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The rest of my stay in Florida

Since I wasn’t flying out until Thursday evening, I had a few days to spend with family, which was nice.

My mother flew back to Maine Wednesday morning, and that same day my some of my relatives took my grandfather out looking at dogs. He had decided that he’d start looking, and stopped at a few places to day before, but didn’t want to commit to anything and wanted his selection to be based on a real connection between him and his new companion. Surprisingly, he found the kind of bond he was looking for at a small local pet shop, a 5 month old Shitzu Maltese mix that he named Honey.

She’s one of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever met, dare I say so cuddly she’s almost like a kitten :) The night she came home she was joined by three “nephew” dogs in the family, with whom she was remarkably tolerant with.

The last morning I was there, before we drove out to Orlando, my Aunt Elaine took me out to the beach. Unfortunately it was a bit cloudy, but I missed the ocean (as usual) and had to see it before I flew home.

The flight home was relatively uneventful, but we did have to wait a bit around Philadelphia before we could land (eastern airports were a bit of a mess that day due to a storm). Stephen was kind enough to pick me up and take me out for some much needed dinner once my flight came in around 9:30 :)

Now that I’m back I’ve settling back into the work routine. I had intended to get a Christmas tree, but by the time I got home it hardly seemed worth it. Next year I better not have an excuse, I love Christmas trees and this is my second year without one.

Grandma’s Obituary and Service

In case this goes away at some point, my Grandma’s obituary was published by Florida Today:

Carol Flynn:

CAROL FLYNN – PALM BAY – Carol Ann Flynn, 71, passed away Thursday, December 4, 2008 in Palm Bay. She will be sadly missed by her husband, Donald E. Flynn; loving children, Donald W. (Tayna) Flynn of Palm Bay, Daniel (Sharon) Flynn of Ft. Lee, VA, Pamela (Keith) Schlarf of Arizona, Lori Flynn of Maine, Elaine Flynn of Palm Bay and Mary Ellen (Joseph) Mathe of Orlando; 18 grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Cremation Arrangements by Fountainhead Memorial Funeral Home, Palm Bay.

The service took place on Monday afternoon at a beautiful little Catholic church in the area, just as my grandma wanted. I’m impressed at how quickly things came together, everything was done very well. After the service, the family (the thirteen of us who attended) all headed down to Meg O’Malley’s in downtown Melbourne, one of my grandma’s favorite pub+eatery places. We ordered a table full of appetizers and drinks all around to celebrate her life. My Aunt Mary Ellen and I had martinis, grandma’s favorite drink.

I’m staying with my Aunt Elaine and cousin Chet. I’ve lived with them a couple times over the years, and it’s been far too long since we’ve spent any time together. My mother stayed here as well, just flew back to Maine early this morning. I’ll be flying out tomorrow evening, which is a bit late – but when I booked my flight I wasn’t positive about timing. No complaints from me though, this is a sad time and I’m making the best of the time I’m spending with a loving family who is generous with their hugs. Given everything else I’ve gone through this year I really needed this, knowing people care and are thinking of you is one thing, but touching and getting spoken words of sympathy and love is something very different, and precisely what I needed.

On top of all this, my employer has been fantastic. I really couldn’t have asked for more support, I’ve checked in pretty regularly but my boss hasn’t needed me very much. I’ll be returning to work as soon as I wake up on Friday morning :)

It’s been a tough week, but we’re all doing alright.

Grandma Flynn

My mother’s mother, my Grandma Flynn, passed away this evening.

It was somewhat unexpected. She’s had emphysema for several years, but recently it began to catch up with her and she deteriorated very quickly. Last night she was brought to the hospital and she passed away this evening. I received a call from my mother this evening telling me what was going on, shortly before I called my grandfather and learned that she had passed.

I’m flying to Florida (into Orlando, will be picked up and head to Melbourne) on Saturday. I’ve already worked out with my boss to work as I can from Florida Mon-Thurs on my laptop as needed.

You will be missed dearly, Grandma.

Upcoming Ubuntu Classroom Meeting

Ubuntu Classroom

#ubuntu-classroom has been pretty quiet since Ubuntu Open Week earlier this month, so we’ve gone ahead and made plans for a team meeting next week, details have been posted to the fridge and I sent out an announcement this evening:

While we’re interested in getting more folks to handle the administrative tasks on the project, we’re primarily focusing this meeting on two points:

The latter has resulted from several conversations I’ve been having over the past few weeks with PrivateVoid who has poured hours of work into the Education Focus Group. Discussions started out primarily being about hosting their IRC sessions in #ubuntu-classroom, but have since developed into a lot of fantastic ideas he’s developing for the EFG that may be adopted or jointly developed with Classroom.

So far it’s shaping up to be a very productive meeting. Hope to see you there!

Low-key Thanksgiving

I decided to hang in this Thanksgiving. I don’t have any local family, but wasn’t short of invitations from friends to spend the holiday with them and theirs. I can’t thank these friends enough for the invitations, in spite of declining them all, it means a lot to know I have friends who care enough to make that kind of offer.

But spending Thanksgiving at my apartment didn’t mean I wasn’t going to have turkey! Boston Market had an all Thanksgiving menu today, and for $10 I was able to snag a very satisfying dinner, including a slice of pumpkin pie that I haven’t eaten yet. Mmmm pumpkin pie.

Yum! And I got to use the new table and chairs I bought from Ikea earlier this week.

Now just chilling on the couch with my kitties curled up next to me. Hopefully next year I’ll be able to spend this holiday with family, perhaps driving up to Rochester or New Hampshire, but this year I’m thankful for having a couple days off from work and the satisfaction of having everything I need for a warm comfortable holiday. Might start putting up Christmas decorations this weekend.

