• Archives

  • Categories:

  • Other profiles

Symphony, giraffes and pinnipeds

Prior to my trips to Texas and Croatia, MJ and I were able to make it over to Sherith Israel to enjoy the wonderful acoustics in a show by the Musicians of the San Francisco Symphony in a concert to benefit the SF-Marin Food Bank. It was a wonderful concert, and a wonderful way to round out a busy weekend before my trips.


During intermission

Last weekend our friend Danita came into town to visit for a week. Saturday we spent with a leisurely brunch at the Beach Chalet, one of my favorites. From there we went to the San Francisco Zoo to catch up with our new little friend, the baby patas monkey, who has grown even since my last visit a couple weeks ago!

We visited with the giraffes, as is appropriate since it was World Giraffe Day. I also got to finally see the peccary babies, but we were too late to make it into the lion house by 4pm to visit the two-toed sloth who I’ve never met. Next time.

On Sunday we went the amusement park route and made our way up to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom. Given my health lately, I wasn’t keen on going on any rides, but I learned a while back that this park has walruses (the only place in the bay area that does), along with lots of other animals, so I was pretty excited.

The walruses didn’t disappoint. One of the larger of the three seemed thrilled to delight the humans who were visiting their tank:

And the rest swam around doing walrus things. It was awesome to see them, I’m a general pinniped fan but I don’t get to see walruses all that often.

I also got to visit the seals and sea lions, and got to feed a mamma sea lion, the baby was a bit too shy.

Continuing on our giraffe trend, we also got to visit the giraffes there at the park as they celebrated a whole weekend of World Giraffe Day!

More photos from Six Flags here (I even got one of a roller coaster!): https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157645359472733/

Then I had a busy week. I attended Google I/O for the first time, which I’ll write about later. I also had an Upper Endoscopic Ultrasound (EUS) done to poke around to see what was going in with my gallbladder. The worst part about the procedure was the sore throat and mild neck bruising I had following it, which hasn’t made me feel great when coupled with the cough I’m recovering from. The doctor looking at the initial results mentioned sludge, but didn’t think there was concern, but upon follow-up with the surgeon I’ve been working with I learned that the amount of sludge when combined with my symptoms and family history made him think the right course of action would be gallbladder removal. I’m scheduled to have it removed on July 24th. I’ve never had surgery aside from wisdom teeth removal, so I’m pretty apprehensive about the procedure, but thankful that they finally found something so there is hope that the abdominal pain I’ve been having since April will finally go away.

Tourist in Zagreb, Croatia

In addition to attending and presenting at DORS/CLUC, I had the opportunity to see some sights while I was in Zagreb, Croatia this past week.


View from my room at Panorama Zagreb

My tourist days began in the late afternoon on Monday when my local friend Jasna could pull herself away from conference things. Huge thanks to her for doing this, I know the exhaustion and pressure of working with a conference, and I’m really grateful that she was willing to take the time in the midst of this to walk around the city with me.

We did about 7 miles of walking around the center of the city. Our first stop was to visit the Nikola Tesla statue! I learned on my trip that Tesla was born in what is modern day Croatia so visiting the statue quickly became a must.

From the statue, we walked north and picked up a snack at one of the dozens of small bakeries that are all over the city and sat down next to the beautiful Croatian National Theatre to enjoy.

I was able to get some shopping done and when we made it to the main square in Upper Town I noticed that it had been almost completely taken over by World Cup festivities. Most of the United States doesn’t get too excited about the World Cup, so being in a country that cares about it during it was a treat. In addition to giant screens put up, they had little soccer (er, football?) games set up at pubs, roadside stands selling fan goodies and even cars were sporting the iconic red and white checkers of the Croatian team.

As our adventures wound down, I also got to see the outside of the main railway station in the city, which we’d go back to on Tuesday to catch a tram down to the zoo.

Monday night after tourist adventures, the conference organizers had a wonderful dinner for the keynote speakers at Pod grickim topom or “Under the Canon.” The food was exceptional, and even though I’m off alcohol at the moment (no honey schnapps for me!), I really enjoyed the family style dinner that was prepared for us.

