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Simcoe’s October Checkup

Friday, Oct 21st, 2016 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

On October 13th MJ and I took Simcoe in to the vet for her quarterly checkup. The last time she had been in was back in June.

As usual, she wasn’t thrilled about this vet visit plan.

This time her allergies were flaring up and we were preparing to increase her dosage of Atopica to fight back on some of the areas she was scratching and breaking out. The poor thing continues to suffer from constipation, so we’re continuing to try to give her wet food with pumpkin or fiber mixed in, but it’s not easy since food isn’t really her thing. We also have been keeping an eye on her weight and giving her an appetite stimulant here and there when I’m around to monitor her. Back in June her weight was at 8.4lbs, and this time she’s down to 8.1. I hope to spend more time giving her the stimulant after my next trip.

Sadly her bloodwork related to kidney values continues to worsen. Her CRE levels are the worst we’ve ever seen, with them shooting up higher than when she first crashed and we were notified of her renal failure back in 2011, almost five years ago. From 5.5 in June, she’s now at a very concerning 7.0.

Her BUN has stayed steady at 100, the same as it was in June.

My travel has been pretty hard on her, and I feel incredibly guilty about this. She’s more agitated and upset than we’d like to see so the vet prescribed a low dose of Alprazolam that she can be given during the worst times. We’re going to reduce her Calcitriol, but otherwise are continuing with the care routine.

It’s upsetting to see her decline in this way, and I have noticed a slight drop in energy as well. I’m still hoping we have a lot more time with my darling kitten-cat, but she turns ten next month and these value are definitely cause for concern.

But let’s not leave it on a sad note. The other day she made herself at home in a box that had the sun pointed directly inside it. SO CUTE!

She also tried to go with MJ on a business trip this week.

I love this cat.

Filed under: simcoe

Seeking a new role

Monday, Oct 17th, 2016 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

Today I was notified that I am being laid off from the upstream OpenStack Infrastructure job I have through HPE. It’s a workforce reduction and our whole team at HPE was hit. I love this job. I work with a great team on the OpenStack Infrastructure team. HPE has treated me very well, supporting travel to conferences I’m speaking at, helping to promote my books (Common OpenStack Deployments and The Official Ubuntu Book, 9th and 8th editions) and other work. I spent almost four years there and I’m grateful for what they did for my career.

But now I have to move on.

I’ve worked as a Linux Systems Administrator for the past decade and I’d love to continue that. I live in San Francisco so there are a lot of ops positions around here that I can look at, but I really want to find a place where my expertise with open source, writing and public speaking can will be used and appreciated. I’d also be open to a more Community or Developer Evangelist role that leverages my systems and cloud background.

Whatever I end up doing next the tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) version of what I need in my next role are as follows:

  • Most of my job to be focused on open source
  • Support for travel to conferences where I speak at (6-12 per year)
  • Work from home
  • Competitive pay

My resume is over here: http://elizabethkjoseph.com

Now the long version, and a quick note about what I do today.

OpenStack project Infrastructure Team

I’ve spent nearly four years working full time on the OpenStack project Infrastructure Team. We run all the services that developers on the OpenStack project interact with on a daily basis, from our massive Continuous Integration system to translations and the Etherpads. I love it there. I also just wrote a book about OpenStack.

HPE has paid me to do this upstream OpenStack project Infrastructure work full time, but we have team members from various companies. I’d love to find a company in the OpenStack ecosystem willing to pay for me to continue this and support me like HPE did. All the companies who use and contribute to OpenStack rely upon the infrastructure our team provides, and as a root/core member of this team I have an important role to play. It would be a shame for me to have to leave.

However, I am willing to move on from this team and this work for something new. During my career thus far I’ve spent time working on both the Ubuntu and Debian projects, so I do have experience with other large open source projects, and reducing my involvement in them as my life dictates.

Most of my job to be focused on open source

This is extremely important to me. I’ve spent the past 15 years working intensively in open source communities, from Linux Users Groups to small and large open source projects. Today I work on a team where everything we do is open source. All system configs, Puppet modules, everything but the obvious private data that needs to be private for the integrity of the infrastructure (SSH keys, SSL certificates, passwords, etc). While I’d love a role where this is also the case, I realize how unrealistic it is for a company to have such an open infrastructure.

