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My pink WASD keyboard

Sunday, Jan 26th, 2014 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

I like the color pink. Over the years I’ve collected lots of pink electronics that have measured up to their non-pink counterparts, from pink ethernet cables (hey, that’s my photo on Gizmodo!) to my pink netbook that has traveled the world with me (frequently still seen at Ubuntu Hours, always came along to Ubuntu Developer Summits and recently was at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong).

Keyboards have always been tricky though. Ones that come in pink tend to be princess or Barbie themed for little girls, which means they are either too small or of poor quality. I have found some larger, adult-ish pink keyboards, but they have never been mechanical, which is my strong preference. I’m on my keyboard all day, a good keyboard is important.

Then my friend Karen McLoughlin Largent posted a picture of her custom-colored keyboard from WASD Keyboards. It was pink! And mechanical! Be still my heart!

I went with the WASD V2 104-Key Custom Mechanical Keyboard with Cherry MX Blue switches (though Brown was also a contender), no sound dampeners, and all the keys in pink, with Classic layout and function keys, just like my current IBM keyboard.


I was going to crop my messy desk, but if you look close, I have the following pink items peeking into this photo: pen, mini swiss army knife, earbuds, USB cable, USB stick

Oh, and the final thing that made me spend over $150 on a keyboard? They let you have a custom OS key, and Ubuntu (as well as Linux Tux) were part of their default options.

Even better? I live near where they put them together, so I ordered it Wednesday and with no rush and standard shipping I was plugging it in to my computer on Saturday.

I love it. It’s much more clicky than the Model M successor IBM keyboard that I had previously used, which had dampeners, but after an hour I was quite at home with my noisy new friend. Hooray!

Filed under: pink, ubuntu planet

Much ado about otters and lamps

Monday, Jan 20th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last week I had a cold and was getting over jet lag, just like when I came back from Hong Kong! So this is my second cold of the season. Fortunately, this one seems to be clearing up more quickly than the last but I’m still not thrilled that I’ve been knocked over by colds twice since November. Most of the week I just focused on my work and slept a lot, ignoring everything else.

By Friday morning I was feeling more alive and had a much more productive work day with my head finally clearing. I even managed to get out on my next Couch-to-5K run, even if I was sniffly and more out of breath than usual. It was really good to get out of the house.

Saturday I got around to making Challah french toast for the first time, it was as delicious as everyone told me it would be. Side of turkey bacon too.

The rest of the day was mostly spent catching up on some reading and doing some other “day off” tasks. After sundown we headed down to Colma for some home stuff shopping. Later in the evening I was able to get some of the Partimus accounting stuff behind me, including the year end report for the board, now that I have all the bank stuff from my name change squared away.

Sunday I went out for my run and then hunkered down to get caught up with open source work I had been ignoring all week. I still have a lot on my plate, but I’m happy to say that the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter was in nice shape for release today and our schedule for Ubuntu User Days on Saturday is almost complete.

In the late afternoon we decided to head to Fisherman’s Wharf for some fried seafood. There were too many birds, I was happy when we vacated the bird area and went over to see the sea lions at Pier 39. There are more of them than I’m used to seeing, I’m happy to see that they are almost back up at numbers seen 10 years ago. While we were there we also decided to swing by the Aquarium of the Bay to finally see their Otters: Watershed Ambassadors exhibit, featuring a trio of adorable river otters, Shasta, Tubbs and Wildcat.

But the otters where sleeping in a big pile of otter cuteness while we were there and weren’t up for entertaining us further:

It was nice to see them though, even if it was just in snuggle pile with their heads popping up here and there. The jellyfish were also cool (naturally, I waited for the pink light to take my picture).

Today was a bank holiday here in the US, so I had some shopping lined up. First it was to get new running shoes, we shall see tomorrow if having new shoes prevents ankle soreness. We then we went out to do some bedside lamp shopping, which is pretty much the last piece we needed to complete our bedroom.

We shopped around a bit, and ended up at Lamps Plus where we had a very pleasant shopping experience. The staff was friendly and helpful and we also managed to get an mirror that I’m hoping we can hang soon. Unfortunately most of what we wanted was out of stock, so we had to shift our order a bit to have the rest of it shipped to us. I did get to bring home one bed side lamp though!

Tomorrow I hope to make it out to the BALUG meeting on CiviCRM. We’ve been trying to get CiviCRM going for Partimus, but our lack of people power for maintaining it both software-wise and content-wise has prevented this. I’m hoping a talk about it will inspire me to have another look. This upcoming Friday, part of Saturday and Sunday I’ll be helping out with the Openstack CloudCamp Social Good Hackathon, I’ll be pitching in to make sure folks can get registered with our infrastructure and documenting the fun with my camera.

Filed under: animals, food, life

C25K: Week 4, Day 2

Sunday, Jan 19th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last month I started Couch-to-5K. Except for one week I had to take off due to a cold (this sucked, but I was in bad shape) I’ve managed to stick to the program. I have some observations to share.