Photos from the rest of my touristing adventures here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157645274192044/

On Tuesday evening we went to the Zagreb Zoo! It’s always interesting to visit zoos in other countries, but I’m also a bit apprehensive since they often aren’t particularly accredited by organizations like the AZA for many zoos in the United States, so I am not sure what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the Zagreb Zoo – many of the animals had big enclosures, very natural. The new lion enclosure was particularly impressive. As a city zoo in a park it reminded me a lot of the Central Park Zoo, but it definitely larger, if not as big as some of the other zoos I’ve been to.

More photos from the zoo here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157645264459992/

Unfortunately I had to cut my touristing short by Wednesday as I had come down with a cold and decided that my time would be better spent getting some rest before my trip home. Still, I got a lot in during my stay. Next time I’ll have to visit the coast, I hear the beaches on the Adriatic are well worth the visit.

DORS/CLUC 2014 OpenStack CI Keynote and more

Several months ago I was invited to give a keynote at the DORS/CLUC conference in Croatia on the OpenStack Continuous Integration System. I’ve been excited about this opportunity since it came up, so it was a real pleasure to spend this past week at the conference, getting to know my friend Jasna better and meeting the rest of the conference crew and attendees.

Each day I attended for the keynotes, as they were all in English, and on Monday I also participated in a Women in FLOSS panel. The evenings were spent exploring the beautiful city of Zagreb, which I’ll write about in another post once I upload my photos.

The first keynote was by Georg Greve who spoke on Kolab in his talk “Kolab: Do it right, or don’t do it at all” (slides here). I evaluated Kolab for use about 3 years ago and it was a bit rough around the edges, and I believe it was still using Horde as the webmail client. It was interesting to learn about where they’ve gone with development and the progress they’ve made. I was happy to learn that they are still fully open source (no “open core” or other kinds of proprietary modules for paying customers). Today it uses RoundCube for webmail, which I’d also go with if I were in a position to deploy a webmail client again. Finally, he spoke some about the somewhat unexpected success of their hosted Kolab solution, MyKolab, which had me seriously thinking again about my non-free use of Google Apps for email.

Next up was Dave Whiteland in a talk he called “Sharing things that work or ‘hey I just had somebody else’s really good idea'” where he talked about the work that MySociety and Poplus are doing in the space of civic coding. I’m a big fan of civic coding projects, and it was great to hear that the existing projects are working together to provide platforms for governments and municipalities all over the world. He also talked about public engagement and the success of email alerts in the UK about politics, saying that if people have access to structured data, they will use it. This really resonated with me, as someone who is interested in being better informed, I find myself struggling to find the time to stay informed, we’re all busy people and if we can get access to the facts in a clean, simple interface that draws from officially released information (which is hopefully largely unbiased) it’s super helpful. It was really cool to hear about the Poplus components available today, including MapIt and WriteIt to make civic mapping and contact projects easier.


Dave Whiteland

It was then time for the “Women in FLOSS technology” round table where I participated in with Ana Mandić, Jasna Benčić, Lucija Pilić and Marta Milaković. Jasna did a great job of rounding up great, really technical women for this panel with a variety of experiences and experience levels in the FLOSS sphere. After introductions, we talked about challenges we’ve encountered in our work, which tended to be those that every new contributor runs into (not so gender-based) and ways in which we’ve been helped in our work, from women-focused groups like LinuxChix to more formal programs like the Outreach Program for Women organized by the GNOME Foundation, serving a vast array of FLOSS projects. Huge thanks to all my fellow round table participants and the great, positive comments from the audience about how they can help.


Women in FLOSS round table participants, thanks to Milan Rajačić for this photo

Tuesday kicked off with a keynote by Miklos Vajna on “Libre Office – what we fixed in 4.2/4.3.” During preparation for my recent talks on Ubuntu 14.04, I reviewed the release notes for 4.2, so I was somewhat familiar with changes like the bigger, improved Start Center screen that you get upon launch, but some of the other features I was less familiar with. They’ve added LibCMIS support (perhaps most notably for GDrive support), preliminary release of import of Keynote slide decks into Impress, per-character border support, spreadsheet (Calc) storage rewrite for improved functionality and speed, ability to print notes and more. Upcoming features include Impress slide control from Android and iPhone and ability collaborate on documents using the Jabber protocol.


