, I’m leaving for it soon, this will be the first wedding I’m attending since the divorce) and just kick back with a couple of drinks and a new friend. I really should do this more.

This past weekend my boyfriend was in town. It was a bit of a whirlwind of a trip, as his trips out here tend to be. Meeting up with friends, family, and getting things done. We did manage to spend a nice chunk of quality time together though, a couple of nice dinners alone, including one over at Melting Pot, yum! We also were able to see District 9, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but we saw it in the theater down the street from me, which is a bit old and they didn’t fully dim the lights during the movie (maybe this is a Carmike Cinemas thing? The last time I went to a Carmike my experience was similar). Our next visit is in September, over my birthday weekend. I’ll be flying out to SFO on the 25th and returning to PHL early on the morning of the 30th. I have to admit I’m looking forward to it like nothing else.

Wednesday evening was spent shopping and catching up on a lot of things that I let pile up over the weekend. Thursday evening was spent at the first real PLUG into Hive76 meeting, which I’ll expand upon in another post (with photos! there was cake!). And last night I had Michael over for a bit, he brought some delicious Indian food and we chatted as he played with the cats for a bit and we watched some Metalocalypse.

And in the midst of all this stuff were various Ubuntu meetings on IRC and event planning to do. After the wedding today I’ll probably be diving into a lot of that, and tomorrow will be set aside for the same. I also have my PLUG presentation on Wednesday to prepare for, it’s mostly written, just need some practice and review.

Now, off to get pretty for the wedding! …I’ll be wearing a nice dress, around people I met through PLUG. Oh my! Clashing of worlds!

Filed under: life

Road Trip to New Orleans!

Tuesday, Aug 18th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

The 5 minute conversation between Brent Saner and I last Monday went like this:

< bts3685> pleia2: come to new orleans with me on saturday!
< pleia2> bts3685: too hot :(
< bts3685> my car has a/c!
< pleia2> bts3685: you’re driving down?
< bts3685> yes
< pleia2> haha, wow
< bts3685> and i can give you a plane ticket back
< bts3685> but i’m moving, remember?
< pleia2> cool
< pleia2> yeah
< bts3685> i need SOMETHING to pull the trailer, and i don’t think the airlines would let me hook it up to a jet
< pleia2> that would be lulzy
< bts3685> yeah it would
< bts3685> so? roadtrip? whaddya say?
< bts3685> IF YOU COME I CAN SHOW YOU THE TRANSVESTITES ON BOURBON ST!
< pleia2> cool
< pleia2> I’d need to figure out a way to get home from PHL
< pleia2> when I fly back, Sunday night?
< bts3685> whenever you want
< pleia2> and driving down all in one shot on Saturday?
< bts3685> yes but it’ll be fun
< pleia2> hehe
< pleia2> well, I have never been to NOLA before
< bts3685> \o/
< pleia2> ok, sounds fun :)

And the rest was history! I’ve been taking advantage of every opportunity to travel this year, and a free weekend trip to New Orleans is perfect. Oh, and interesting side note, a road trip together is sure far from our first interaction back in 2007. Hahaha!

Brent picked me up at 8AM on Saturday morning and we began the drive down. We took 81 so it was pretty much the same trip I took earlier this year to the Southeast Linuxfest. Taking the diagonal route through Virginia was the longest leg of the trip, toward the end there was plenty of “please Virginia, let me out!”

Once out of VA we trekked through Tennessee, where we stopped for gas at this awesome travel plaza:

You can see Brent’s car hooked up to the trailer there too, but there is a better picture here. The poor little v4 Saturn held up impressively well during the trip though, even if gathering speed and climbing hills was sometimes a challenge, and the gas mileage was terrible. No breakdowns! Not even any scares! The weather was beautiful too, while Philadelphia was steeped in 90+ degree weather, the south was only in the 80s, with the breeze much of the trip was comfortable with just the windows rolled down a bit.

Around midnight Brent needed some sleep and I took the wheel for the first time during the trip. My leg of the trip took us through the northwest corner of Georgia (the first time I’d been to the state since I left as a baby! Over 25 years!) and through much of the Alabama leg of the trip. Most notable about my drive? Lack of light pollution! While driving I could look up in the sky and see so many stars! In spite of growing up in an area with very little light pollution, these past few years it’s been far too infrequent that I’m in such places. As much as I love cities and see myself living near (or in!) them for the foreseeable future, I do miss the stars.

Brent took over again after about 4 hours when we needed gas and I proclaimed exhaustion. Luckily that seems to have been plenty of time for him to sleep, as he was wide awake for the rest of the drive into NOLA and I was able to get a couple hours of sleep.

He woke me up as we approached NOLA. There were some crazy clouds (ok, not so much crazy as – so many different kinds at once!):

That was taken just a few miles before getting on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. Wow. I love bridges. And this one? Just, wow! It’s huge! And apparently the second largest in the world. Very cool. Oh, and crazy-wild clouds cause random downpours. Most of the sky was blue, but several times during the day a few of the clouds decided to rain, what a place.

Once over the bridge we navigated to the Tremé neighborhood where Brent’s new home is! He’s living with a few others at their newly purchased House of the Rising Son, I took a lousy sun-mangled photo of it (and Brent standing outside it):

So we got there around 8AM, which means we’d been on the road a good 24 hours. Google Maps says the trip should take less than 20, but when you figure in a trailer that you’re not supposed to go over 55MPH with? Yeah, that added a few hours.

Shortly after arriving his house mates showed up and we unloaded the trailer, chilled out for a bit and then ventured down to the French Quarter. The plan was to hit Cafe du Monde for some beignets, but since it was a beautiful Sunday morning the place was packed. I am now a bit disappointed that I missed out on it, but at the time I was so tired I didn’t care much where I got breakfast. Instead we ended up at EnVie espresso bar & cafe, where I got a yummy eggs, bacon, buttermilk biscuit and homefries breakfast (and didn’t come close to finishing it!).

From there we did a little more wandering around the French Quarter and then made plans for my departure. So soon? Alas! My flight was at 3:20PM. So we dropped off the trailer and headed up to the airport. I will say now that flying out of the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY) was a wonderful experience. I was through security in just a couple minutes (no line!), everyone was friendly and courteous and they had free wifi! I had a layover in Fort Lauderdale and was back in Philly by 9:20 (Southwest had us there a full 30 minutes early, well done). My friend Mike from NJ was nice enough to pick me up from the airport and swing by Wawa on the way back to my apartment so I could get some food before crashing into bed. Thanks Mike!

This road trip and the exhaustion that followed on Sunday does mean I got almost no project stuff done this weekend, and very few emails replied to. I’m hoping to get through much of my backlog this week, but I’m going out with a friend to see a movie Tuesday night and then MJ is visiting for a long weekend (squee!), so some stuff might have to wait until next week.

Filed under: travel
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