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No More Alcohol

We quit drinking. My birthday was our grand finale.

Gasp! Shock! I know, I know.

So what spurred this decision?

For the most part, health.

Following Michael’s high cholesterol report early this year we immediately cut red meat and pork from our diet. Our poultry intake has been reduced considerably. We’ve been eating more fish and buying a lot more fresh vegetables. No longer are we eating fries with our veggie burgers, those have been replaced with couscous or rice dishes.

In preparation for his surgery, Michael has lost a considerable amount of weight (which is amazing, since he was never “fat” by any standards!). For the rest of his life following the surgery he’ll need to keep weight low in order to reduce the wear on his replacement hip and help prolong its expected 40 year lifetime.

So why quit drinking if it remains in moderation? It’s an easy thing to do[0], and drinking does us no good. When we drink we have not only the rush of calories from the beer itself, but also all those extra bad-for-you munchies that go along with it. It’s also expensive, a temptation after a rough day, a possible wedge in relationships, and although we greatly enjoy tasting new and exciting beer and attending beer events, more often than not we just end up feeling lousy the next day and craving the same junk food we ate the previous evening (at least I do!).

I guess what it comes down to is that with the current health situation, stress level with this upcoming surgery and other stuff going on in our lives, the beer hobby needs to be shelved, quite probably indefinitely.

What ever will I fill it with? Oh right, I already have too many hobbies.

[0] In spite of the alcoholics on both sides of my family (one being my own father) I somehow managed to skip out on that addictive and/or alcoholic gene. I’ve never been painfully addicted to anything, even when I dropped caffeine the physical repercussions were quite tolerable and not enough to even make me consider grabbing another cup of coffee. Chocolate and lobster pie are the only things I have what may be unusually strong cravings for. Oh man, lobster pie is good.

Victory Fall Fest was a blast!

We had a great time yesterday at the Victory Fall Fest.

We arrived shortly before 3PM, and were quite surprised to see almost all the parking spaces in the sprawling lot taken up, we hopped on a shuttle van from where we parked to the event. I can’t imagine how crazy parking got after that, as the crowds really picked up around 5PM and some of our friends reported having to park on the street.

There were 7 of us that I directly invited, and then friends brought friends. We had reserved a 10 person table, but ended up taking up most of the table next to us by the time the evening was out. The turnout for the festival in general was impressive too, and they did some really clever things to handle the crowds which made for easy restroom trips (always a concern at beer fests!) and pretty speedy food and drink acquisition even as the evening wore on and the crowds picked up. All in all, a very good event.

Now I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves!


OK, I’ll explain this one, cyron_lj had a breathalyser and there are few things more amusing at a beer festival than a breathalyser. 3 beers in I was already at .08 (higher than everyone else – go me!). Here Michael is trying it, he was only .02.

Thanks again to everyone who came out and helped make it a great birthday. And of course thanks to Michael, who took care of me and got me that delicious carrot cake :) We ended up getting some Real Food inside after the festivities died down around 9PM, but by then I was ready to take a nap. We traveled home around 10.

Today is my birthday!

I’m now 26.

We’re headed out to the Victory FallFest to celebrate and Michael bought me a big ole carrot cake from Whole Foods – yum!

Software Freedom Day, PLUG West and MythTV Seminar

It’s been a busy week for Linux stuff here in the Philadelphia area.

Last Saturday was Software Freedom Day. Ubuntu Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia area Linux Users Group teamed up to do demos and hand out Ubuntu disks and disks with a bunch of Free Software for Windows at the monthly Philadelphia Area Computer Society. The turnout was about 75 people, the demos included one by my husband on Audacity (which was helpfully bundled on the free software CD – what luck!). While the Debian machine Michael brought was being used for Audacity demos, the Xubuntu PC I brought was monopolized for much of the event by a young boy who was entranced with the default Gnome games – I’m glad I installed those! I could use some recommendations as to what to install next time though, this machine was a 700mhz P3 with something like 258M RAM and a standard issue graphics card, so I couldn’t do any really impressive beryl stuff or anything, but I’m sure there are cool GUI apps out there that will wow the crowds even with limited resources.

