It’s hot and humid out, they’re calling for showers this afternoon. What lousy Memorial Day weather! There is grilling to be done!

Saturday was most spent doing errands, in the evening Michael and I decided to to check out The Tiki Bar @ Spring Mountain. It’s just on the other side of the mountain, probably a mile from our house by car but we’d never been there. It’s a popular place, and people have recommended it to me in the past. We arrived around 5:30, it wasn’t too busy (which surprised me for a Saturday night).

The staff was great, very friendly and helpful without being annoying. The way the place works is you go up to a “station” that looks like a deli case with a bunch of steaks and kabobs in it. You order and pay for your steaks and kabobs (along with bread, salad and baked potato if you want the “dinner”) and they give you the meat raw. You then bring it over to the grills and grill your kabobs yourself. It’s really fun and social. I went with a shrimp kabob and an alligator kabob – alligator?! They were good. Drinks are handled by your table server, of which he keeps a tab of and you cash out drink tab before leaving the table.

In the late evening a quick storm came through and after losing the umbrella off our table due to the wind, we went to the bar to huddle under the bit of roof. We still got a little damp, but spring storms are fun! Michael and I spent some time hanging out and had some drinks, they actually had some decent beers! Then called a couple friends who ended up coming out later in the evening. High price of drinks aside (yowch!), we had a really fun evening. I expect we’ll go back sometime.

Oh – was it authentic tiki? Hahahahaha no! They were playing Jamaican music when we arrived, and that morphed rock. It was fun anyway :)

Yesterday was a wasted day, I got nothing done :) We have been watching RiffTrax lately, and ended up watching Episode 2 and Battlefield Earth. Ah good stuff, Battlefield Earth was a tough one to get through, it was a pretty horrible movie.

And today – we’ll see how the weather cooperates! And I think I’m going to get away from my computer for a while now so I can decompress.

I’ll shut up about Ubuntu at some point, but I just have four things to say:

The Ubuntu PA LoCo Mailing list is finally up! – We’d been waiting for almost a month, serves us right for requesting it during the insanity around a version release when everyone is busy.

Dell is now shipping Ubuntu machines! – The $600 laptop is looking very appealing. I don’t use a laptop much so I don’t need a powerhouse, but my 500mhz Dell is going to need to retire eventually.

I added myself to the CommunityCouncilAgenda for Ubuntu Membership! I was going to wait until the LoCo team was approved, but I figure I have enough under my belt at this time to go for it and should stop dragging my feet. The meeting is on May 29 2007, 21:00 UTC (worldclock) – come support me! My wiki page is here: wiki.ubuntu.com/Pleia2.

I realized at the PACS meeting that I really am a Debian girl who only is brilliant with Ubuntu because of my Debian background. I use apt on the command line for all my package management and in general I just pretend that Ubuntu is Debian. It’s not, and I need to brush up on some Ubuntu-y things before the InstallFest next weekend (plus there is some Kubuntu work coming in at Work so I really should brush up on it since I’m now being touted as the Ubuntu Expert of the company). So I went ahead this morning and installed the ubuntu-desktop and kubuntu-desktop packages. I really don’t like KDE and Gnome, and my computer really starts showing it’s age when I load up full-bouncy KDE. But it should be fun to poke around and see what both have to offer these days, it’s been a while.

Moving on, we attended a Steve Roach concert last Saturday, Michael already blogged about it (his entry has pictures). This is the third time I’ve seen Steve Roach in concert, and as much as I am absolutely in love with Dreamtime Return and Structures from Silence, I haven’t been as into his newer stuff, and so the concerts I’ve attended have been less than impressive. This one changed all that – he kept to electronic and all of what I heard was new to me, it was an amazing show! And the place was packed, they sold out of tickets online days before the show and there were people who brought their own chairs because there weren’t enough pews in the church. How exciting!

Thusday evening I had plans to meet up with a few women I used to work with at my Accounts Payable job – but a couple of them were sick and had to cancel. I was really bummed out about it and ended up just going out for dinner with one of them. I had a nice time and she offered to come out sometime this weekend and help with my garden. Yay garden help! I sure need it.

Speaking of my yard, I mowed the lawn on Sunday and while I was finishing up our neighbor came by with his teenage son and offered to do it for $20 every other week. Wow! Can’t beat that for a half acre of hilly and rocky mowing! I agreed right away and now at least I won’t have to worry about doing that. I don’t mind mowing the lawn, but it really eats up a whole afternoon and when it gets hot I have trouble completing it at all (I am so useless in the heat). Perhaps with someone doing the lawn regularly I can focus more on getting my gardens under control.

