There was a bit of a firestorm over at LinuxChix this week. It boiled down to some decisions that were made by the new coordinator not being popular, many long-time members and volunteers in the group stood up and objected and the whole thing got out of hand. Of course this took hundreds of emails burying us for days. All waiting and hoping it would end peacefully and the group would arise intact. It was a tough time, mostly due to the parties involved being so respected and popular within the community. It certainly was tough for me, I’ve been a member since 2002 and have been running the Philadelphia chapter since 2003. There were a few hours there where I really was quite worried and let myself wonder what I’d do without LinuxChix.

This week has made me stop and realize what a vital part of my involvement with LinuxChix has been for my involvement with Linux. The contacts I’ve made through PhillyChix have been vital to my career, the amazing and brilliant women I’ve met and had a chance to view as role models has been transformational to my whole outlook of the field. The friends I’ve made through it have made it so sometimes I am able to almost forget that women are a minority in Linux. My sphere of friends has changed from being almost entirely male to include just as many women who share my interests and wouldn’t hesitate to take me up on a conversation about Linux and beer. It’s so good not to feel alone, and like such an oddball all the time.

And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think I would have kept up with involvement in the Linux world without LinuxChix. I might have still used Linux, but it certainly wouldn’t have been my career, and I wouldn’t be involved with F/OSS at all. So I don’t care what people who don’t “get” women in IT groups say, groups like LinuxChix can be vital to the growth of a woman looking to advance herself in the field. I’m living proof. I could point you to others who would say the same.

The LinuxChix thing has settled down quite a bit now. The coordinator has stepped down (very gracefully, and she will remain involved with the community – yay!) and talks have started about a new coordinator (or group of coordinators). Damage has been done by this, LinuxChix has lost some volunteers and I fear what some of the people new to the group must think (indeed, some have actually voiced their opinions, and they haven’t been favorable). But I have no doubt that the group will recover from this and learn from mistakes of the past, LinuxChix is an intelligent group of women. Good thing too, LinuxChix remains very important to me. In the end I’m going to just file this whole thing under “growing pains” – the way things were decided in the past isn’t working so well in a group of over 1000 members world-wide (no one knows how many members there actually are, could be several thousand women who call themselves LinuxChix). The volunteers are now hard at work forumlating a plan to move forward.

And while I’m on the subject of LinuxChix, I got around to posting about the Girls Inc Event yesterday morning before work (and emailed mailing lists this morning), enjoy: Girls Inc Computer Installation/Introduction Event

I should have gone to the Bear Creek Beer Festival on Sunday, Michael crashed in bed for most of the day after coming home from Starscape but I could have caught a ride! Our friends who went said they had a great time and told us stories of the fantastic beers brought from Crabby Larry’s (a place that got a new brewer, who happens to be a guy from our local homebrew shop and a great brewer) and other breweries. Next year I’m SO THERE!

The peche lambic I mentioned enjoying Saturday night was the St Louis Premium Peche made by Brouwerij Van Honsebrouck in Ingelmunster, Belgium. It’s no Lindemans, but it’ll do when I’m craving a peach lambic and there is no Lindemans to be found.

So I didn’t go to the beerfest and I found myself saturated with boredom on Sunday afternoon. After the installfest and other computer work for days I was not too keen on the idea of another afternoon inside with my cats and computers. Plus it was a bit warm and if I stayed home I’d have to really hide in my office in the air conditioning. I ended up heading down to King of Prussia and doing some much needed shopping. I’ve had a few giftcards in my wallet for nearly a year because of how infrequently I go to the mall. I was able to pick up some clothes, finally grabbed Brain Age for my DS (yay!), got the watch band on a watch my mother gave me a few years ago replaced, and a few other things. It was a productive day, and not as horrible as shopping usually is.

Monday evening we decided to head out to Sly Fox – mostly because all we had to eat in the house was pasta. It was shaping up to be just another night at the Sly Fox when our friendly waiter accidentally spilled a whole glass of soda on Michael’s lap right after delivering our food. Eeek! It pretty much ruined the evening, Michael was so soaked that he needed to leave immediately to get home and change. They packed up our dinner and the manager wrote off the tab (w00t – free dinner! And free beer!). Tuesday evening we had a much better dinner down at the sushi place in Collegeville, our second visit and still superb.

This week is flying by, I went out to get the mail yesterday afternoon and realized that it was Thursday already (how did that happen? eek!). We had my former co-worker Jane over for dinner Wednesday night and to introduce her to the cats. She offered a while back to watch them when we go on vacation, and although we’re only leaving for 3 days we figured since it’s so soon since Simcoe’s surgery that we should have someone come check on them. So we worked it out for Simcoe to get her sutures out Thursday afternoon, and we’ll be leaving home about 4 hours after that to head to Artemis, PA. Jane will stop by on Saturday to feed and check on them.