Miklos Vajna

We then heard from Georg Greve in his second keynote, “Living in the Free Software Society” (slides here). He began his talk by covering some of the fundamentals of FLOSS philosophies and then went into the importance of having people understand their rights when it comes to software they use and depend upon. He had several quotes from Lawrence Lessig’s recent commentary on free software and civic involvement. There was the sad realization that even though FLOSS has had better arguments for being the preferred solution for users (transparency, rights), it often hasn’t “won” as the preferred solution. As a result, he stressed the importance of helping those in power understand the technological fundamentals of bills and laws they are getting through Congress/Parliament and our role there. I also appreciated the observation that companies need to make an investment in implementing FLOSS technologies the “right way” with upstream collaboration (not internal forking) to avoid the massive internal maintenance problem that so many companies have encountered when going down this path and causing their FLOSS deployment to ultimately fail. Finally, I learned about the Terms of Service; Didn’t Read project which seeks “to rate and label website terms & privacy policies, from very good Class A to very bad Class E.” Cool.


Georg Greve

Wednesday morning was my keynote, and I had unfortunately developed a cold by this point in my week! Fortunately, I was able to get a lot of rest prior to my talk and my familiarity with the material and slide deck made my talk go well in spite of this. Several of my colleagues have given this Overview of the Continuous Integration for OpenStack before, so I was excited about my own opportunity to give a talk on this fully open source system, particular to an audience who are pretty new to the relatively new CI concept – hopefully they’ll think of us when they do get around to setting up their own CI system.

Slides from my talk are available here. We manage the slide deck collaboratively in git and you can always view the most recent rendered version here: http://docs.openstack.org/infra/publications/overview/


Thanks to Vedran Papeš for this photo, source

I really enjoyed this conference, huge thanks to Jasna Benčić and the whole conference crew for helping organize my trip and providing meals and entertainment for all of us while we were in town. It means so much to be welcomed so warmly into a country I’m not familiar with!

A few more of my photos from the event available here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157644861010398/

And photos from others in the DORS/CLUC 2014 Group on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/groups/dc2014/

Texas Linuxfest wrap-up

Last week I finally had the opportunity to attend Texas Linuxfest. I first heard about this conference back when it started from some Ubuntu colleagues who were getting involved with it, so it was exciting when my talk on Code Review for Systems Administrators was accepted.

I arrived late on Thursday night, much later than expected after some serious flight delays due to weather (including 3 hours on the tarmac at a completely different airport due to running out of fuel over DFW). But I got in early enough to get rest before the expo hall opened on Friday afternoon where I helped staff the HP booth.

At the HP booth, we were showing off the latest developments in the high density Moonshot system, including the ARM-based processors that are coming out later this year (currently it’s sold with server grade Atom processors). It was cool to be able to see one, learn more about it and chat with some of the developers at HP who are focusing on ARM.


HP Moonshot

That evening I joined others at the Speaker dinner at one of the Austin Java locations in town. Got to meet several cool new people, including another fellow from HP who was giving a talk, an editor from Apress who joined us from England and one of the core developers of BusyBox.

On Saturday the talks portion of the conference began!

The keynote was by Karen Sandler, titled “Identity Crisis: Are we who we say we are? which was a fascinating look at how we all present ourselves in the community. As a lawyer, she gave some great insight into the multiple loyalties that many contributors to Open Source have and explored some of them. This was quite topical for me as I continue to do a considerable amount of volunteer work with Ubuntu and work at HP on the OpenStack project as my paid job. But am I always speaking for HP in my role in OpenStack? I am certainly proud to represent HP’s considerable efforts in the community, but in my day to day work I’m largely passionate about the project and my work on a personal level and my views tend to be my own. During the Q&A there was also interesting discussion about use of email aliases, which got me thinking about my own. I have an Ubuntu address which I pretty strictly use for Ubuntu mailing lists and private Ubuntu-related correspondences, I have an HP address that I pretty much just use for internal HP work and then everything else in my life pretty much goes to my main personal address – including all correspondences on the OpenStack, local Linux and other mailing lists.


Karen Sandler beginning her talk with a “Thank You” to the conference organizers

The next talk I went to was by Corey Quinn on “Selling Yourself: How to handle a technical interview” (slides here). I had a chat with him a couple weeks back about this talk and was able to give some suggestions, so it was nice to see the full talk laid out. His experience comes from work at Taos where he does a lot of interviewing of candidates and was able to make several observations based on how people present themselves. He began by noting that a resume’s only job is to get you an interview, so more time should be spent on actually practicing interviewing rather than strictly focusing on a resume. As the title indicates, the key take away was generally that an interview is the place where you should be selling yourself, no modesty here. He also stressed that it’s a 2 way interview, and the interviewer is very interested in making sure that the person will like the job and that they are actually interested to some degree in the work and the company.