Today I’m running off to get a haircut and my nails done, then we’re headed off to North Philly for the 80th birthday party of Michael’s grandmother (who is really awesome). It should turn out to be a nice day. Later we’ll probably be dragging the air conditioners out of storage to install them in my office and in the bedroom, it got up to almost 90 degrees yesterday! Intolerable. I’m just glad it didn’t get that hot in the house yesterday (woo for keeping windows closed and blinds drawn!).

And it’s a three day weekend here in the States – yay for Memorial Day! As much as I love my job (and I do), a day off is always nice.

Joe Terranova blgged about the PACS meeting Saturday and included some photos (I was caught in a couple, they aren’t terrible).

Melissa Draper posted “An Open Letter to the Open Source Community”. It’s a good letter, the sort that I don’t think gets posted enough and even I neglect to raise often enough because the issue is so obvious to me now and while plowing along with Ubuntu-Women and LinuxChix things I sometimes get detatched. Go Melissa! It’s great to have active women in the Ubuntu community like her to work with.

In the same vein, Jono Bacon wrote a blog entry Say NO to discrimination in our community. After a few incidents within Ubuntu about 2 months ago Jono, in his capacity as community manager, began having meetings with the Ubuntu-Women group to discuss equality issues. We’ve had a couple meetings, a few women have continued conversatiosn with him about the issues facing women and even though the release of feisty and a few big ubuntu events have put us off-track a bit, we’re getting there. There are some really great ideas floating around.

Which brings me to a post by Richard Johnson, which is really just a quick response to Melissa and Jono, but I had to post a link because he’s been amazingly supportive – he’s a guy who “gets it” like I wish more men would.

Sadly all this goodness and support comes during a wave of trolls flooding through the Ubuntu-Women channel, one of which was a “known troll” in Ubuntu circles and has gotten a bit out of hand (followed me into my loco channel after I banned him from U-W). Luckily these past few days I’ve had the help of Miriam Ruiz who I’ve encountered before via LinuxChix and Debian-Women, but haven’t really sat down and spoken with until she joined the Ubuntu-Women channel last week. She uses Debian, and does extensive work with Debian (she’s an admin and founder of the Debian Games Team!), but she’s learning about Ubuntu and joined the channel. She is very cool :) Actually, there are a lot of really awesome women in the Ubuntu-Women channel right now, as well as a few key (and clueful!) men in Ubuntu there to support and work with us.

Oh and there is an unofficial #ubuntu-men channel now, which the founder claims was created with innocent intentions, but which appears to be growing in protest to the Ubuntu-Women project. I don’t have any problem with such a channel existing (and actually defended it in #ubuntu-ops), this is something -Women groups and LinuxChix have always maintained – if you want a -Men group or a LinuxChaps, MAKE ONE. I must have gotten a dozen private messages over the past week about #Ubuntu-Men, and theories about their evil intentions. I honestly don’t have time to spend on caring about it, the Ubuntu Women Project is very secure and doing well, we have nothing to fear from a protest group, and if they do have innocent intentions – more power to them! Perhaps the most amusing thing about all this is that I’m the channel Contact for the Ubuntu Women channel… and the channel Contact for the Ubuntu Men lives in Pennsylvania too. We’re in the same LoCo team. Lucky me, eh? Actually we can talk like normal human beings, he seems like a decent guy.

Geez, Ubuntu stuff is keeping me busy lately.

This week when I wasn’t spending time with Michael or working, I had myself buried in Ubuntu-PA LoCo stuff. First task was getting our planet running: Planet.MeetLinux.com. That took longer than it should have, but at least it’s running now.

The next big thing was getting prepared for a PACS meeting on Saturday. PACS is a big group of people learning about computers, and Joe Terranova from the NJ LoCo Team was giving a presentation on “What is Ubuntu?” According to the PACS site “Members from the PA Local Community Team (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam) will be answering any questions people may have.” I didn’t even know I was going for sure until Friday evening. A bunch of people burned CDs, I created and printed out some Ubuntu-Women fliers and about 25 little slips with all the loco team info on them for people to grab. I didn’t quite know what to expect.

