I’m not the type to take a lot of pride (or shame) in what my distant relatives have done. I this sheds light onto one of my only “beliefs”: that we’re born into the families we’re born into simply by chance. As such we shouldn’t take too much pride out of what our ancestors did, but instead forge our own way in life. We could have just as likely been born into a family with very few recorded accomplishments. But I am fascinated by family history and where I come from. This month I learned a lot about where I came from – and the fact that I’m only 3rd generation “American born” in at least in one vein of my family.

Back in March I received an email from JoAnn Plenge. She was responding to a journal entry I wrote back in 2003 where I mused about my possible relationship to an Elizabeth Krumbach from Nebraska who passed away in 1926. I learned that there was a whole Nebraska family of Krumbachs – one of whom was in the Nebraska state legislature, a Charles Krumbach. JoAnn is Charles’ great granddaughter. How cool is that?

JoAnn was kind enough to send a whole email detailing some of the family history so I could have a better chance at actually getting to the bottom of whether we were related. Here’s the information she gave me:

Joann’s branch of Krumbachs came as three brothers Nebraska from Eitorf, Germany in July of 1873, leaving behind their parents Erasmus and Helena Krumbach and eleven siblings (yep, fourteen children in all!). The brothers were Erasmus, John, and Charles, aged 30, 21 and 18, who came to the US to start their lives as homesteaders. When their life out there began they lived together in a sod house dug out of the side of a hill.

Her great grandfather Charles married Ida Ingalls and they had five children – JoAnn’s mother was one of them. Charles started as a farmer but later owned a hardware store in Shelby, Nebraska and even later became director of a local bank, served on the school board and became the treasurer of an insurance company. He ran for Senator and spent two terms there from 1902-1914.

John married Elizabeth Schumacher and Erasmus married Marie Benda.

JoAnn as able to visit her relatives in Eitorf, Germany and had this to say:

“My husband and I visited my third cousins, who still live in Eitorf (a charming little town east of Bonn) in 2001. The original Krumbach home with its many out buildings including stables, a meat curing building, chicken coop, blacksmith shop, etc. is still being lived in by my third cousin Detlef and his wife. According to my third cousins, the brothers left Germany to seek better economic opportunites in the U.S. and to avoid what was then mandatory military service in the Prussian army. The German Krumbach family were devout Catholics, but my great grandfather eventually converted to the Protestant Methodist faith (probably when he got married).

Wow!

I don’t know much about family history, so I dropped a line to my Aunt Elaine to see if any of her information could be matched up with this. She replied with a great email that started out saying that there doesn’t seem to be a close connection, but it’s possible. The email continued to give some very interesting information I didn’t know about.

Before coming to the United States, my family of Krumbachs were living in Cervinka, Yugoslavia, having emigrated there from the Bavarian part of Germany sometime around the mid 1800s when the Franz Joseph canal was being built. They were a middle class family that was relatively well-to-do. I had a great great uncle (or something? He was my great grandfather’s uncle) Vilmush Krumbach owned a machine shop where my great grandfather Adam Krumbach learned the machinist’s trade and became a journeyman by age 16.

“Prior to WWI my great grandfather was conscripted into the Austrian Army, but around 1913 he left Yugoslavia when he learned that although his conscription was up, they were planning on keeping everyone in the army anyway.” He came to the United States on a boat with first class travel, had papers to get into the country and so was able to avoid Ellis Island.

Adam went to work for The Jacob Ruppert Brewery in Manhattan where he practiced his machinist trade (which my Aunt Elaine tells me was much like an engineering position by today’s standards). He married my great grandmother in 1915, she had also come from Cervinka, Yugoslavia. My grandfather was born in a nice area on the east side of Manhattan in 1919.

My great grandfather had a brother who died when he was young. He had a step-sister who never married but came to the United States as a ladies maid for a wealthy woman (this was a very good life for her). My aunt believes that most of the other Krumbachs remained in Cervinka until the WWII era when they were evicted from their homes and businesses and forced to walk back to Germany, leaving everything behind. Wow, that’s sad. What a mess of things WWII was.