A huge thanks to Jim and Randy for the piles of CDs they managed to bring. Jim signed us up as an official team at SFD so we got the balloons and stickers and all that fun stuff from the SFD folks. It was neat to see some of the same people from our presentations back in May return and ask questions about the CDs we gave out back then. The crowd in general was a good one, Michael posted to the PLUG list after the event and mentioned this.

Thursday night I ended up heading over to PLUG West for a talk on Nagios by Brian Stempin. It was a good presentation, and it was nice to know that I’m not the only one who thinks Nagios config files are a nightmare – it turns out there are a bunch of tools out there for building them without having to touch the config files themselves (we do use one at work, but even that is more complex than some of the other options out there). The discussion prior to the meeting was good too, we had some lively discussions about zsh, laptops and financial software (hey, it’s more interesting than you might expect!).

Saturday I had a scheduling conflict. I was supposed to head down to Maryland with Michael for an event, but that didn’t work out. With those plans dashed I decided to hop over to the already-in-progress MythTV Seminar presented by Matt Mossholder. This event was one I had been excited about for some time. Back in August Matt dropped a note to the ubuntu-us-pa list asking if there was interest in Myth, to which I replied there absolutely was (a presentation on Myth + HD drew a crowd of 31 people at a recent PLUG West meeting). Matt and I took it off-list and over the next couple weeks Matt fleshed out his presentation while I secured the location (thanks again to The ATS Group!) and handled other logistical concerns. At SFD Matt did a demo and handed out fliers for the event. Early last week I dropped a note to the PLUG list about the seminar and our sign-up sheet filled up pretty quickly.

Unfortunately I missed the opening presentations (which everyone agreed were quite good). Slides for the Intro to Myth itself can be found here and slides for his second presentation, on actually building the machine are here. I think the build session I was able to attend went quite well, a few people brought tuners so the television bit could be tested. It was great how many experienced Myth folks turned up, and really helped take a load off of Matt during the build session. The total number of people there was around 16, a turnout that was big enough to be proud of while being small enough to manage and fit into the conference room. Logistics-wise I’m happy to say that everything fell into place, it was a great location and we’re being encouraged by the company that hosted it to bring more events their way – it’s so nice to have such local companies asking to host events!

Finally, I upgraded to Gutsy over the week. Unfortunately it wasn’t a planned upgrade. Last week Michael brought home a scanner that was being tossed out at work, which I plugged in to see if I could get working in Linux. I ended up grabbing some libs from Gutsy to get it working and after the xorg security upgrade this week and a restart of X I was faced with X freezing up, and .xsession-errors telling me about GTK problems (of the libs I upgraded – oops). I spent the morning trying to fix the dependency problems that were raised with me trying to go back to older versions of the libs, but in the end I surrendered and just upgraded to Gutsy. The upgrade went well though, the only problem I have is some annoyances with the new version of Gimp, but I can live with those for now (might even get used to them). Oh, and the scanner works great.

Cats

23:44:47 <@pleia2> hehe, simcoe got a moth
23:45:47 <@pleia2> they are fighting over it
23:47:15 <@pleia2> caligula ate it

PLUG Meeting and a busy September for the PA US LoCo Team

On Sunday I officially (if unceremoniously) took over the reins for PLUG. I fumbled my first meeting announcement by being victim of a speaker canceling. I should have confirmed with the speaker before I sent out the announce, as the scrambling to find another speaker and getting the word out about the change before the meeting happened was a chore. I learned my lesson, and made sure to confirm with the speaker before I sent out the announcement for the second meeting of the month.