Jim Fisher who blogged about the event here was really a driving force in this. He brought a bunch of computers with several ubuntu flavors installed on them and came early. He was quite excited about the whole thing, as you can tell from his blog entry about it. I showed up around 11:30, shortly after Alex. Joe brought a bunch of ubuntu *stuff* – including t-shirts (I grabbed one!), stickers, a big ole ubuntu banner, official ubuntu pamphlets. Alex and I ended up setting all this stuff up on a table near the entrance to the cafeteria, while Jim and some others from the loco handled the demonstration table. The talk by Joe went well, and afterward there was a HUGE flood of people coming out of the auditorium – and we were prepared! I tossed my camera to another fellow in the group and told him to take pictures while I manned the stuff table and helped people with questions and gave out CDs. The rush lasted for about 20 minutes and was somewhat exhausting, we must have given out about 100 cds!

The rest of the afternoon was spent much quieter, talking to each other (Alex was the one one in the loco I had previously met) and sitting down with people one-on-one to show them ubuntu and sign them up for our installfest. I had a fun time, and am really excited about how successful it was.

Now pictures!

I’m used to dealing with a college-age people when discussing linux, but this crowd was almost complete made up of people older than that who were eager to learn about it. What a delight!

I’m explaining something Ubuntu-y. I think I talk with my hands more when I’m nervous, and talking to a whole flood of people I don’t know will do that. But I didn’t let nervousness show I don’t think… woo progress in my nervous craziness!

A G3 that was brought along to show Ubuntu could run well on older hardware

Our stuff table – stripped bare by the end of the day! Woohoo!

The demo table after things had calmed down.

There I go posting about more events when I haven’t even caught up with talking about ones that already happened! This was last Sunday.

First off, it was crowded this year! The event seems to have really taken off.

We met Bob at our house, and then met up with Nita, MJ, Ron and were surprised to meet up with Constance, David and their new baby Caylee later in the afternoon!

The weather was cool and breezy when we arrived, I was glad to have worn my sweatshirt. We got our souvenir beer glasses right when we arrived and Michael and I got them filled with the Slacker Bock – which was quite a delightful bock. Later I went with the 2006 Helles Bock, which is one of my favorite Bocks. And after that? I am not sure, Michael kept bringing Bocks around and I kept drinking from his glass! The one I do remember was the Ice Bock – which was one of the bocks that they froze and removed much of the water from – leaving a very potent brew. Good stuff, but yowza!

And the goat race? We were in line for a half hour getting some sausages to eat and didn’t get a spot to see the race, so we were out of luck. There were just so many people there! I don’t mind so much though, hanging out with friends and having some great beers was enough for me. Now pictures!

Early in the day, Michael enjoying a beer in front of the brewery

Nita and MJ – MJ is not actually unhappy! He’s just tired because he’s been running around for weeks and is about to move to CA (he even had to leave the festival early, boo)

A bunch of us huddled in for this photo: Bob, me, Ron, Nita, Constance (and Caylee attached!) and you can see a little bit of David – oh and you can see the crowd!

Michael and David

As the event started winding down we put our name in for a table for 7 and were able to have a quick dinner inside the brewery. Afterwards a bunch of us went back to our house and sat around the firepit in our back yard. There was lots of beer to be had between the growlers from Victory the night before, misc beer we had in our ‘fridge and what David and Constance brought over. I stopped with the beer thing pretty early (I think I was already feeling my cold creep up) but a few people got quite drunk and started doing crazy things like pouring out their heart or singing the theme from Firefly (I’m not naming names!). What a night. What a day!

Oh and speaking of growlers from Victory, we took a couple camera-phone pictures while we on the brewery tour the day before, our favorite of which was this treasure: Michael hugging one of the aging tanks – hah!

I’m sure part of the reason I tend to get depressed in the winter is that I don’t get out much. I seem to have more plans in the spring and summer than at any other time of the year. Today I just booked my last free weekend in June! These are mostly local things, and we’re always looking for people to come along, so here are the events we’ll be attending in the coming month:

Saturday, 19 May: The Gatherings Concert Series: Steve Roach (with opening by Jeffrey Koepper) – Steve Roach is huge in the ambient world, and even touches outside of it. It’s been a few years since he played in the area and they’re expecting to sell out – so if you want to come order your tickets now!

Saturday, 2 June: PA LoCo Ubuntu InstallFest – Really, people come :) You can volunteer or bring an old computer or buy a cheap old computer there and get Ubuntu installed on it!