But wait, back up a second to happy things, my great grandfather was an engineer in a brewery? That is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard! I just had to learn more about this brewery. I discovered The Good Old Days of Beer in New York at beernexus.com, which talks all about the brewery.

Records online are a bit confusing, but as far as I can tell the first Ruppert family brewery in the US was started by Franz Ruppert who was an immigrant from Bavaria, and his son Jacob Ruppert Sr. created his own brewery in his father’s footsteps and his son Jacob Ruppert Jr. eventually took over the brewery’s business. At one time the brewery was the third largest in the United States, coming behind Busch (which was churning out 1 million barrels a year) and NYC competitor Ehret, who was pushing 600,000 barrels a year. The brewery was known for high quality beer and the ambition Jacob Ruppert showed with it came to salesmanship and making connections with “every German organization he could find.”

In 1913 the brewery made their final expansion, the timing is right for my great grandfather to have started working there as soon as he came to the United States. My great grandfather got to know Jacob Ruppert Jr. quite well, and by then Ruppert had spent time in Congress, served as a Colonel in the National Guard and in 1914 he became the owner of the New York Yankees (as such, most of the info online is about his ownership of the Yankees rather than the brewery).

Alas, the 18th Amendment came along and introduced Prohibition. The Jacob Ruppert brewery went out of business. Stupid 18th Amendment. EDIT: Not true! See this post for info from the great great grandson of Jacob Ruppert, he set me straight.

I might not take pride in accomplishments of others (even family), but it’s neat to be able to say I have solid family roots in the golden age of NYC Brewing!

Last month I posted about how I had given up on my Belkin wireless card and wanted to replace it. answered my plea and within a week I had the linux happy Linksys WPC11. It Just Worked in Ubuntu when I plugged it in. So awesome. The range is better than that of the Belkin card too, and it runs solid. It’s so nice when things work, I’m posting so long after this success because 1) I forgot to earlier and 2) I thought it was worth mentioning even if it is so late. Thanks again Colin!

In other hardware news I got my new graphics card this week and am back to my 1600×1200 resolution and maximum productivity!

I posted to the PLUG list last night, for the first time in a while. Plans for the website and input needed from members. I’ll be spending some time this weekend working on it.

The PA LoCo team site is live! MeetLinux.com is the url, provided by a company in the area along with hosting space. The original plan for the site was to use Joomla but then I joined the web project and tossed that idea out the window. I don’t like giant CMSes and since all we really needed was a “news” function and member logins so others could submit content I decided to go with WordPress. I grabbed a template and had the site in it’s current state within just a couple days of tweaking. I’m quite happy with it. The next step with the team is getting the mailing list set up, that’s something the Ubuntu side handles though since we’ll be getting a ubuntu-us-pa list. It’s pretty exciting that I joined the team just as things started getting rolling. Today they had an installfest meeting down in Philly to work out details of an upcoming installfest – I didn’t attend the meeting but I left some dates I’m free with the team so they would think of me when planning the date, I would really like to attend the installfest.

And now that I am involved with this LoCo I officially have to draw a line here with my volunteer work. I am busy, bordering on too busy. I technically have time to handle everything on my plate right now, plus more, but I am not too keen on burying myself in volunteer work all day. I have a husband, a house to maintain, kitties to play with and the time I spend reading technical articles and catching up with friends is crazy important to being happy. Having volunteer work turn into a chore is not something I’d like to see happen again.

Speaking of having a life away from my computer, most of my day today fit that. The weather hovered on “gloomy” all day, even if it didn’t end up raining. I was able to get grocery shopping done, run a bunch of errands. This afternoon I ended up at the video store and rented Spinal Tap (which I’d never seen) and Life of Brian, which I really should own but somehow don’t – too bad they weren’t selling it. I did buy Young Frankenstein, which is one of our favorite comedies, I was going to just rent it but renting was $4 and buying it new was only $10.