An alternative would be a position where I’m one of the ops people who understands the tooling (probably from gaining an understanding of it internally) and then going on to help manage the projects that have been open sourced by the team. I’d make sure best practices are followed for the open sourcing of things, that projects are paid attention to and contributors outside the organization are well-supported. I’d also go to conferences to present on this work, write about it on a blog somewhere (company blog? opensource.com?) and be encouraging and helping other team members do the same.

Support for travel to conferences where I speak at (to chat at 6-12 per year)

I speak a lot and I’m good at it. I’ve given keynotes at conferences in Europe, South America and right here in the US. Any company I go to work for will need to support me in this by giving me the time to prepare and give talks, and by compensating me for travel for conferences where I’m speaking.

Work from home

I’ve been doing this for the past ten years and I’d really struggle to go back into an office. Since operations, open source and travel doesn’t need me to be in an office, I’d prefer to stick with the flexibility and time working from home gives me.

For the right job I may be willing to consider going into an office or visiting client/customer sites (SF Bay Area is GREAT for this!) once a week, or some kind of arrangement where I travel to a home office for a week here and there. I can’t relocate for a position at this time.

Competitive pay

It should go without saying, but I do live in one of the most expensive places in the world and need to be compensated accordingly. I love my work, I love open source, but I have bills to pay and I’m not willing to compromise on this at this point in my life.

Contact me

If you think your organization would be interested in someone like me and can help me meet my requirements, please reach out via email at lyz@princessleia.com

I’m pretty sad today about the passing of what’s been such a great journey for me at HPE and in the OpenStack community, but I’m eager to learn more about the doors this change is opening up for me.

Filed under: openstack, ubuntu planet, work

Autumn in Philadelphia

Sunday, Oct 2nd, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I spent this past week in Philadelphia. For those of you following along at home, I was there just a month before, for FOSSCON and other time with friends. This time our trip was also purposeful, we were in town for the gravestone unveiling for MJ’s grandmother, to celebrate my birthday with Philly friends and to work on a secret mission (secret until November).

Before all that, I spent some time enjoying the city upon arrival. The first morning I was there I got in early and a friend picked me up at the airport. After breakfast we headed toward the Philadelphia Zoo. We killed some time with a walk before making our way up to the zoo itself, where I insisted we spend a bit of time watching the street cars (they call them trolleys) on the SEPTA Route 15 that goes right past the zoo. These SEPTA PCC cars are direct relatives to the ones that run in San Francisco, in fact, San Francisco bought a large portion of their PCC fleet directly from SEPTA several decades ago. Almost all the PCC cars you see running on the F-line in San Francisco are from Philadelphia. It was fun to have some time to hang out and enjoy the cars in their home city.

And of course the zoo! I’ve been to the zoo a few times, but it’s a nice sized one and I always enjoy going. I don’t remember them having an aye-aye exhibit, so it was nice to see that, particularly since the one at the San Francisco Zoo has been closed for some time. The penguins are always great to see, and the red pandas are super adorable.


Humboldt penguins at the Philadelphia Zoo

More photos from the zoo here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157673262888271

Tuesday I spent working and spending time with my friend Danita. Camped out on her couch I got a pile of work done and later in the evening we went out to do a bit of shopping. That evening MJ arrived in Philadelphia from a work trip he was on and picked me up to grab some dinner.

Wednesday morning was the gravestone unveiling. According to Jewish tradition, this ceremony is completed approximately a year after the passing of your loved one and coincides with the conclusion of the year of mourning. We had 10 people there, and though the weather did threaten rain, it held out as we made our way through some words about her life, prayers and quiet moments together. Afterwards the family attending all went out to lunch together.

Thursday’s big event was my 35th birthday! In the morning I went out Core Creek Park a few miles from our hotel to go out for a run. The weather wasn’t entirely cooperative, but I wasn’t about to be put off by a hint of drizzle. It was totally the right thing to do, I parked near the lake in the park and did a run/walk of a couple miles on a trail around that edge of the park. I saw a deer, lots of birds and was generally pleased with the sights. I love autumn in Philadelphia and this was such a perfect way to experience it.