Sunday 10, June: Bear Creek Brew Fest – We’re going with a few people, but the more the merrier at a brew fest! You get a sampler glass and go around to all the beer tables and get samples. The venue looks to be a nice one too, I’m really looking forward to this. I need to grab our tickets soon. Tickets are $25 each in advance (recommended) or $30 at the door (if they have room left) – if you want to meet us at our house and be our designated driver you can get in for just $5 :)

Saturday 16, June: The STAR’S END 30th Anniversary Spacemusic Festival – We just found out about this today and immediately bought tickets. The show will be featuring: Robert Rich + Ian Boddy, Jeff Pearce, The Ministry of Inside Things and Orbital Decay. Robert Rich is one of my favorite ambient artists who we’ve seen in concert a few times, and we saw Jeff Pearce play at the Summer Solstice Spacemusic Spectacular 3 years ago. I’ve never seen Ian Boddy in concert but I’m familiar with some of his work and he’s quite good. It’ll be the concert debut of Rich and Boddy playing together (awesome!). I’m really excited for this. The tickets were “sort of” $60 each – in that you make a pledge to become a member of XPN and get the ticket as a “gift” – fine with me, they’re worth $60 a piece and XPN has some nice member privileges.

Thursday-Sunday 21-24, June: 6th Annual GAIAN MIND SUMMER FESTIVAL – Woohoo! We went to this last year and had a blast. This year I took off from work Friday so we could leave Thursday evening and camp out for the entire event. This is going to be a lot of fun, hopefully it won’t rain too much this time! We were supposed to join some friends there but they’re unable to make it. Anyone else up for camping out with us for a weekend? The base ticket price is $110 each which gets you the campsite – this means you bring your own food and “fend for yourself” as far as food goes, we’ll be taking this route as we felt the meal tickets were a bit pricey for what you’re served ($166 gets you a campsite and food for 4 days, $149 for just friday dinner-sunday brunch). I’ll be buying our tickets pretty soon.

It’s shaping up to be a fun season.

Thursday and Friday were a bit of a challenge with this cold and the allergies, but I think the Claritin is finally starting to build up in my system so my allergy symptoms aren’t so severe. The cold just had to take care of itself, and mostly left me feeling achy those two days. I was able to work though and luckily I managed not to fall too far behind. One night this week (Wed? Thurs?) I was feeling a bit hot and miserable and Michael took me down the street to the new Rita’s for some waterice. He’s so good to me, and it hasn’t been a good week for him either – some pretty serious sinus headaches are really messing with his ability to function.

My head still wasn’t quite right when we went out yesterday evening for some dinner and to stop by Lowe’s for a new air conditioner. I was doing very absent-minded things all evening, the worst of which was ordering cookies for dessert with the intention of taking most of them home – and then leaving them on the table at the restaurant. Arrrgggg cookies! :(

The air conditioner was one that would finally be big enough to cool the upstairs living room/Michael’s office. This was an investment we have been meaning to make, it gets VERY hot up there. We needed one that was at least 15000BTU, so I did a tiny bit of research and decided upon one. Usually I do more research but I just haven’t had the time. My research was pretty much: HomeDepot site sucks, I’m not shopping there, Sears doesn’t have anything big enough in a Window unit, hey Lowes has what we want, Frigidaire is a good company, and the price is competitive. So we went with the Frigidaire 15,100 BTU Room Air Conditioner (Color: White) ENERGY STAR. It was huge and heavy. It barely fit in the Civic (we should have brought the truck!) and bringing it upstairs was a challenge. Even more of a challenge was installing it in the window. Should be pretty straight forward, right? Nah, it came with a bunch of screws and horrible instructions. It must have taken us 2 hours to figure it out and finally get it installed. We’re not dumb people! It was tough! I think the worst part is the instructions didn’t clearly tell you that the bulk of the A/C was removable from the chassis – and this is required to do some of the installation. Bleh, air conditioners. But by 10 PM last night we had it running and it cooled down the room very quickly! Michael and I slept upstairs on the new futon couches last night.

And now that I’m feeling a bit more alive than previously, I need to shower and get myself out of the house and run some errands I’ve put off while I was sick.

Monday I wasn’t feeling so hot.

Tuesday I felt so lousy I called out sick to work.

Today I feel bad too. My cough is worse (which makes my head hurt), I’m more achey and all around miserable. Michael suggested I call the doctor.