0

PLUG North Meeting, September 10, 2007

The second meeting of the month was a great presentation on Erlang presented by Toby DiPasquale. We had a logistics snafu, our previous Unisys host provided a projector, but that was lacking this time so our presenter ended up doing his entire talk on the conference room white board. Lucky for us it worked out and he enjoyed doing the talk on the white board, as it gave some more spice to the talk (which he’d done 2 times previously). Slides and other details are available on the PLUG Previous Meeting Information page. Afterwards we ended up heading over to Capone’s over in Norristown for some beers and food. It was a great place for an after meeting gathering, not crowded, good selection of beers from around the world, it’ll probably become our default after meeting place.

I haven’t spoken much lately about the activity of the PA US team. Assuming I’m properly keeping up with statewide events, we have no fewer than 5 engagements this month:

Saturday September 15: Philly & SE PA: Software Freedom Day @ PACS – Following the presenter, David A Harding (who has recently been hanging around with our team), we’ll be in the lobby handing out CDs and working with PLUG to give demos of Ubuntu and other free software. In preparation for this event, Jim and his wife have been doing a great deal of promotional work, printing up fliers, doing the legwork to post them and contacting dozens of local University CompSci departments in the area.

Saturday September 15: Lehigh Valley: Software Freedom Day 2007 – One of our members even purchased a domain name for the event! They’ll be working with the area LUG and Linux SIG to show off and share free software. Way to go guys!

Monday September 17: Philly & SE PA: Nonprofit Technology Resources Training Session – This is now a monthly event, on the 3rd Monday of each month from 10AM-2PM. This month they’ll be handling and teaching NTR staff to handle software updates, showing staff where to find help aside from our team and in general answering Ubuntu questions. Big cheers for the folks heading this up, doing such a volunteer project during “normal working hours” is not possible for so many of us, and your dedication is admirable.

Saturday September 22: Philly & SE PA: MythTV SeminarThe ATS Group, a local technology company, has graciously offered space on a Saturday for this event (thanks again Jonathan!). During this 5 hour session, Matt Mossholder will be presenting the basics of how to get a MythTV set-up running with Mythbuntu and helping folks who bring their computers with setting it up for themselves. Publicity for this event has been in the form of discussion on the local LUG list and at meetings, forum postings and mailing lists. We’ll also be promoting it at the Software Freedom Day event on the 15th, where Matt will have a live demo as a bit of a teaser. This is the only project this month that I can actually claim to have contributed a lot too, which is ashame because I now have a scheduling conflict and might not actually be able to attend the Seminar!

Wednesday September 26: Philly & SE PA: Mt Airy Learning Tree Computer Volunteer Group LTSP Project – We’ve teamed up with MALT, an organization focused on a variety of classes for adults to set up LTS on donated thin clients to provide a “classroom” environment, and teach the MALT volunteers how to administrate it. This is another project that is now scheduled to be monthly, taking place on the last Wednesday of each month. This month our volunteers will be be focusing on teaching MALT volunteers how to use the thin clients to preform tasks that they may have previously been doing on Windows or Mac.

Finally, it looks like some of our Western folks might be attending WPLUG’s Software Freedom Day event, which we’re hoping will be the catalyst needed to get things going on that half of the state.

Phew! What a month! In case I don’t say it enough, I’m very proud to be part of such a fantastic LoCo team.

French Creek and Chaddsford Jazz Fest

It was a busy week, so I’m just now taking the time to sit down and write about last weekend.

Saturday we ended up heading down to French Creek State Park to do a bit of hiking. It didn’t quite work out as we would have liked, as is often the case with these state parks sorting out our orientation on the map and then figuring out exactly where you’re supposed to get on trails was a little tricky and we wasted a lot of time time on unmarked mini trails. Once we got our bearings and got on a nice trail we were disappointed to find that it was poorly marked. We ended up turning around and heading back to the car.

In spite of these things, we spent a good half day at the park. It was nice to get back in touch with the woods even for a bit, and I got some pretty pictures.



After the park we headed up to Kimberton Whole Foods. We’d never been there before, and since it’s less than 25 minutes from our house it’s a nice alternative to the bigger natural stores in the area that are so much further away. Not really a great place to find exotic cheeses, but for the basics it’s great.