It’s hard every time

Every week I look at the proposed schedule and think “Run for $X minutes?! I can’t do that! I will die!” And then I go out and do it anyway, even though it’s really hard. So I am definitely making progress, on the first week it was running for a minute that made me want to die, this week it’s running 5 minutes that kills me and the 3 minute bursts are a nice break from the 5 minute ones.

Next week I have to run for 8 minutes. That will kill me!

I like running after I’ve run

I feel really good after I’ve run (and taken a shower). Much like going to the gym once did, it helps me have more energy for the day and is a net benefit, even if I have to force myself to do it. I don’t think I like the actual deed very much, I swear a lot in my head and want it to be over.

I am exploring new worlds!

The first two things here I could have anticipated, but this one is very interesting to me. I knew getting out and running in a beautiful place here in San Francisco would be great, but I didn’t expect how much greater it would be while traveling. I thought it may have been a mistake to start this right before going on trips to Florida and Perth, but instead it was brilliant. During both of these trips I got much more familiar with the area I was staying in (looking for places I could run) and more in tune with the climate (looking for when I could run, both were hot in the daytime!).

I love numbers

OK, we knew that. I’m using the Active.com C25K running app and it’s been awesome to keep track of stats and have maps of where I ran!

Selfies aren’t part of the app ;) I did that on my own.

Completed run in Hollywood, Florida!

The challenge in Florida was humidity and heat, even in December when the temps were still getting into the mid 80s with humidity during the day. I had to avoid running when the sun was at the highest and humidity was up, so I tended toward late afternoon. Mornings are probably better, but jet lag from California prevented that.

Completed run along the Swan River in Perth, Australia!

I was really worried about Perth. Not only is southwestern Australia hot, it’s summer there and I was in town for a heat wave where daytime temperatures were peaking around 100. Fortunately Perth has this amazing ability to cool off almost immediately once you’re out of the sun. Shade is wonderful and morning and evening times are quite comfortable. I got my running in during the morning before the sun had a chance to cause too much trouble. Jet lag helped me here, waking up at 5AM and going for a run was perfect.

Completed Run along the Embarcadero here at home in San Francisco!

This was my run today! I took a week off last week for my cold and was dreading starting week 4, fearing I’d backslid too much since Perth, but I was fortunate. I started back up on Friday and it wasn’t easy but it never is and I managed to pick up where I left off.

Things hurt

Muscles in my calves are taking the brunt of the soreness from all of this, but it’s a good, exercisey hurt. I’ve had some trouble with my right ankle too, so I’ve iced it after some runs and I now have “buy new running shoes” on my list for this weekend. The sneakers I have now are for running, but they’re old and a bit too worn out.

I run slow and haven’t lost weight

But that’s ok :)

Filed under: health

Tourist in Perth

Saturday, Jan 11th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I wasn’t sure what to expect with Perth. To the best of my knowledge it was that odd city on the wrong side of Australia and I had vaguely heard that it had nice beaches and that it would be very hot.

Now I’m happy to say that Perth is one of my favorite cities. The public transit is clean, the downtown of the city is nice, there is tons of green spaces and in general it felt like home. The heat was indeed bad, as we’re in the middle of summer down here, but the humidity seemed quite low, so even when it got into the 90s there was relief in the shade. With so much mention of the beach, and the realization that it’s beach on the Indian Ocean, which I’d never touched, I had to spend some time at the beach.

I went with my friend and colleague Anita Kuno, and it made for a wonderful relaxing time as I dealt with the cold I managed to pick up while traveling. The water was on the cool side, but still very pleasant to swim in. Plus, it was beautiful.

Oh, and it was fun to get immediate use out of my linux.conf.au speakers’ towel!

I was able to get some shopping in too, picking up some of the typical tourist goodies (I didn’t have to get an opal though, MJ took care of that one on a trip to Sydney a few years ago). I skipped the didgeridoo and picked up an awesome kangaroo leather hat. Now, I love kangaroos, so getting a hat made of one is still causing me moral conflict. It’s a really nice hat (see above!).

On my last day in Perth I decided I’d go to the zoo. Unfortunately the weather didn’t want to cooperate and the forecast called for 43F (which it got up to, that’s 109F). So I altered my plan some and decided to arrive right when the zoo opened at 9AM and then just stay for an hour or two so I could see the Australian animals. When I asked about buses, the Hilton concierge pointed me to the ferry terminal and recommended that instead – it was the same price ($2) and ferry!

I made the 10 minute walk down to the ferry and was happy to learn that the ride across the river only took a few minutes, but it was a great ride.


I sat in front to pretend I was driving (just kidding (no I’m not))

Once I got off the ferry there were signs pointing to the zoo which I followed and bought my ticket. First stop – Australian walkabout!

That’s where I saw my first live kangaroos in Australia.