That night MJ drove us down to the city and met up with a whole pile of friends (Danita, Crissi, Mike and Jess, Jon, David, Tim, Mike and Heidi, Walt, and Paul) for a birthday party at The Continental near Penn’s Landing. I love this place. We had our wedding party dinner here, and we eat here, or at the mid-town location, almost every time we’re in town. MJ and Danita had reserved a private room which allowed for mingling throughout the night. Danita helped me pick out some killer shoes that I had fun wearing with my awesome dress and I drank a lot of Twizzle martinis (Smirnoff citrus, strawberry puree, lemon, red licorice wheel) along with all the spectacular food they brought to our tables through the night. There was also a delicious walnut-free carrot cake …with only 5 candles, which was appreciated, hah! Did I mention I drank a lot of martinis? It was an awesome night, my friends are the best.

Late Friday and into Saturday were secret mission days, but I took some time for work like every day and we also got to see friends and family both days. I also was able to get down to the hotel gym on Saturday morning to visit the treadmill and spend some time in the pool.

Our flight took us home to our kitties on Saturday evening. I’ve been incredibly stressed out lately with a lot going on with my career (work, book, other open source things) and personally (where to begin…), but it was a very good trip over all.

Rosh Hashanah begins tonight and means a day of observation tomorrow too. Tuesday and Wednesday are packed with work and spending evenings with MJ before I fly off again on Thursday. This time to Ohio for the Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus where my talk is A Tour of OpenStack Deployment Scenarios. While I’m there I also have plans to meet up with my Ubuntu community friends (including going to the Columbus Zoo!) and most of the crew I went to Ghana with in 2012.

Filed under: family, food, philadelphia, travel

MUNI Heritage Weekend

Sunday, Oct 2nd, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Before heading to Philadelphia last weekend I took time to spend Saturday with my friend Mark at MUNI Heritage Weekend. As an active transit advocate in San Francisco, Mark is a fun person to attend such an event with. I like to think I know a fair amount about things on rails in San Francisco, but he’s much more knowledgeable about transit in general.

I was pretty excited about this day, I was all decked out in my cable car earrings and Seashore Trolley Museum t-shirt.

The day began with a walk down Market to meet Mark near the railway museum, which was the center of all the activity for the day. I arrived a bit early and spent my time snapping pictures of all the interesting streetcars and buses coming around. When we met up our first adventure was to take a ride on our first vintage bus of the day, the 5300!

Now, as far as vintage goes, the 5300 doesn’t go very far back in history. This bus was an electric from 1975 and it had a good run, still riding around the city just over a decade ago. This was a long ride, taking us down Howard, South Van Ness, all the way down to Mission and 25th street, then back to the railway museum. It took about 45 minutes, during which time Mark and I had lots of time to catch up.

We then had some time to walk around a bit and see what else was out. Throughout the day we saw one of the Blackpool “boat” streetcars, the Melbourne streetcar (which I still haven’t ridden in!) the Number 1 streetcar and more.

Next up was a ride on the short 042 from 1938! This was a fun one, it’s the oldest bus in the fleet and the blog post about the event had this to say:

A surprise participant was Muni’s oldest bus, the 042, built in 1938 by the White Motor Company. Its engine had given up the ghost, but the top-notch mechanics at Woods Motor Coach Division swapped it out for one in a White bus Market Street Railway’s Paul Wells located in the Santa Cruz Mountains and repatriated. The 042 operated like a dream looping around Union Square all weekend, as did 1970 GMC “fishbowl” 3287, shown behind it

Pretty cool! As the quote suggests, it was not electric so it was able to do its own thing in the Union Square loop, in a ride that only took about 20 minutes.

Then, more viewing of random cars. I think the highlight of my time then was getting to see the 578 “dinky” close up. Built in 1896, this street car looks quite a bit like a cable car, making it a distinctive sight among all the other street cars.

By then we were well into the late afternoon and decided to grab some late lunch. Continuing our transit-related day, I took him up Howard street to get a view of the progress on the new Transbay Transit Center. After walking past it on street level, we went up to the roof deck where we live to get some views and pictures from up above.

This was definitely a bus-heavy heritage day for me, but it was fun. Lots more photos from the day here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157674240825576

That evening it was time for me to get off the buses and rails to take another form of transportation, I was off to Philadelphia on a plane!

Filed under: events, san francisco

Yak Coloring

Tuesday, Sep 27th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

A couple cycles ago I asked Ronnie Tucker, artist artist and creator of Full Circle Magazine, to create a werewolf coloring page for the 15.10 release (details here). He then created another for Xenial Xerus, see here.