Simcoe is doing better. She’s been pretty sluggish for the past week, and that did concern me, some of what I read said that they’re usually up and running around like nothing happened within a few days. But I looked into it a bit more and it is generally stated that it can take over a week for a female to get back close to normal and longer for full recovery. I was also worried about the incision site, I noticed it was swollen and the swelling was actually firm when I touched it! Then I found this:

“Later in the recovery period, it is not unusual to notice swelling at the incision site. Cats often react this way to internal sutures and this kind of swelling is common and resolves spontaneously. Such swellings are firm and there is no fluid drainage or bleeding from the incision. They generally resolve in 3-4 weeks.” – Feline Spay FAQ, VeterinaryPartner.com

Phew! There hasn’t been any problem with the incision itself, so she should be fine. In fact, after I got finished doing all this worrying after work Wednesday night she reacted all evening by deciding to be quite active, we had to put her back in her room for the night because we were slightly worried she’d be too active and run around the house like a crazy animal :) I’m glad to see her on the mend.

Thursday evening we went to the Malvern Sweat Lodge. I hadn’t been there in far too long. It was a good evening.

Today I got up shortly before 7, showered, dressed, got my directions and headed down to Cheltenham to catch my ride down to a Girls Inc+Ubuntu PA+PhillyChix+some Philly computer society I forgot the name of. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange donated 10 PCs (1.7ghz – decent machines!) to Girls Inc to give out to girls and it was arranged to get them installed as a dual boot with Ubuntu and Windows. Kevin Valentine did pretty much all the prep work for our group, which was awesome. We arrived at Girls Inc around 10AM and had to wait around a bit for the machines to show up. Kevin had previously imaged most of them, but there were four left to do, so Kevin and I got to work on that while the girls were show around Windows. When the imaging was almost complete they asked me to give the group (about 20 people) a blurb about Ubuntu and tell the girls who I was (Ubuntu Member, a woman working with Linux as a career). It was impromptu and I hope I didn’t speak to quickly or sound dumb, I accepted because I’m trying to get over being so nervous about such things but I still am not the best at it.

Girls Inc sprung for lunch (how great of them!) and we showed a few of the girls around Ubuntu. There were a few snags, but considering the time and resources restraints placed on us I think the event went well. Now pictures! I forgot my camera at home so theses are all ones I swiped from ‘s gallery, the photos were taken by him and his girlfriend Christina (yes, she uses linux too, my grand scheme is to teach her Debian and get her to do some linux work at the company I work for). Thanks Joe and Christina!

Some of the organizers working on Windows.

Me working with one of the girls on Ubuntu – just booting up. Alex too!

One of the girls and her mother leaving with their new computer.

Christina taking notes about Windows licenses (how did we get stuck with this job? We’re the Linux people who don’t have to worry about such things!)

One of the other volunteers helping some of the girls with Windows

Things wrapped up around 2:30 and I was home by 5.

And at 5 there was an Ubuntu Women meeting in IRC. I was late for it (had to get settled in once I arrived at home…). I did make it though and the meeting went well. Hopefully I’ll have notes up tomorrow. I was going to do it tonight but it’s getting late and I’m tired.

Shortly after I got back home Michael left for the 2007 Starscape Festival in Baltimore. I totally would have gone if the Girls Inc thing wasn’t today, but from the way I’m feeling now at 11PM I’m sure I would have just been a drag. In light of me being busy today and Michael going to this pretty much all-night festival we decided to pass on the Bear Creek Beerfest tomorrow. We have enough going on in the next few weeks, and I haven’t really been in the mood for beer lately. Aside from that lambic I picked up to enjoy late this evening with an MST episode…

After wrapping things up with the Ubuntu Women I headed down to the YMCA in Spring Valley. I haven’t been getting to LA Fitness in the mornings, it’s just too far, so I’m getting all out of shape, yuck. So I signed up at the YMCA tonight, maybe I’ll start going tomorrow, I could really use a dip in the pool. After the Y I headed over the pet store and picked up some cat food and a few more tetras for the tank. I got a couple Buenos Aires Tetras and three Serpae Tetras – yay!

And then I came home and did some work to get my new laptop-as-debian-development-machine further set up. I think the last thing I need to do is get the svn logged in, but after throwing a few fixes at webcalendar this evening I’m just too tired to do any more.