I also made the plunge to feisty today on my desktop. It was one of the zillions of journal entries I’ve seen lately about beryl that did it. I couldn’t be bothered previously to muck about with config files and graphics card settings to get it running in edgy, so the official support in feisty was a desirable feature. The upgrade went flawlessly, booting into the new kernel didn’t break anything! And beryl? 2 commands:

sudo apt-get install beryl beryl-manager emerald-themes (installs stuff)
beryl-manage (starts beryl)

Voila! I was really impressed. It’s not flawless on my 5 year old machine (a little jitter when minimizing windows), but it’s quite usable. I won’t be using it full time, but it’s sure a cool thing to show off. When I showed it to Michael this afternoon it was as close to getting him to say “Maybe I should install Ubuntu” as I’ve ever gotten ;)

I’m upgrading to fiesty on my laptop as I’m writing this, somewhere in it’s lifetime (it started out as a breezy box) it appears to have gotten the impression that it’s running software raid, which is neat because it only has one harddrive. I need to track that down, the poor thing is quite confused and I have been getting a lot of mdadm errors during the upgrade… and I just saved this post to boot into my new feisty kernel. The upgrade wasn’t as flawless as my desktop one, I had to `dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg` to get a resolution better than 800×600. Now opera is segfaulting, which is annoying. Nice, firefox just did too. Oh boy… must go off to investigate.

Last night I didn’t feel like eating in so Michael suggested we go out for sushi. We hadn’t been out for sushi in ages. There was a sushi place down in Jenkintown that we used to go to, but the last few visits have not impressed us much – I guess the neighborhood is just getting sucked into the city and going bad. There is a sushi place in Skippack which is only about 4 miles from our house, but we weren’t overly impressed with them. So Michael hit Google and found Bonjung Japanese Restaurant in Collegeville. Sushi is always a risky experience, but I was up to it.

We were pleasantly surprised. The prices were a bit high at first glance, but when we saw the generous portions of fish we could see why. And FRESH! Boy that was some fresh fish, probably the best salmon I’ve ever had at a sushi bar. Best of all? Michael requested a special roll that was quite untraditional and after going back and forth with the waitress about specifics a few times she presented us with exactly what he wanted. She got a nice tip for her efforts. I think we found a new sushi place! And it’s only 15 minutes from our house. Wait… that’s dangerous…

So, who saw the DSA on Sunday and thought of me? Hmm? Anyone? Webcalendar is fixed up! The credit almost entirely goes to my co-maintainer, while I was mourning my graphics card all weekend he was busy following up on our mandate from the security team and patching sarge (oldstable). We also did another release this week, added php5 to the dependencies (along with php4) after far too much discussion on -mentors and the bug reports about how it would break if you had php4 installed but libapache-mod-php5 – dependencies are satisfied but it won’t work. I made the executive decision to move forward based on precedent (other packages support both 4 and 5) and wanting to keep php4 support.

Which reminds me I ordered a new GFX card.

Local Linux stuff – the PLUG website has sort of limped along since left a few years ago. kept all meeting information up to date (which is the important part!) and would routinely update the other local groups pages. Since I’m now running PLUG Montco he gave me access a couple months back and I have big dreams! Actually, not that big, I just want to freshen up parts of the site that have started to collect dust. I dropped an email to the other admins and “interested parties” on Sunday.

There is an active Pennsylvania Ubuntu LoCo! How cool is that? Forums here. I was musing in an email to a fellow I met at PLUG recently about how I should contact the one I thought existed and he laughed and said he was one of the administrators! Haha! They’re just getting started, launched a website and have some meetings an installfests planned. I offered to help out with some startup administrative stuff that they need help with because I’m a sucker for that sort of thing. Oh, and I love Ubuntu.

Last year I only read a half dozen books. That’s like a drought to me, when I think back on the year I want to say “I didn’t read anything last year!” and frown. Looking back I had a lot going on last year, between work (full time + contract), planning a wedding, and diving into projects like Ubuntu-Women it’s no surprise that I didn’t find much time for reading.