It was then time for my own talk, “Code Review for Systems Administrators,” where I talked about how we do our work on the OpenStack Infrastructure team (slides here). I left a bit of extra time for questions than I usually do since my colleague Khai Do was doing a presentation later that did a deeper dive into our continuous integration system (“Scaling the Openstack Test Environment“). I’m glad I did, there were several questions from the audience about some of our additional systems administration focused tooling and how we determine what we use (why Puppet? why Cacti?) and what our review process for those systems looked like.

Unfortunately this was all I could attend of the conference, as I had a flight to catch in order to make it to Croatia in time for DORS/CLUC 2014 this week. I do hope to make it back to Texas Linuxfest at some point, the event had a great venue and was well-organized with speaker helpers in every room to do introductions, keep things on track (so nice!) and make sure the A/V was working properly. Huge thanks to Nathan Willis and the other organizers for doing such a great job.

Simcoe’s June Checkup

On June 7th I brought Simcoe in to the vet for her regular-ish checkup to see how she’s handling her kidney disease. Her last visit was back in January. She wasn’t happy about this visit, with MJ out of town for a week I think she was feeling pretty out of sorts, and the poor thing is always terrified at the vet.

But I’m happy to report that it’s now been over 2.5 years since she was diagnosed, and while things aren’t getting better, she’s pretty stable. It was nice to see her weight holding steady at 9.62lbs.

Her BUN and CRE levels have both shifted slightly, from 57 to 51 on BUN and 3.6 to 3.9 on CRE.

BUN: 51 (normal range: 14-36)
CRE: 3.9 (normal range: .6-2.4)

Of course we’re not thrilled to see CRE continue to creep up, it had managed to stick around high normal for quite some time, but neither are near where she was when she was diagnosed back in December of 2011. We’ll continue stick to her care schedule of subcutaneous fluids and Pepcid AC.

Life, critters and upcoming travel

MJ has been traveling a fair amount lately, so I’ve been working harder to meet up with friends, which I don’t do nearly enough. I had brunch with a friend just before Memorial day, and ended up at The View for drinks and dessert with a couple who just moved into town last Sunday. This week I was able to meet up with my old friend Mark down in the Mission to chat about life and enjoy some foods that were much too greasy for my own good (and quickly learned I should be avoiding right now, oops!).

Before leaving on his last trip, we were able to meet up with my cousin Melissa who was in town for an event, and my in-town (for now) cousin Brendan who I manage to only meet up with when other relatives are in town. We ate over at Fang before inviting them up to our condo for a bit.

After MJ left on his trip, I was looking to take a walk and decided to head over to the San Francisco Zoo to finally renew my membership and visit some of their new critters. My first stop was Tenzing, their new Red Panda! He popped out for a few minutes and then I had to return after a loop around that part of the zoo to return to him wandering around his enclosure.

From there I went over to visit one of their newest babies – a baby Patas Monkey! They are probably my favorite monkeys at the zoo, so getting to see a baby was pretty awesome, especially once he stopped being latched to his mother and wandered around a bit on his own. So cute.

More photos from my short zoo visit here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157644958797102

I still need to visit the baby peccaries before they get too big and see if I can get a glimpse of the two-toed sloth that’s living in the Lion House.

Work has been busy, but continues to be enjoyable. I mentioned in a previous post that I regretfully had to miss the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta due to being sick, but some of my awesome colleagues sent me a small gift and post card. I also have more travel coming up this week. On Thursday I fly to Austin to speak at the Texas Linux Festival, which I’ve been hearing great things about for years but never had the opportunity to attend until now. From there, I’ll be flying to Zagreb, Croatia to participate in DORS/CLUG 2014 where I will be giving a keynote on the Continuous Integration system for OpenStack developers and also participating in a Women in Tech panel with Ana Mandić, Jasna Benčić and Lucija Pilić.