He’s now created one for the upcoming Yakkety Yak release! So if you’re sick of all the yak shaving you’re doing as we prepare for this release, you may consider giving yak coloring a try.

But that’s not the only yak! We have Tom Macfarlane in the Canonical Design Team once again for sending me the SVG to update the Animal SVGs section of the Official Artwork page on the Ubuntu wiki. They’re sticking with a kind of origami theme this time for our official yak.

Download the SVG version for printing from the wiki page or directly here.

Filed under: animals, LoCo, ubuntu planet

Beer and trains in Germany

Saturday, Sep 24th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I spent most of this past week in Germany with the OpenStack Infrastructure and QA teams doing a sprint at the SAP offices in Walldorf, I wrote about it here.

The last (and first!) time I was in Germany was for the same purpose, a sprint, that time in Darmstadt where I snuck in a tiny amount of touristing but due troubles with my gallbladder, I could have any fried foods or beer. Well, I had one beer to celebrate Germany winning the World Cup, but I regretted it big time.

This time was different, finally I could have liters of German beer! And I did. The first night there I even had some wiener schnitzel (fried veal!), even if we were all too tired from our travels to leave the hotel that night. We went out to beer gardens every other night after that, taking in the beautiful late summer weather and enjoying great beers.


Photo in the center by Chris Hoge (source)

But I have a confession to make: I don’t like pilsners and that makes Belgium my favorite beer country in Europe. Still, Germany has quite the title. Fortunately while they are the default, pilsners were not my only option. I indulged in dark lagers and hefeweizens all week. Our evening in Heidelberg I also had an excellent Octoberfest Märzen by Heidelberger, which was probably my favorite beer of the whole trip.

Now I’m getting ahead of myself because I was excited about all the beer. I arrived on Sunday, sadly much later than I had intended. My original flights had been rescheduled so ended up meeting my colleague Clark at the Frankfurt airport around 4PM to catch our trains to Walldorf. The train station is right there in the airport, and clear signs meant a no fuss transfer halfway through our journey to get to the next train. We were on the trains for about an hour before arriving at Wiesloch-Walldorf station. A ten Euro cab ride then got us to the hotel where we met up with several other colleagues for drinks.

Of course we were there to work, so that’s what we spend 9-5 each day doing, but the evenings were ours to explore our little corner of Germany. The first night we just walked into Walldorf after work and enjoyed drinks and food until the sun went down. Walldorf is a very cute little town and the outdoor seating at the beer garden we went to was a wonderful treat, especially since the weather was so warm and clear. We spent Wednesday night in Walldorf too.

More photos from Walldorf here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157670828593814/

Tuesday night was our big night out. We all headed out to the nearby Heidelberg for a big group dinner. After parking, we had a lovely short walk to the restaurant which took me by a shop that sold post cards! I picked up a trio of cards for my mother and sisters, as I typically do when traveling. The walk also gave a couple of us time to take pictures of the city before the sun went down.

Dinner was at Zum Weissen Schwanen (The White Swan). That was my four beer night.

After the meal several of us took a nice walk around the city a bit more. We got to look up and see the massive, lit up, Heidelberg Castle. It’s a pretty exceptional place, I’d love to properly visit some time. The post cards I sent to family all included the castle.

The drive back to the hotel was fun too. I got a tiny taste of the German autobahn as we got up to 220 kilometers per hour on our way back to the hotel before our exit came up. Woo!

My pile of Heidelberg photos are here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157674174957385

Thursday morning was my big morning of trains. I flew into Frankfurt like everyone else, but I flew home out of Dusseldorf because it was several hundred dollars cheaper. The problem is Walldorf and Dusseldorf aren’t exactly close, but I could spend a couple hours on European ICE (Inter-City Express) and get there. MJ highly recommended I try it out since I like trains, and with the simplicity of routing he convinced me to take a route from Mannheim all the way to Dusseldorf Airport with one simple connection, which just required walking across the platform.

I’m super thankful he convinced me to take the trains. The ticket wasn’t very expensive and I really do like trains. In addition to being reasonably priced, they’re fast, on time and all the signs were great so I didn’t feel worried about getting lost or ending up in the wrong place. The signs even report where each coach will show up on the platform so I had no trouble figuring out where to stand to get to my assigned seat.