But I love reading and this year I’m working to make time for it. I’ve started reading most nights before I go to bed. I’ve found that an 30-60 minutes of of reading before I sleep works wonders on how well I sleep and how satisfied I feel in general. While I’m still behind what I was reading in years past, I’ve managed to get through about 6 books so far this year, already hitting last year’s number. Yay! As for what I’m reading – it’s a lot of scifi and fantasy, with some history mixed in for fun. I mentioned Saints by Orson Scott Card a little while back, I’m almost finished with it and it’s a fascinating “sort of historical” look at the early days of the Mormon church that has me engrossed.

I love books.

I got at 5AM this morning, far too early. But I was in one of those wonderful moods where I should clean out my inbox and catch up with things and mails I tend to put in the “this is an easy/fun little thing, I’ll do it later when I’m unwinding” category. It’s surprising how little I end up finding time to just unwind – usually it’s when I’m upstairs with my laptop listening to Michael do his radio show on Friday or Saturday night.

Michael and I went to see Grindhouse (annoying official website) recently. It was one of the best movies we’ve seen in the theaters in a very long time! The audience was pretty awesome too, laughing at all the appropriate grotesque parts. As with most people, I adored Planet Terror, it’s now up there in my top 5 zombie movies ever. Death Proof was a bit less fun, but only because the middle dragged on for so long, just girls hanging out talking …zzZZzzzZ, the climax mostly made up for it. The “fake” trailers were a riot, Werewolf Women of the S.S. and Thanksgiving almost had me in tears laughing.

And, how can this be? There is another movie in theaters we want to see! That never happens. Hot Fuzz is now at our local theater! It’s a movie made by the guys who did Shaun of the Dead and the reviews have been fantastic. Maybe we’ll go this weekend.

fuse is one of the coolest things ever. I do some of the accounting at work and all the scripts written to generate invoices were created for local use. Going into the office just to write invoices is silly! So my boss dug up this article Mounting remote filesystems using SSH. Very cool stuff – it’s still a little slow (it’s pulling data from a DSL line that has other stuff running on it) but way better than something crazy like ssh -x – which also runs the application remotely. With fuse I just yank the documents as needed and can run the programs that manipulate them locally. The more I learn about what can be done with fuse the more I like it, the gmail stuff is pretty cool.

Speaking of gmail, a while back I posted a link to Google GMail Loader over on 13thHour.net (where I tend to dump cool links when I have time). This past weekend I checked it out. It’s a neat idea in theory – it parses archived mail (like in mbox format, it supports a few formats) and then forwards it to gmail. Woo I can keep all my emails archives up on gmail, they’d be searchable and since gmail automagically adds the contacts I’d have an impressive addressbook too!

The downsides? It forwards, you just specify an address. Makes it easier than normal to mailbomb someone if you’re willing to get your IP flagged by gmail for spamming, but don’t tell people I told you. It forwards, rather than bouncing! So the received time isn’t preserved. You have to open the email itself to see the time and date. It only sends to your Inbox, I put up filters for the “To:” field to filter everything within gmail (not sure if this is fixable). It uses the python GUI which is clunky and a bit ugly. I should check out the command line version.

Ubuntu released 7.04 (feisty fawn) this week! I’ve had several people ask me if I’m using it yet, and the answer remains “No.” As much as I’d like to have the time to run a beta system and submit bugs and be a good contributer, I honestly don’t have time. Plus I use my machine for work and it would be very bad if I broke it one day and had trouble getting my work done (even if I’ve never broken Ubuntu that badly before…). I’ll upgrade in a couple months when the dust settles and the repositories let me download at disgustingly fast speeds again :)

Some of you may have noticed that Xelium is now using XBL for it’s blacklisting/glining. This is an aggressive step on our part, it has a lot of unfortunate false positives, and have already been snagged by it. Here are some tips: Identify your nickname on connect! We have it set up to only warn us if you identify within a certain time period and are on a flagged IP. Contact me on AIM: Leia26 or on other IRC servers listed in my LJ profile if you get glined – our glines for this only last for a day but if you want to get on an identify immediately I can remove the ban for you.