Then we finished up our day with a trip to Victory! The food was actually good too, which was a nice surprise (it’s been lousy lately). The beer was as good as ever, I started out with the V-Saison, which they had fresh on tap, and then moved to the old standard Golden Monkey. After dinner we sat at the bar and enjoyed some more beer before heading home, and Michael got a picture of me at the bar with my Golden Monkey.

Sunday we headed out to Chaddsford Winery for their annual Labor Day Weekend Jazz Festival. We packed up some of the goodies we got from Kimberton Whole Foods along with Michael’s famous salmon roll-ups. At the door you pay your $20 to get in and get a wine glass (to keep and use for tastings) and a little info about the event. We quickly met up with our friends who had reserved a big table and along with a bunch of their other friends had filled it with yummie-with-wine snack foods, to which we added ours.

And now to the wines! In spite of a friend of ours wincing when we said we’d hit a local winery event, there were actually some good. The event had tasting stations nicely spread out on their lot, the whites at tables outside and the reds were inside where they stored barrels and had the bottling line. I was really pleased with the setup.

Station #1: 2006 Spring Wine
I don’t remember what any of these seasonal or reserve wines were, unfortunately. This was a sweet one though, but not too sweet that I disliked it. I wouldn’t choose this wine, but I wouldn’t say no if offered.

Station #2: 2005 Pinot Grigio and 2006 Proprietors Reserve White
The Pinot Grigio was pretty good, the Proprietors Reserve was not.

I’m not really into whites so these not being to my taste was probably more due to that than an actual lacking in quality.

Station #3: 2005 Proprietors Reserve Red
This was my favorite of the day, not too heavy or oaky, just a nice clean red.

Station #4: 2005 Merlot and 2002 Merican – Cabernet Blend
The Merlot was my second favorite of the day, heavier than the Reserve but a good solid wine. The Merican was a favorite of our friends, there were a couple bottles of that floating around our table later in the day, it grew on me.

Station #5: 2005 Sunset Blush and 2006 Niagara
Total bust. These were super-sweet, fruity wines that I couldn’t stomach at all. There certainly is a market for this kind of thing though, I saw several bottles being consumed around the festival.

We had the option of taking the tasting tour as many times as we wanted, but were satisfied with the single trip around. Michael hit the store and picked up a bottle of the Reserve Red and Merlot to bring back to the table. The rest of the afternoon was spent eating, drinking, chatting with the people we met at our table and toward the end we even got a bit of dancing in!





It was a really fun time. Our friends David and Kathy have been going every year for 14 years and don’t plan on breaking the tradition anytime soon, so it looks like we’ll have friends to go with next year too!

As for the rest of this past week, the only notable thing was that we went to dinner with Michael’s friend Rebecca and her boyfriend on Thursday. They live out in West Virginia and were in the area for work, so Michael invited them out to Greater India. Michael dated Rebecca several years ago, lost touch for a few years after he and I got together, and recently started communicating again. I vaguely knew her in passing through communicating in IRC, which Michael invited her to while they were dating, and we’ve talked some on IM these past few months. I’d be lying if I said anticipation for such a meeting wasn’t a bit stressful (those irrational “oh no, how do I compare to an ex?!” thoughts), but it turned out to be an enjoyable evening.

Last night Michael ended up going out to a Men’s sweat lodge and I stayed in to unwind and let out all the little stresses of the week. I ended up ordering from the local pizzeria and settling down with a bottle of wine, my laptop and a few episodes of the West Wing. It was a nice evening.

This weekend is our only entirely free weekend of the month (and here I thought things would slow down in September!) so we decided to devote it to doing house stuff that we never got around to, and if we get bored of that we’ll drive up the street to the Green Lane Scottish-Irish Festival. We’ve never been to this festival, but it’s so close, admission and parking are free and it actually looks like it’ll be a lot of fun.