Other than that, health stuff has taken up much of my time as my abdominal pain continues and I have to avoid alcohol and fatty/fried foods to keep the pain in check. On the bright side, this means I’m now eating healthier! I’ve gone in for 2 major diagnostic tests, both of which came back inconclusive. I’m continuing to work with doctors and will be making an appointment with a surgeon soon to see about my options for removing organs-I-don’t-need-but-may-be-causing-pain. Given my travel schedule this year, I’m terribly stressed about the timing of all this and hope that we find the cause and can solve it quickly and efficiently with limited recovery time, as I’m planning to travel again in July.

Elasticsearch blog features OpenStack elastic-recheck

At the Southern California Linux Expo this year I ran into Leslie Hawthorn of Elasticsearch and I told her a bit about how we’re using Elasticsearch in a newly developed elastic-recheck tool for failed tests unrelated to the code being tested. The result was an invitation to write a guest post on the Elasticsearch blog.

Thanks to Leslie and editors on the OpenStack side the post went live today!

OpenStack elastic-recheck: Powered by the ELK Stack

The post describes how the tool works and is used by developers and features a presentation by Sean Dague from the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta this month.

On college and my father

Higher education is a tricky subject for me. I work in an industry where a relatively high percentage of my professional peers are autodidacts who do not have formal higher education (myself included). I live in a world where I see a majority of students leaving their higher education institution burdened with substantial student debt and struggling to launch a career, or even get a job at all that will cover basic needs and school debt.

When I look at candidates I find myself largely disregarding higher education and focusing on experience (whether that be tinkering with a Raspberry Pi at a Hackerspace or running a large scale infrastructure) and their level of passion for technology. If the passion and personal excitement are there, our team can bring them up to speed with what they need to know. Plus, technology changes so fast that you need people who can keep up and learn new things quickly, not be tied into old technologies or development paradigms.

Now, there are certainly fundamentals in computer science that are valuable as you progress in your career, but today services like Coursera can get a committed professional up to speed on fundamentals online for free (an aside: The Hardware/Software Interface is an great class, I did it last year and it’s starting again on June 30th).

For me, being an autodidact was largely related to my learning disability, one that I share with my father but which we took two very different paths to overcome.

I graduated high school and swore never to back to school. School was hard for me, I had to study a lot to do well. Today I still employ strategies of note-taking and multimedia to grasp concepts. I also learn through immersion and have a much easier time understanding something if I spend a lot of time drilling down to the bottom and work my way up from specific to general. This takes longer and is really hard to do in a school setting where you’re taught pieces, quizzed on them, and then brought to the next part. Over time I have learned that I often have a much greater understanding than my peers at the end, but along the way it certainly doesn’t feel that way, because I struggle a lot more and ask a lot of strange questions.

Overall, my philosophy has been that if I need additional education, there are plenty of opportunities for me to get it. Putting myself into substantial debt (and the stress of a school setting) in the beginning of adulthood when I don’t actually know what I want to do anyway seemed like it would have been a serious waste.

My father graduated high school, and reading letters he sent to my grandfather I learned that he was a dedicated intellectual who also struggled. But college was the Thing To Do if you wanted to have a professional career in late 1960s-early 1970s. It was a sign of prestige and what was expected from an upper middle class family. It seems to me that it was less about “smart not being enough” and more “if you, have the means, you go to college.”

With this in mind, I spent last week going through some of my father’s papers from Bethany College in West Virginia. My father was very proud of the time he spent at Bethany getting his Journalism degree, participating in school publications, a fraternity and a youth conservative/libertarian party.

I received a Super8 from my Aunt Meg where he is walking around the Bethany campus, showing off his dorm room and what looks like the fraternity house.

Of course graduation itself was a big deal for him as well, so I was happy to find photos from that occasion.


Posing with my grandfather

And in the collection of paintings sent to me, his diploma (which I’m shipping off to my youngest sister this week).

A handful of other photos from his graduation here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157644277944608/

I also learned that in 1978 he established the “James W. Carty Jr. Award” presented to “an outstanding student who excels in work with the campus print media.” Going through papers it looks like he got a notification letter as late as 1999 for a student who has received it.

I’m really proud of my father. He never lost his passion for learning in spite of difficulties, and made the step that I couldn’t do in going to and completing college. I’ve also found myself softening on the idea of higher education. There are so many experiences that he and others had in these higher learning institutions and professional networking opportunities that I have simply missed out on.

He also left an inspiring legacy for me that stressed hard work as the route to success and brought me up in a culture that saw exceptional performance as the norm.