I didn’t say much about my experience with packaging webcalendar in Debian aside from the basics, but I have to say that my experience went something like this:

* Overwhelmed!
* Calmed down by my previous sponsor and who pointed me to the proper documentation
* Still a bit overwhelmed, this is quite a learning curve
* Very happy found a co-maintainer (who is a Debian Developer)
* Very very happy I have a very active co-maintainer (he probably did more than I did when all is said and done)
* Scared of being torn apart by the Debian security community, put on riot gear
* Oh no, I made a mistake!
* Thankful the mistake is “no problem *at all*” according to the fellow that caught me on it

To be honest I’m hitting the documentation constantly, especially when handling bug reports and feeling a bit apprehensive about some things. I’ve made progress though, and as a whole IRC has been an invaluable tool in connecting with the real humans in the project. I still need to take up my mentor’s suggestion of joining #debian-security and explaining that part of my day job is tracking security problems and reporting bugs. Getting friendly with them would help a lot.

Oh and Debian Women rocks.

Finally, I’m working on a project over at DarkMyst. I think it’s still “top secret” so I can’t really discuss it, but we really need people experienced with Drupal (or if you know PHP and can spend the time and get up to speed real quick) to hop on board. If you’re interested email: Ryan [at] DarkMyst.org (and Cc: Lyz@PrincessLeia.com so I know to expect you). Trust me, it’s a cool project and there are a bunch of great people working on it.

I haven’t felt like writing lately, but I have to mention a few things.

My graphics card died this morning. SUCK. I have an old ATI card in my computer for the time being. Hopefully I can get a replacement soon, I miss my 1600×1200 dearly and the whole machine is slowed down by this old card :\ Will probably just pick up the cheapest agp geforce I can find.

My cousin Melissa came up recently! She was taking a road trip to New England and dropped by to spend breakfast with Michael and I. It was nice to see her, she got us caught up on family news and everything before heading our around noon.

I’m the new Debian Maintainer for WebCalendar! I’ve been working with my co-maintainer on it for a few weeks, it was a bit of a mess when we adopted it. There were 16 open bugs, half of them we closed, a few sent upstream and a couple more to be closed in our next released. The learning curve is pretty intense, but my co-maintainer is pretty awesome and my sponsor from dglog is still available to answer all my dumb questions. I’ve also hopped on the debian-mentors mailing list. I’m getting better at navigating all the Debian documentation, but it all seems a bit disjointed.

Beer! Tried a few new ones over the past few weeks. I was really impressed Victory Sapphire Bock I had on tap at Victory recently. It’s a hoppy bock that has this amazing clean finish. Sly Fox has a new ale on top, the Amarillo IPA that I enjoyed and kicked myself for not bringing a growler with us to the brewery that day! They also have the Sly Fox Helles Bock on tap, which was my favorte Bock until the Sapphire came along – will have to get myself a pint of that next time we’re up at Sly Fox.

And now I’m off to pick up my dinner from the pizzeria up the street.

Her favorite toy is a yellow fluffy ball, which she has in her mouth heading for my desk to interrupt me while I’m trying to work!

Simcoe and Caligula on a (yep, that’s a cord) electric blanket! Spoiled critters.

Simcoe loves the fireplace

Mugshot!

And yes, as others said over on Michael’s blog, she changed colors. Apparently Siamese do that until they’re adults.

She’s still evil, but it’s so hard for me to say that right now because she’s snuggled on my lap at the moment. So cute.

It’s snowing. Not some flurries that don’t stick to anything – real actual snow.

My poor poor daffodils!

My daffodils have had a tough season. They started to come out of the ground back in January when we were having spring-like weather for a few weeks. Then some snow came, then an ice storm, then it got nice again and now snow in April.

I’m not really complaining about the snow, summer can wait as long as it wants to come! But it make it so I couldn’t go to the gym or run the errands before work I wanted to run – no sense in going out in the sleet and snow with crazy drivers if I didn’t absolutely need to.

Last Saturday Kris from my old job came over. She’s really into gardening and gave me a few shade and wet ground loving plants (woo!) as well as a few nice flowers that I was able to get planted earlier this week. It’s nice to finally have a “real life” person to consult about gardening things. That evening we all went out to dinner up at Ortino’s and I introduced her to the lambic – she chose the peach and was suitably impressed. Woo another convert!