Napkins, Books and a VPS

We switched to cloth napkins last week. Paper napkins are one of those things that were always in my house growing up and it never dawned on me until recently that they weren’t the most eco-friendly things in the world. Since we go to the gym everyday we’re doing laundry at least every other day, so buying a dozen cloth napkins to keep in a rotation works out great for us. I wish we had done this sooner. Next step? T-shirts we retired will become rags so we can stop using paper towels for cleaning.

I’ve been reading a lot lately. Finally finished Guns, Germs and Steel and will be ordering the DVD next week. I’m following up this non-fiction book with Drawing Down the Moon, a classic in pagan circles that I’m finding quite enjoyable. I started reading Moby Dick, which I’ve been meaning to get around to ever since Penn Jillette first went on about it being his favorite book. In spite of what I’ve heard people say about the dullness of the opening, I’m thoroughly enjoying every page, which certainly speaks to the Mainer in me, I love sea stories. Finally for times when Moon or Dick are too heavy, I began reading a version of Arabian Nights, which has to be one of the best collections of tales I’ve ever read. Not a challenging read by any means (in fact, this version even has pictures every few pages and I laugh at myself for reading a kids book) but sometimes you just need some fun and it’s nice to pick up on all the references in todays culture that come from these stories.

Now for the big news of this post, I now have my very own TekTonic VPS running Debian! Michael and I have been tossing around the idea of completely retiring the noisy, power hungry Sparc64 for a couple months now, but it wasn’t until a nice promotion by TekTonic last month that Michael finally made the choice to move. He bought one for himself to “see how it would go” and within 2 days bought one for me too. This was a good move, I now have the experience to set up and manage my own server (indeed, I had Apache set up for all 4 of my sites within about 10 minutes) so relying on him to install packages I need and do things like set up logrotation for me was getting to be a bit silly.

A nice chunk of my mornings over these past few days has been spent migrating my sites over. PhillyChix.org was done in a matter of minutes. PrincessLeia.com and 13thHour.net were running a version of WordPress in gentoo that is a “legacy” branch, which I was able to upgrade to the 2.2.2 version with no problem. Which reminds me, after reviewing the WordPress package in Debian I decided to roll my own install of WordPress, I can keep up with security updates and I think it’s worth my time to stay with a current release version. WallaceAndGromit.net was the biggest challenge, I’ve wanted to migrate it to WordPress for a while now but again with the “must nag husband to set stuff up for me” thing. This was the perfect opportunity to do the overhaul myself! So I got WordPress installed with a spiffy theme, threw together a new logo, spent about 2 hours Sunday morning plugging in all 108 of the posts from the launch of WallaceAndGromit.net back in 2002 into WordPress. I themed all the rest of the pages to sync up with the WordPress theme and finally had a sie to launch! I am very very happy with it. The only thing left to migrate is mailman for PhillyChix, which I don’t even know how to begin on and I’m too tired to think about it now. There are still some tweaks that need to be completed on the machine, but it’s running great so far.

I have photos and things from our daytime activities over the weekend, but posting those will have to wait, I need to spend some relaxing and snuggling time with Michael.

Michael Jackson: The Beer Hunter

Michael Jackson, the most famous beer writer in history, died in his UK home Wednesday night of a heart attack, he was 65.

Some articles about his passing:

Washington Post: Beer Connoisseur Michael Jackson, 65
AP: Beer Critic Michael Jackson Dies
The Orgonian: Parkinson’s claims beer’s frontman

I am not usually one to get upset about celebrities dying, but what this man did for the image of beer in general, Belgians and for American microbreweries was transformational to the industry. His death is a terrible loss to the international beer community. AllAboutBeer.com (which he regularly wrote for and his last column, from earlier this week, now appears on) now has a tribute site up to him, and it’s so sad to read through these. One of the more notable posts is by Bill and Ron of Victory Brewing, who were encouraged by Michael to create their brewpub, which is now one of the most famous microbreweries in the country now shipping beer internationally. In addition to their kinds words about Michael the guys at Victory have vowed to donate 11% of their beer revenue for the 11 days following his death to donate to a charitable organization in his name.