Name Change: Bevilacqua to Krumbach

Since the final divorce papers were signed on November 4th, I’ve decided to start changing my name back to my maiden name everywhere. It’ll take forever, so I might as well start now.

The legal change will go through as soon as I receive the final paperwork and manage to drag myself to the social security office, then the real fun changes start (banks, creditors, bills…).

So you’ll now be seeing me around the community as Elizabeth Krumbach rather than Elizabeth Bevilacqua.

I haz stuff out now

This week the power supply on my giant, server class, desktop died. It was a 680W supply, the board requires at least 650W, so it wasn’t going to be cheap to replace. Alas, after about 2 hours of testing I confirmed it was the power supply and had to hit MicroCenter Friday morning. Came home with a 950W supply – ok, maybe that’s over doing it, but it was on sale! And the sale made it be just as cheap as any of the decent 650-850W supplies on the shelf.. However, in the course of diagnosing the problem I realized one of my UPSs was reporting “Building Wiring Fault” and skipped out to Lowe’s to pick up an outlet tester. With it I discovered that only about half of the outlets in my apartment are grounded, including one of the ones I had computers plugged into. Sigh. This weekend I had to spend some time shuffling around my machines on healthy power outlets. I also dragged out my 1U to use for testing again, my desk is full of computers, and in the midst of this shuffling my living room looked like a computer warehouse exploded.

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.

Debian Installation Over SSH (Lenny RC1)

The Debian Installer lenny release candidate 1 was released on November 12th, which inspired me to check it out and give the installation over ssh a try. Installation over ssh has been supported since the Etch installer, but I embarrassingly have to admit that I didn’t know about it until just recently, and it was just last month that I tried it out for the first time. So this post is more of a “Look, this thing exists and is neat and easy!” than a formal how-to for something tricky.

The screenshots and CD I burned were from Lenny (Testing) which I downloaded here this morning, but this is also supported in Debian Etch in a similar way.

Boot from the CD and in the Installer boot menu select “Advanced options >”

Then select “Expert install”

The installer will load up and you will be presented with the Debian installer main menu.

Since the default language and keyboard are fine to get me going (I can reconfigure them later once I get this going over ssh), I skipped these and went straight for “Detect and mount CD-ROM”. When it asked me if I wanted to Start PC card services I selected “No” since I’m not using any PCMCIA cards.

The next option on the menu is “Load installer components from CD”, which you want to select. Browse the list, but for my basic needs the only thing I needed to load up was “network-console: Continue installation remotely using SSH”

Now you’ll need to get networking going. Select “Detect network hardware” and then “Configure the network”.

Next you want to “Continue installation remotely using SSH”

This will generate SSH host keys and have you set a remote installation password. Once it has these set up you will be presented with a screen giving you an installer@ipaddress location for the install and an SSH fingerprint. Use these to ssh into the installer!

Finally – log in from your remote PC and complete the installation.

I went back and configured keyboard to confirm it was correct and languages so I could add a couple of locales, so don’t forget to do this if you need to change something about your configuration.

Christmas Cards!

Last year was very, very busy so I never got around to it, but this year I’d like to send out Christmas cards again.

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 :)

Philadelphia Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Release Party! And how we almost got arrested

On Saturday the 1st the Philadelphia team of the Ubuntu Pennsylvania LoCo held our release party. Just like last year, we decided to celebrate the release with a Halloween influenced costume party at Drake Tavern in Jenkintown.

Drake Tavern is quite the hospitable place for our events, it’s a pretty family-friendly environment (Zoe was our youngest participant last year) and they gave us plenty of space and were tolerant of us spending a few hours there. We had several new folks show up (including one who trekked out from Pittsburgh!) and a few of us dressed up… I couldn’t resist a Leia costume, ssweeny as Indiana Jones, ChinnoDog as an executioner and jedijf, the primary organizer of the party, as a satanic priest.

More photos here: UbuntuPennsylvania.org Gallery: Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Release Party

As a whole, the party was a blast, but a very unexpected event very early on almost made it end very quickly…

Paraphrased from jedijf in IRC, here is what happened:

So a 14 year old kid who had frequented our IRC channel shows up with his friend and mom, Randy and I are the only ones there, standing outside on their deck above the Ubuntu banner so people know where to come. I am in costume as a priest with the pentagon chain, Ubuntu satanic edition! Randy is of course with his teddy bear. So the mom asks “When is everyone supposed to get here?” We tell her “around 3” but it’s now 3:20 ish and no one else is there. Some 20-somethings leave the bar to smoke and she decides this is not the right place for her son, says so and leaves with her son and his friend. I say “No problem,” I don’t want the kid to feel uncomfortable.

10 minutes later 2 Jenkintown police cars show up. They ask me what am I doing and why am I dressed like that. I say “It’s Halloween and we’re having a party” and the police ask for some ID. I point out the banner, explain that we we have reservations, but end up going to get ID and some CDs. The police officer checks Randy’s ID and tells him someone called in a complaint that we were trying to lure young boys. InHisName (another regular of the IRC channel) comes up with his son and the police take his son aside and talk to him. In the end I show the officer my ID and offer him CDs to take back to the station, he only accepted one.

Wow! I absolutely respect this mother’s decision to remove her son from a situation she was uncomfortable with, but taking the additional step of calling the police really says a lot about the culture of fear here in the United States. It was a bit upsetting. We’d rather not restrict attendance of our events based on age (and I’m positive the Ubuntu Youth folks wouldn’t be pleased with this either!), and probably won’t. However we are now more aware of what kinds of things can happen and it has gotten me to think what we can do to prevent this kind of situation in the future.