Simcoe is doing well, Caligula finally stopped being scared of her, now we just have to keep an eye on them when they’re together so he doesn’t bother her sutures. The last remaining problem is the removal of sutures situation – they’re supposed to be removed 16 days after surgery, but we’re supposed to be at Gaian Mind in 16 days. I’ll be calling the vet next week to see if we can remove them in 14 days instead if there are no complications. I really didn’t expect over 2 weeks of recovery from the spay :\

Simcoe is home from the vet, we were able to pick her up in the evening after no complications from the surgery – yay! Except I seemed to have forgotten how invasive a spay is, she’s now got a big old collar on for 16 days to prevent her from tearing at her sutures. She seems to be taking it alright though, the worst part is that we’re keeping her put away in her own room so Caligula leaves her sutures alone too. Plus we need to keep her using the paper litter instead of the clay litter Caligula gets to continue using during this period. Ah cats.

Anyway, here is a picture of her highness in all her “back from vet” glory:

And far from looking for Simcoe to pull out her sutures, Caligula is pretty terrified of the new cat with the funny hat. I let her out of her room for a few minutes this morning and he ran off, I found him sitting on our table looking terrified:

Simcoe has eaten a little this morning (yay!) and Michael gave her some water before we gave her the pan medication this morning. I expect she’ll be back to her old self within a few days, with the exception of still needing that surgery wound to heal and so requiring her lovely collar. I am not exactly sure how I’m going to handle this, it’s only the morning after and already she’s wanting to get out of her room…

Just dropped of Simcoe at the vet to get declawed (no lectures, please, I’ve heard them all) and spayed.

I’m sure she’ll make it through surgery fine, I’m paying the extra fees for before-surgery blood work and paying extra to have it done with lasers (just like with Caligula – that’s why we chose this vet, faster recovery time and way more humane). But she was so scared and sad when I put her in the cage at the vet – I almost started crying! Yeesh! I sure do love that monster of a kitten.

I get to call at 1:30 this afternoon to see how she’s doing, then I can call back around 4:30 to arrange a pickup time this evening.

Wifi in Linux annoys me.

After working on it yesterday evening and then this morning before work I was pretty fed up with the behavior of wireless on my new Debian install. It worked fine in Ubuntu. It even worked fine during the Debian installation! Arrrgg… Maybe I’ll load up the installer just so I can see what’s loaded up and file a proper bug report. Anyway, I finally resigned for asking for help, and decided upon asking in #ubuntu-pennsylvania – where Joe Terranova pretty much read a forum thread I’d browsed earlier but didn’t think helped. Thanks again Joe, sometimes my brain stops working, and your suggestions were right on. Turns out the system was loading up the orinoco_cs module, and what I really needed loaded was the hostap driver because of network encryption (wpa or wep or something… I am wireless terms dumb)

So why have I forsaken Ubuntu on my laptop? My laptop has had Ubuntu on it longer than any other machine I have! It just make more sense to run Debian on it. I don’t need the new flashy things Ubuntu has (except, perhaps, better wifi support *snicker*), my Ubuntu install was pretty much a server install + xfce (so not exactly Xubuntu). More importantly (and the reason I didn’t just give up on Debian when wireless started acting up) is that my current development machine running Debian is dying. Right now it takes two boots for it to come up – every time I try to boot it up it says “Cannot find Operating System” – I hit the power button and then it comes up fine. What if it didn’t someday and I needed to get some Debian development work done? That would suck. So I figured I could use this laptop more. I can use it as my portable toy and keep it around for development too. Too bad I just put that “Powered by Ubuntu” sticker on it. Hehe.

“Debian development?! I thought you were an Ubuntu Member!” – Debian and Ubuntu work closely together, and both the packages I currently handle have been scooped into Ubuntu through their syncing process. I didn’t even need to do a thing, but if I do sometime need to put my hand in on the Ubuntu side – I’ll jump in! So since this syncing thing happens, I figured I can put my development time toward Debian so both Debian and Ubuntu has this stuff, everybody wins :) Not to mention all the development work I’ve done thus far has been for work, and so Debian-specific. I’m looking to change that though, after some encouragement from Miriam Ruiz I joined the Debian Games Team and she offered to help me get started (even said she’d find an “easy” package for me!). Learning more on my own with Debian is fun (and *ahem* pretty important for my career), so I figure this is the best path I can be taking right now. Now to shuffle my priorities again so I can handle this…

So I bailed on the InstallFest. I should have looked up the address sooner and organized appropriately. Instead of waited until Saturday morning to look up the place that for some reason I thought was in NE Philly. It was in Center City. Ack! It wouldn’t have been so bad if I wasn’t going down alone, but I really hate driving alone in the city. I felt bad that I canceled on them, but I let one of the guys know before he left for the -fest.