I took a few more pictures while on my train adventure, here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157670930346613

And so I spent a couple hours on my way to Dusseldorf. I was a bit tired since my first train left the station at 7:36AM, so I mostly just listened to music and stared out the window. My flight out of Dusseldorf was uneventful, and was a direct to San Francisco so I was able to come home to my kitties in the early evening. Unfortunately MJ had left home the day before, so I’ll have to wait until we’re both in Philadelphia next week to see him.

Filed under: beer, travel

OpenStack QA/Infrastructure Meetup in Walldorf

Saturday, Sep 24th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I spent this week in the lovely town of Walldorf, Germany with about 25 of my OpenStack Quality Assurance and Infrastructure colleagues. We were there for a late-cycle sprint, where we all huddled in a couple of rooms for three days to talk, script and code our way through some challenges that are much easier to tackle when all the key players are in a room together. QA and Infra have always been a good match for an event like this since we’re so tightly linked as things QA works on are supported by and tested in the Continuous Integration system we run.

Our venue this time around were the SAP offices in Walldorf. They graciously donated the space to us for this event, and kept us blessedly fed, hydrated and caffeinated throughout the day.

Each day we enjoyed a lovely walk from and to the hotel many of us stayed at. We lucked out and there wasn’t any rain while we were there so we got to take in the best of late summer weather in Germany. Our walk took us through a corn field, past flowers, gave us a nice glimpse at the town of Walldorf on the other side of the highway and then began in on the approach to the SAP buildings of which there are many.

The first day began with an opening from our host at the SAP offices, Marc Koderer and by the QA project lead Ken’ichi Ohmichi. From there we went through the etherpad for the event to figure out where to begin. A big chunk of the Infrastructure team went to their own room to chat about Zuulv3 and some of the work on Ansible, and a couple of us hung back with the QA team to move some of their work along.

Spending time with the QA folks I learned about future plans for a more useful series of bugday graphs. I also worked with Spencer Krum and Matt Treinish to land a few patches related to the new Firehose service. Firehose is a MQTT-based unified message bus that seeks to encompass all the developer-facing infra alerts and updates in a single stream. This includes job results from Gerrit, updates on bugs from Launchpad, specific logs that are processed by logstash and more. At the beginning of the sprint only Gerrit was feeding into it using germqtt, but by the end of Monday we had Launchpad bugs submitting events over email via lpmqtt. The work was mostly centered around setting up Cyrus with Exim and then configuring the accounts and MX records, and trying to do this all in a way that the rest of the team would be happy with. All seems to have worked out, and at the end of the day Matt sent out an email announcing it: Announcing firehose.openstack.org.

That evening we gathered in the little town of Walldorf to have a couple beers, dinner, and relax in a lovely beer garden for a few hours as the sun went down. It was really nice to catch up with some of my colleagues that I have less day to day contact with. I especially enjoyed catching up with Yolanda and Gema, both of whom I’ve known for years through their past work at Canonical on Ubuntu. The three of us also were walk buddies back to the hotel, before which I demanded a quick photo together.

Tuesday morning we started off by inviting Khai Do over to give a quick demo of the Gerrit verify plugin. Now, Khai is one of us, so what do I mean by “come over”? Of all the places and times in the world, Khai was also at the SAP offices in Walldorf, Germany, but he was there for a Gerrit Hackathon. He brought along another Gerrit contributor and showed us how the verify plugin would replace our somewhat hacked into place Javascript that we currently have on our review pages to give a quick view into the test results. It also offers the ability in the web UI to run rechecks on tests, and will provide a page including history of all results through all the patchsets and queues. They’ve done a great job on it, and I was thrilled to see upstream Gerrit working with us to solve some of our problems.


Khai demos the Gerrit verify plugin

After Khai’s little presentation, I plugged my laptop into the projector and brought up the etherpad so we could spend a few minutes going over work that was done on Monday. A Zuulv3 etherpad had been worked on to capture a lot of the work from the Infrastructure team on Monday. Updates were added to our main etherpad about things other people worked on and reviews that were now pending to complete the work.