But the primary reason she was coming over was to spend the night so we could leave Sunday morning for the drive down to Baltimore for the joint PhillyChix/DC Chix meeting.

We left Sunday morning at 6:30, swung by Dunkin Donuts for some breakfast and hopped on the expressway. We took 422 to 202 to I-95 down into Baltimore, it was a simple drive and getting to the Aquarium in Baltimore was pretty easy (even if there was some construction at the exit). The drive down only took a little over 2 hours, so after parking we were there to meet Lauren, Katie and Raven shortly before 9AM.

The National Aquarium was great! I’d never been to Baltimore before, so it was all quite an experience – and I took pictures.

There were tons of fish, but I didn’t get pictures of many because they were dimly lit and moved too much for the little digital camera I brought with me.

Sea Anemones! I love these things.

There were plenty of turtles.

There was an impressive Australia exhibit, this photo catches some of it’s glory – as well as some giant bats hanging from the ceiling!

This frog was the best. They have a big frog exhibit this summer, frogs are great.

A photo of Baltimore Harbor from inside the aquarium.

I squealed like a little girl when I saw this, and then I felt silly. I had heard about the campaign to dress up the mailboxes, but I don’t go into cities much and didn’t expect to actually see one.

I love aquariums.

Katie’s pictures from the day are here and Lauren’s are here. Lauren’s include a group shot!

Uploaded by elwing on 5 Apr ’07, 6.49am PDT.
Kris, Lyz, Katie, Lauren (Raven not pictured)

We left the aquarium around noon and headed to the Capitol City Brewery. This is the second time we’ve had a meetup and the second time we’ve ended up at a brewery. It’s all my doing, and I’m the only one who really drinks beer. I need to stop hijacking meetings like this :P Actually everyone enjoys brewery food even if I was the only one drinking beer. I ended up with a Amber Waves Ale: An American original West Coast style or California ale. Ours is medium bodied with an intense floral hop character featuring variants grown in Oregon and Washington. This beer style is a recent development in the craft brewing industry. I was quite impressed with it, and brought a growler home to Michael. Oh and I had a crabcake sandwich, because that’s what you’re supposed to do in Maryland. The conversation was great too – we even talked about Linux a little ;) It’s just so relaxing to kick back with an awesome group of women from time to time, I look forward to our next meetup.

It was almost 2PM by the time we left the brewery and I decided it was time to head back so I could get home at a reasonable time and hopefully miss some of the traffic on 95. The ride back was a bit slower than the ride in, we did hit a bit of traffic, but we were back at the house before 5PM.

The other Linux event I attended this past week was the PLUG meeting in downtown Philly. I don’t generally get down to these, but I had a very good reason to this time – Michael was presenting! He did a talk on “Cross-Platform Digital Audio Streaming” and I really enjoyed it. Slides here and a photo here. Yay myn :) After the meeting we had a keysigning – which I hadn’t done in FAR too long. Then we dropped by the Best House with the rest of the PLUG group to chat for a few minutes before driving home. We managed to make it home by 10:30.

And Debian 4.0 released was released today! Woohoo! We only have two sarge machines here at home (work is another story, as my co-worker so helpfully reminded me in IRC this morning, hah!), and we’ll probably wait a couple months to bring those up to etch, but it’s still nice to see Etch finally go stable, it’s been almost 2 years since sarge did.

While I’m blabbering about Linux, I might as well mention that I was in the rare mood of wanting to “make my desktop pretty” yesterday and have quite a lovely pale purple setup right now. I also added hooks that will allow good access management to the dozens of servers at work, I love XFCE4.

Finally, Happy Easter everyone, I managed to get my Robin Eggs and Cadbury Creme Eggs yesterday, so I have been munching on them all morning – so bad! But so good… My chocolate intake has gone down since leaving my old job, so I figure it’s OK for me to indulge myself today. I also picked up some young gouda, port wine cheese and Deli-style rye Triscuits to enjoy while watching zombie movies this afternoon.

Oh, and there are flurries out today, a white Easter? My poor daffodils!