I don’t go to the doctor much, afterall “it’s just a cold” – but I am feeling pretty miserable, and this is the second cold I’ve had in about 3 months. So I got an appointment for 9:30 this morning. I saw a new doctor, one who is covered under my current medical plan. He was great (that’s rare, I will make sure I see him next time too). After an exam I felt was thorough and a zillion questions he pronounced that I have “a cold aggravated by allergies.” And I should “get some sleep for the cold, and take these allergy medicines for the allergies.” Oh good.

I’m going to take his advice about the cold now and get some more sleep.

So, beer things. First off, my grandmother emailed me about my post about her father-in-law working in the Ruppert Brewery (it’s the post that wouldn’t end!). She emailed to share information about my great-grandfather’s situation back then, and had this to say:

“I just read your journal and read about Ruppert Beer. I caught that error in your research that the Ruppert Co. had gone out of business during the depression. The reason I knew is that Otto always said his father always worked during the depression and that many of his relatives had not. Some of them even borrowed money from his father because he had a good job all through the depression. One of his relatives who had been a stock broker (his stepson’s wife’s father borrowed money from him). It was a very tough time and most people were unemployed. They did make “near beer” and although it didn’t have the alcohol in it really tasted quite like real beer. It really was pretty good. I think it is still made but I’m not sure about that. When Grandpop Krumbach was still working (Otto and I were married before he retired) he brought home all kinds of special beer. Once a year they made Bock Beer which was very good. I liked that although beer was not a favorite of mine.”

That’s pretty cool.

I’ve had a busy weekend. On Friday flew up from North Carolina to spend the weekend up here for the Broad Street Race. He arrived shortly after 4PM and after chilling out for a bit we all went to grab some appetizers and a beer or two up at Ortino’s Northside. I ended up with a Brooklyn East India Pale Ale that they had on tap – pretty good! They also had Dale’s Pale Ale from Oskar Blues in Colorado on tap, it was pretty mellow and it seemed like more of an amber ale than an pale, but it was good.

After Ortino’s we headed over for a nice evening of BBQ, friends and a bonfire. Met some cool people, had a lot of laughs and fun. We need to do this sort of thing more often.

Saturday morning I made blueberry pancakes and sausage before skipped out the door to meet some of his running buddies down in Philly. Michael mowed the lawn, I knocked out some much needed weeding in my gardens (godzilla dandelions!). Then I ran out to run some errands. Around 3 gave us a call, he was leaving the city and we made plans to meet up at Victory Brewing Company for the brewery tour, some dinner, and some great beer.

The tour at Victory was fun, as usual. We got to see more of the bottling line than previously, and since that’s one of my favorite parts of the tour that was fun!

Between the three of us, I got to try a bunch of Victory beers I hadn’t previously tried:

St. Boisterous Hellerbock – A bit malty for me, but a solid brew.
St. Victorious Doppelbock – Now this is what I’m talking about! A nice, dark lager that was quite spicy.
Festbier – Not bad, but it didn’t really knock my socks off.
Sunrise Weissbier – This one was too lager for me, a session beer.
Whirlwind Wit – This was a nice, spicy wheat.
Mad King’s Weisse – How did this one fly under my radar for so long? It’s amazing! Really reminded me of a saison.

I also enjoyed some of the Sapphire Bock and Golden Monkey, still as good as ever!

Unfortunately the food was lousy again. One of the new things on the menu was a Reuben. Great! Not really. It wasn’t really bad as food goes, but it’s probably the worst reuben I’ve ever had, I should have been clued in by them spelling it wrong in the menu. They put coleslaw on it instead of sauerkraut! And it wasn’t because they didn’t have sauerkraut, ordered a sausage thing and there was sauerkraut on that. The corned beef was dry and thick (very odd). The bread wasn’t toasted at all. Ugh, I still can’t get over the coleslaw.

We left Victory around 7:30 and got home before dark. Had a couple beers, watched some TV (Victory Brewing DVD and some Firefly), and then had to turn in so he could wake up at the break of dawn this morning for the race. It was a good night.

Today we’re headed out to the Sly Fox Bockfest & Goat Race – woohoo! The LJ icon I’m using on this entry was taken at the fest last year, and I look forward to getting myself another giant glass to fill with bocks! I’ve been looking forward to this festival all year, and we managed to convince some friends to come along! Nita will be meeting us here at the house in about an hour, Bob will be meeting us at the festival, and in a wonderful turn of events (for me) MJ’s flight out to CA where he is moving to was delayed so he decided to drop by the beerfest! Woohoo, we get to see him again!

I should grab a nice hearty breakfast and get myself prepared for the day.