Groups then split off again, this time I followed most of the rest of the Infrastructure team into a room where we worked on infra-cloud, our infra-spun, fully open source OpenStack deployment that we started running a chunk of our CI tests on a few weeks ago. The key folks working on it gave a quick introduction and then we dove right into debugging some performance problems that were causing failed initial launches. This took us through poking at the Glance image service, rules in Neutron and defaults in the Puppet modules. A fair amount of multi-player (using screen) debugging was done up on the projector as we shifted around options, took the cloud out of the pool of servers for some time, and spent some time debugging individual compute nodes and instances as we watched what they did when they came up for the first time. In addition to our “vanilla” region, Ricardo Carrillo Cruz also made progress that day on getting our “chocolate” region working (next up: strawberry!).

I also was able to take some time on Tuesday to finally get notice and alert notifications going to our new @openstackinfra Twitter account. Monty Taylor had added support for this months ago, but I had just set up the account and written the patches to land it a few days before. We ran into one snafu, but a quick patch (thanks Andreas Jaeger!) got us on our way to automatically sending out our first Tweet. This will be fun, and I can stop being the unofficial Twitter status bot.

That evening we all piled into cars to head over to the nearby city of Heidelberg for dinner and drinks at Zum Weissen Schwanen (The White Swan). This ended up being our big team dinner. Lots of beers, great conversation and catching up on some discussions we didn’t have during the day. I had a really nice time and during our walk back to the car I got to see Heidelberg Castle light up at night as it looms over the city.

Friday kicked off once again at 9AM. For me this day was a lot of talking and chasing down loose ends while I had key people in the room. I also worked on some more Firehose stuff, this time working our way down the path to get logstash also sending data to Firehose. In the midst of which, we embarrassingly brought down our cluster due to failure to quote strings in the config file, but we did get it back online and then more progress was made after everyone got home on Friday. Still, it was good to get part of the way there during the sprint, and we all learned about the amount of logging (in this case, not much!) our tooling for all this MQTT stuff was providing for us to debug. Never hurts to get a bit more familiar with logstash either.

The final evening was spent once again in Walldorf, this time at the restaurant just across the road from the one we went to on Monday. We weren’t there long enough to grow tired of the limited selection, so we all had a lovely time. My early morning to catch a train meant I stuck to a single beer and left shortly after 8PM with a colleague, but that was plenty late for me.


Photo courtesy of Chris Hoge (source)

Huge thanks to Marc and SAP for hosting us. The spaces worked out really well for everything we needed to get done. I also have to say I really enjoyed my time. I work with some amazing people, and come Thursday morning all I could think was “What a great week! But I better get home so I can get back to work.” Hey! This all was work! Also thanks to Jeremy Stanley, our fearless Infrastructure Project Team Leader who sat this sprint out and kept things going on the home front while we were all focused on the sprint.

A few more photos from our sprint here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157674174936355

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, travel

Kubrick, Typeface to Interface and the Zoo

Saturday, Sep 17th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’ve been home for almost three weeks, and now I’m back in an airport. For almost two weeks of that MJ has been on a business trip overseas and I’ve kept myself busy with work, the book release and meeting up with friends and acquaintances. The incredibly ambitious plans I had for this time at home weren’t fully realized, but with everything we have going on I’m kind of glad I was able to spend some time at home.

Mornings have changed some for me during these three weeks. Coming off of trips from Mumbai and Philadelphia in August my sleep schedule was heavily shifted and I decided to take advantage of that by going out running in the mornings. I’d been meaning to get back into it, and my doctor has gotten a bit more insistent of late based on some results from blood work, and she’s right. Instead of doing proper C25K this time I’ve just been doing interval run/walks. I walk about a half mile, do pretty even run/walk for two miles and then a half mile back. It’s not a lot, but I’ll up the difficultly level as I the run/walk I have going feels easier, I have been going out 4-5 days a week and so far it feels great and seems sustainable. Fingers crossed for keeping this up during my next few weeks of travel.

With MJ out of town I’ve made plans with a bunch of local friends. Meals with my friends James, Emma, Sabice and Amanda last week were all a lot of fun and reversed my at home trend of being a hermit. Last weekend I made my way over to to the Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition. It opened in June and I’ve been interested in going, but sorting out timing and who to go with has been impossible. I finally just went by myself last Saturday after some having some sushi for lunch nearby.