My father traveled

Following the passing of my grandmother this winter my aunts Elaine and Meg sent me a few boxes of my father’s possessions that my grandparents had kept in their care since his passing in 2004.

Going through all of this paperwork has been sad and I’ve learned more about my father than I knew growing up, but one thing I did know was that he traveled a lot in his youth. As a result, I’ve had the travel bug for as long as I can remember, but it’s only in the past few years that I’ve finally had the opportunity to do it. South America and Antarctica are the last two continents I have to cross off my list, plus various specific countries I want to visit.

A few boxes of slides that came along with the paperwork spoke to his travels, showing trips to Spain and a safari in Africa. I had 57 slides in total transferred into digital, which was an expensive endeavor at $2.25 each (need to look into their bulk deal next time!), but I’m really impressed with how clear they came out.

In the collection I found an article about a trip taken in what the photos indicate was 1967, making my father 15 or 16 at the time of the trip. The article describes that they did a touchdown in Lisbon and then spent a day in Madrid and Rome. From the slides from when he was in Spain, I learned that they go to see and go inside Las Ventas Bullring. From the article:

They also saw the bull ring (but no bull fight) and were interested in the fact that on fight days a complete hospital was set up right at the ring with surgeons, nurses, orderlies and everything else – a silent commentary on what a bull fight may be expected to produce.


My father and Uncle Paul outside Las Ventas (and inside too)

They also were able to visit the Royal Palace, where the article writes:

They went to the Royal Palace which they were told has somewhere around 2,800 rooms. “But we only saw about 50 of them” Carl says.

More photos from the trip here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157644678697471/

As a favorite of my father’s, Madrid is still in the top places I’d like to visit some time.

I also had a box of slides labeled “Extra Africa” which were dated 1973 and showed one of my father’s safari trips in Africa, including a rare photo of rhinos that I remember him being quite proud of:

And a hilarious photo of a large sleeping lion:

Now I’ve been to Africa, but never a safari (though feeding monkeys in Ghana was one of the best experiences of my life). Based on his passport stamps, I was able to determine that he went to Kenya and Tanzania during his travels. Doing a proper safari to see big wild animals in Africa is totally still on my list.

More photos from their time in Africa here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157644733378853/

Finally, there was also a post card from when my father visited Hong Kong – somewhere I actually have been!

On the back of the postcard my father writes that they visited Kowloon. Based on passport stamps it looks like he went to Hong Kong in 1973.

My father also had stories about traveling to Egypt that I remember slides from (Cairo is totally on my list once things settle down) and I know there are more Africa slides floating around. I’ll have to follow up with my relatives to see if I can borrow them to be processed to digital.

Ubuntu 14.04 Presentations at FeltonLUG and BALUG

This past week I’ve had the opportunity to join two separate Linux Users Groups (LUGs) to give presentations on the Ubuntu 14.04.

The talks were a full talk version of the mini talk I gave at the release party in San Francisco last month, covering:

  • Unity Desktop
  • Server
  • Phablet
  • Xubuntu

I’m a member of the Xubuntu team and use it primarily myself, which is why that flavor got special treatment ;)

The first talk was on Saturday for FeltonLUG down near Santa Cruz. Since I had a series of laptops already installed and set up from when we did the release party , I packed them up and brought them along with me.

We had a small group, so the meeting was a bit more on the informal side and folks had a lot of great questions and comments throughout the presentation. Given the group size it was also possible to have everyone give my Nexus 7 with Ubuntu on it a try, which folks had a lot of questions about.

Thanks to Bob Lewis and Larry Cafiero for being such great hosts, at their scenic drive recommendation my husband and I had a wonderful trip up route 1 along the coast on our way home.

Last night I joined BALUG here in San Francisco. I brought along my trusty tahr and pile of demo laptops for this presentation as well.

In addition to the great questions about the direction of Ubuntu in general (desktops! servers! clouds! tablets! phones!) I was really happy to have server folks in my audience for this talk who were eager to hear about the changes to virtualization technologies and such on the server side. I even was able to have a chat with a sysadmin who is doing a lot of virtualization and told me that her team is looking at deploying OpenStack in the near future.

Slides from both presentations are available online, the BALUG one includes some screenshots from Xubuntu since I was using a Unity-based laptop to present there:

The .odp versions of these slides are also available, just swap out .pdf for .odp in each url.