We learned of his death on Thursday, a friend of mine in Belgium told me it had been on the news over there. I told Michael and we immediately dropped our previous plans for the evening and decided to head up to our favorite beer bar to enjoy some beers from one of his beer books we own and honor his memory. Our beers for the night chosen from his book included: Orval, Rodenbach Grand Cru, Westmalle Triple and Saison Dupont. The evening was accented by talking to the owner of the beer bar and a few patrons we’re familiar with, they all had stories about the times they met Michael, who flew in from the UK regularly and was in the Philadelphia area often. He was the guest of honor at an annual beer dinner not too far from our house and is regularly a guest at Monk’s Cafe down in Philadelphia, but sadly we never got to meet him. When his annual beer dinner came around this year we decided to put off going until next year, and now there won’t be a next year. Clearly the lesson from this is “Life is short, drink beer now!”

Rest in peace Michael, you will be missed. We’re heading out to Victory tonight.

Ubuntu Women Project Status

I’ve already posted about much of this on list, but it’s been a big part of what I’ve been doing over the past couple weeks, although I will concede that my attention to this project over the summer has dropped due to a lot of factors. General summertime business in my life (so many festivals, so little time!), other Ubuntu obligations (like our overactive LoCo team), but now as the weather cools it’s time for me to bring my attention back, so here’s a bunch of info about the status of the project.

After a discussion with several other women in the Ubuntu-Women project, a discussion with the Program Manager at Canonical, Billy Cina, and a call with the Community Manager at Canonical, Jono Bacon, last week about general project status we’ve begun to formulate a plan to move forward with our Mentoring and Courses program at Ubuntu Women.

The discussion with Jono was both informative and a bit depressing. His brought the outside perspective of the project that I had been lacking, which helped us better understand our current position in the community. The depressing bit? Many people within Ubuntu view ANY comments on feminism by ANY women within Ubuntu as a reflection of the Ubuntu Women project. Melissa‘s controversial posts, Sarah‘s -marketing thread about the Canonical women’s t-shirts, Vid‘s suggestion that Ubuntu-Women.org should be on t-shirts and even my -marketing post about UWN “wives” comment have been put up as examples of how all the Ubuntu Women project does is complain – when in fact NONE of these are official positions coming from the Ubuntu Women Project, some of them are even denied by a majority of folks in the project. We’re just Ubuntu Members who stood up with an objection, all on our own. Regardless, association matters and we aren’t going to change our image by doing more complaining about the unfortunate associations, what we need to do is continue push forward with our wonderful projects and work to show the community that we’re a positive force within Ubuntu. And ultimately we need to work harder to show that women ARE coming to and staying with Ubuntu via the Ubuntu-Women Project.

Billy Cina dropped by the #ubuntu-women after hearing about the Debian Packaging Course Miriam Ruiz is doing on LinuxChix and which Ubuntu Women is promoting. She explained that the Ubuntu Training team had been discussing creating a similar tutorial. As discussion progressed, it was decided that the Ubuntu Women project working in a partnership with the Ubuntu Training team (and begin seeking out other courses, classroom type projects within Ubuntu) would be beneficial to both groups. Ubuntu Women can push women who want to do tutorials for the Training team (or other teaching teams, where appropriate) and promote all the Training courses at U-W, and our tutorials can put more focus on Women in F/OSS issues, like a possible upcoming course about how to effectively handle unpleasant behavior we encounter in F/OSS. This has been discussed loosely in the past, including the fact that having general courses on U-W takes away from them being promoted to the general Ubuntu community. I agree, but until now haven’t seen a way to move forward with it.

Finally, it perhaps goes without saying that discussion with other women in the project has been pivotal to this new surge forward, I certainly can’t do it on my own and the democratic nature of the project wouldn’t allow me to. Thanks to previously mentioned Miriam and Melissa, Lydia, Susana, hypa7ia and others in IRC who have lately been so active with our plans moving forward. We’re making progress, ladies!