I wouldn’t say I’m a huge Kubrick fan, but I have enjoyed a lot of his work. The exhibit does a really exceptional job showcasing his work, with bright walls throughout and really nicely laid out scripts, cameras, costumes and props from the films. I had just recently seen Eyes Wide Shut again, but the exhibit made me want to go back and watch the rest, and ones I haven’t seen (Lolita, Spartacus). I particularly enjoyed the bits about my favorite movies of his, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Some photos from the exhibition here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157670417890794

I did get out to a movie recently with my friend mct. We saw Complete Unknown which was OK, but not as good as I had hoped. Dinner at a nearby brewery rounded off the evening nicely.

With the whirlwind week of my book release, preparations for the OpenStack QA/Infrastructure sprint (which I’m on my way to now) and other things, I called it a day early on Thursday and met up with my friend Atul for some down time to visit the San Francisco Zoo. He’s been in town for several weeks doing a rotation for work, and we kept missing each other between other plans and my travel schedule. We got to the zoo in time to spend about 90 minutes there before they closed, making it around to most of the exhibits. We got a picture together by the giraffes, but they’ve opened exhibits for the Mexican Wolves and Sifaka lemurs since I last visited! It was fun to finally see both of those. I have some more zoo visits in my future too, hoping to visit the Philadelphia zoo when I’m there next weekend and then the Columbus Zoo after the Ohio LinuxFest in early October.

More zoo pictures here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157670651372724

Thursday night I met up with my friend Steve to go to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to see the Typeface to Interface exhibit. This museum is just a block from where I live and the recently reopened after a few years of massive renovations. They’re open until 9PM on Thursdays and we got there around 7:30 to quite the crowd of people, so these later hours seem to be really working for them. Unfortunately I’ve never been much of a fan of modern art. This exhibit interested me though, and I’m really glad I went. It walks you through the beginning of bringing typeface work into the digital realm, presenting you with the IBM Selectric that had replaceable typing element ball for different fonts. You see a variety of digital-inspired posters and other art, the New York Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual. It was fun going with Steve too, since his UX expertise meant that he actually knew a thing or two about these things out of the geeky computer context I was approaching it with. I think they could have done a bit more to tie the exhibit together, but it’s probably the best one I’ve seen there.

We spent the rest of the evening before closing walking through several of the other galleries in the museum. Nothing really grabbed my interest, and a lot of it I found difficult to understand why it was in a museum. I do understand the aesthetically pleasing nature of much abstract art, but when it starts being really simple (panel of solid magenta) or really eclectic I struggle with understanding the appeal. Dinner was great though, both of us are east coasters by origin and we went to my favorite fish place in SOMA for east coast oysters, mussels, lobster rolls and strawberry shortcake.

Yesterday afternoon MJ got home from his work trip. In the midst of packing and laundry we were able to catch up and spend some precious time together, including a wonderful dinner at Fogo de Chão. Now I’m off to Germany for work. I had time to write this post because the first flight I had was delayed by an astonishing 6 hours, sailing past catching my connection. I’ve now been rebooked on a two stop itinerary that’s getting me in 5 hours later than I had expected. Sadly, this means I’m missing most of the tourist day in Heidelberg I had planned with colleagues on Sunday, but I expect we’ll still be able to get out for drinks in the evening before work on Monday morning.

Filed under: san francisco

Common OpenStack Deployments released!

Tuesday, Sep 13th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Back in the fall of 2014 I signed a contract with Prentice Hall that began my work on my second book, Common OpenStack Deployments. This was the first book I was writing from scratch and the first where I was the lead author (the first books I was co-author on were the 8th and 9th editions of The Official Ubuntu Book). That contract started me on a nearly two year journey to write a this book about OpenStack, which I talk a lot about here: How the book came to be.

Along the way I recruited my excellent contributing author Matt Fischer, who in addition to his Puppet and OpenStack expertise, shares a history with me in the Ubuntu community and Mystery Science Theater 3000 fandom (he had a letter read on the show once!). In short, he’s pretty awesome.

A lot of work and a lot of people went into making this book a reality, so I’m excited and happy to announce that the book has been officially released as of last week, and yesterday I got my first copy direct from the printer!

As I was putting the finishing touches on it in the spring, the dedication came up. I decided to dedicate the book to the OpenStack community, with a special nod to the Puppet OpenStack team.