Instead I spent the day mostly just working on a bunch of little things. Saturday afternoon Michael and I headed down to Skippack for some shopping. We tried a new coffee shop, which Michael’s post here says everything about – the short version? It was no good. That evening we ordered some pizza and chilled out to watch Episode 1 and the Fifth Element RiffTrax. We actually had to rent those movies, since we didn’t own them – how embarrassing ;) The riff of Ep1 wasn’t good as the Ep2 one, but I greatly enjoyed Mike and Kevin’s hatred of Jar Jar Binks. The riff of Fifth Element could have been better, it was just Mike riffing and about a third of the way into it I found myself saying “Mike needs to talk more – I’m actually watching the movie!”

Sunday I was able to get into my garden for a little bit and handle some of the weeds that have popped up over the past few weeks. Then I had to go inside because I wasn’t feeling so hot. Humidity + allergies that had been fought off by Claritin+A/C for so many days. I ended up taking some Claritin D, which put me into a coma. It ended up working, I stopped being congested, but I felt all numb and sleepy. For dinner we headed out to Greater India (yum yum!) before doing some shopping at Whole Foods (note to self, don’t shop at Whole Foods on Sunday evening – the selection is terrible!).

Last night we sat down and “enjoyed” the RiffTrax for Reign of Fire. Oh, My, Gosh. What a horrible movie! The riffing was good though, so we were able to make it through.

I love RiffTrax, it’s like having MST3K back.

Sunday I was also able to install Debian on my laptop. I’m thinking of turning it into my development box to replace the crappy HP I have now. We’ll see how it goes – thus far I still need to get wireless working (it worked during the install but not after I booted into the new install…sigh).

The weather today is lousy – warm, humid and rainy. At least it wasn’t too hot, I was able to just open the window in my office instead of turning on the A\C.

OK, that’s weird… I just ran into my cousin who I haven’t spoken to in over a year in IRC.

-!- Selekta [darkmyst@dm-32275.rochester.res.rr.com] has joined #darkmyst
< Selekta> Hello there!!
< Selekta> No, shit.
< Selekta> Pleia2
<@pleia2> hm?
<@pleia2> Steven?
< Selekta> Hi Beth.
<@pleia2> :D
< Selekta> :D
< Selekta> Hahaha
<@pleia2> omfg it’s my cousin!
< Selekta> Insanity!
< Selekta> We rule so hard.

< Selekta> Wow, this is pretty cool. Who’da thought a google search would lead to my long lost cousin?! :D
<@pleia2> I was never lost :)
<@pleia2> you were!

I recognized him based on 1) hostname 2) he’s used similar nicks in the past. 3) he knows me

Had to bring Caligula to the vet on Tuesday. His ears and the base of his ears on his “forehead” were all red. When I brought him in the first thing the vet said was “He’s all red!” to which I said “Aaah I know! What’s wrong with him?” After taking his temperature (not running a fever) and doing a quick inspection (seemed fine otherwise), she decided that it was probably an allergic reaction. He was either bitten by some bug or ate some bug that he was allergic to. Silly kitty. He got a steroid shot and sent me home with instructions to give him children’s Benadryl. Unfortunately children’s benadryl only comes in Cherry (syrup) and Grape (pills) both of which he hates, but I managed to get enough in him each day. Now he’s looking and seems to be feeling much better, most of the redness is gone.

Finally broke down and installed the air conditioner in my office last night. The weather has been quite tolerable, even when it’s gotten up to mid 80s the humidity has stayed low. But yesterday I learned that today that would all change – and I’d be prepared! Indeed, today it’s been yucky and humid, I’m glad to have the A/C in or I would have been pretty miserable.

The Ubuntu InstallFest is this weekend. We’re working hard to get all the loose ends tied up so it goes smoothly. For our day long event we have 13 people registered, which I think is pretty good :) Should be a fun time.

This post is all about vanity, forgive me for a moment while I wade in it :)

< nixternal> and pleia2 is rocking the Ubuntu US LoCo scene — I thought for some reason she was already a member…under a new name :)
* elkbuntu cheers loudly for pleia2
* towsonu2003 cheers for pleia2 who is a Debian package maintainer and a very good ubuntu-women project contributor – not to mention her level of awareness in women’s issues as they relate to Linux and computing.
< dinda> Pleia2 has been doing some amazing work for the ubuntu community; and brings lots of upstream knowledge (Debian package maintainer) and linuxchix
< Susana> I’m here to cheer for pleia2, she has done a great effort to dynamize the ubuntu-women project and she’s one of its greatest contributers. She has always been very wise in her decisions i think she’ll be a great member.
* jedijf cheers YO! from philly in pa loco for pleia2
* etank cheers for pleia2. She is very active in the PA LoCo and Ubuntu Women.

< Burgundavia> yay for more women to bridge our awful gender inequality

Thanks everyone – you all rock! (info about members here)