Text:

This book is dedicated to the OpenStack community. Of the community, I’d also like to specifically call out the help and support received from the Puppet OpenStack Team, whose work directly laid the foundation for the deployment scenarios in this book.

Huge thanks to everyone who participated in making this book a reality, whether they were diligently testing all of our Puppet manifests, lent their OpenStack or systems administration experience to reviewing or gave me support as I worked my way through the tough parts of the book (my husband was particularly supportive during some of the really grim moments). This is a really major thing for me and I couldn’t have done it without all of you.

I’ll be continuing to write about updates to the book over on the blog that lives on the book’s website: DeploymentsBook.com (RSS). You can also follow updates on Twitter via @deploymentsbook, if that’s your thing.

If you’re interested in getting your hands on a copy, it’s sold by all the usual book sellers and available on Safari. The publisher’s website also routinely has sales and deals, especially if you buy the paper and digital copies together, so keep an eye out. I’ll also be speaking at conferences over the next few months and will be giving out signed copies. Check out my current speaking engagements here to see where I’ll be and I will have a few copies at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Barcelona.

Filed under: author, openstack, tech

Labor Day Weekend in SF

Monday, Sep 5th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Labor Day weekend was a busy one for us this year, as the last weekend MJ and I will be properly spending together for several weeks. Tomorrow he flies off to India for work. He’ll get home mid-day the following Friday, and Saturday morning I’ll be off to Germany. When I get home he’ll be in New York, directly from there we’ll meet at the end of September in Philadelphia for a couple events we have planned with family and friends. October will only be marginally better. But I already have three trips planned and he has at least one.

Saturday morning we went to services and then lunch in Japantown. We had a bit of a medical adventure in the afternoon (all is well) before going off to dinner. MJ started a new job in the beginning of August while I was in Mumbai and we hadn’t had time to properly schedule time to celebrate. After doing some searching as to a nice place to go where getting reservations wasn’t too much of a hassle, we ended up at Luce. They have a Michelin star, reservations were easy to get, they offer a tasting menu Tuesday through Saturday and they’re located just a few blocks from home.

I really enjoyed the ambiance of the restaurant, in spite of it being just off the lobby for the InterContinental. It was spacious and cool, and not very busy for a Saturday night, so we had privacy to talk and didn’t feel crowded. The food was good, with the portions being just right for a tasting menu. There were a lot of fish dishes (menu here), which suited me just fine, both the salmon and the halibut were amazing. I skipped the foie gras, but I did have the duck course, which I’m not usually that keen on, but it was not as tender and rare as is usually served so I was OK with it. The desserts were light, cold and fruity, making for a really nice ending to the meal that wasn’t at all heavy. I also opted for the wine pairing, which MJ dipped into throughout the meal. There was only one red among the selection, with the rest being a series of dry and sweet whites.


Selections from the tasting menu at Luce

Sunday we had a long lunch over at Waterbar on the Embarcadero. We’d been to the restaurant next door, EPIC Steak, many times but this was our first time snagging reservations over at Waterbar. They have an amazing oyster list and the views of the Bay Bridge there are stunning, especially on a day as beautiful as Sunday was.

After lunch we went to the Exploratorium. We’d been there a few times before, so this visit was specifically to see their exhibit Strandbeest: The Dream Machines of Theo Jansen.

I knew about the Strandbeests after seeing a video about them online. These mechanical animals are created by a Dutch artist artist and propel themselves along beaches. He makes them out of a type of plastic piping and has come up with a whole evolution through the various animals he’s made since beginning this work in 1990. They all have names, and the exhibit went through various iterations, some of which they had examples of on exhibit. It talked about the “nerves” and “muscles” that the Strandbeests have, how some are propelled by wind but many also have some mechanisms for limited self-propulsion. We also sat through a 32 minute video they had showing about them.

What was most striking about the exhibit was how strange it all was. This artist devoted a nice chunk of his life to this work and it’s kind of an unusual thing, but the Strandbeest are amazing. They are mechanical but appear so lifelike when they move. All in spite of being so very obviously built with plastic and they wander along beaches. More photos from the exhibit here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157673332520306

Monday didn’t have so many adventures. As we prepare for all this overlapping travel, we had a lot to get squared away at home and in preparation for our trips (like booking one of them! And packing!). Though we did have time to sneak out to a nice brunch together at the nearby Red Dog Restaurant.

Filed under: food, san francisco
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