It was actually a much cooler experience than I’ve had with kangaroos at other zoos. The area where the kangaroos (and wallabies) live is fenced off but inside the fence where you walk is open so I found myself startled when a kangaroo popped out of the bushes and hopped down the walkway right in front of me. Given the heat (81F when I arrived, up to 91F by the time I left just after 10AM), most of the kangaroos were sleeping (or rolling or relaxing) in the shade.

I also got to see a wombat, which was much bigger than I expected, and caught a glimpse of a little numbat before it hid away. Australia-wise, I was happy to see some Little Penguins.

Before leaving the zoo I also did a loop around their African Savanna, which was thankfully shaded through most of the walk. Even still, I was exhausted and quite hot before I decided to finish up my zoo visit for the day. I took the bus back to my hotel to cool off and finish packing for my evening flight.

More photos from my trip here (I will be adding lots more here when I get home): http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157639640699323/

Filed under: animals, life, travel

Final day at LCA 2014 with more OpenStack

Saturday, Jan 11th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Aww, the last day of Linux.conf.au! My schedule called for camping out in the WEBB lecture hall all day to watch talks by several of my OpenStack and HP colleagues.

Things kicked off with James E. Blair’s talk titled How OpenStack Improves Code Quality with Project Gating and Zuul. He did a quick review of the OpenStack Infrastructure and then did a closer look at how we run tests on every piece of code submitted and then accepted and showed how Zuul manages the queue. He also walked the audience through the YAML config files for how Zuul is configured. Slides here.

Next up was Robert Collins on Diskimage-builder: deep dive into a ‘machine compiler’. While there are other tools in the space of DiB, Robert explained the requirements that this particular tool satisfies, and then went through the internals of the “ubuntu” element as an example of how a specific image element is structured and what it produces in the resulting build.

After lunch Clark Boylan did his talk, Processing Continuous Integration Log Events. The OpenStack CI system produces billions of log events and this talk centered around how they are handled and processed. He began by talking about how we serve up the plain log files to developers (366M worth for each full test run) and how they sought out a system of processing these to make them easier for developers to use. Requirements for it were a friendly UI, REST API, and a decent querying language and the solution ended up being logstash, Elasticsearch and the Kibana dashboard. He then talked about how this has led to elastic-recheck which has helped track down bugs in the infrastructure more efficiently and report the results to developers. The “living document” (kept updated over time) version of the slides are here: here.

Last talk of the day! Most of the talks of the day were OpenStack-related but could easily be used for other projects (indeed, that’s a core reason we’re giving these talks). This last talk actually was OpenStack related though, with Devananda van der Veen giving his Provisioning Bare Metal with OpenStack talk. I saw a version of this talk last year, and it was interesting to see how it’s changed as the Ironic project progresses and he could expand upon how it works. I was also glad to see that the community developing it is diverse in terms of companies contributing.

Finally, it’s awesome to see that most of the talks from LCA are already available for downloading! Kudos to the LCA volunteers who worked on this, so all the talks I’ve mentioned in this post can be downloaded from here: http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2014/Friday

The conference finished with the announcement of LCA 2015 in Auckland and LCA 2016 to be held in Geelong (I had to look that one up). And then a series of lightning talks.

In all, a great conference, I hope I can attend again in the future!

More photos from the conference here (I will be adding more here when I get home): http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157639634280886/

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, travel

Linux Conf AU 2014 Continues!

Thursday, Jan 9th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

After all of the OpenStack stuff I discussed in my last post, I presented two more times at linux.conf.au, on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Tuesday morning the keynote by Kate Chapman on the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). I haven’t paid a lot of attention to OpenStreetMap over the years because there are only so many hours in a day, but it was very interesting to learn that the work they’re doing to map developing countries is really making a difference for disaster relief, urban development and more for regions in need. I can’t make time to participate in their program right now, but you should! A copy of her talk is already available on Tuesday’s mirror of talks.

My second talk of the conference came in the form of a Haecksen talk on Tuesday. It was really exciting to have my talk accepted and it was one I was particularly looking forward to it, where I was talking about myths of public speaking. There were several revolutionary points in my learning to do speaking, so I tried to summarize them into a 20 minute presentation, slides here. My main points were:

  • Myth: The audience won’t like you
  • Myth: You have to know everything
  • Myth: Good speakers don’t need to practice
  • Myth: Good speakers don’t get nervous
  • Myth: Shy people make poor speakers
  • Myth: Your talk must be completely original
  • Myth: I can’t because <insert any excuse here>

I also really enjoyed the Q&A during this session, so thanks to everyone who attended and participated with questions and helpful responses to the comments from others. In Haecksen I also learned about Robogals and it was great to hear a talk about giving talks by Alice Boxhall, who I saw speak at OSCON last year on automated testing for accessibility. I was in such great company!

On Tuesday night I attended the speakers dinner and sat between two spouses who I got to talk to about their tag-along status at the conference. Dinner was enjoyable, if a bit slow, and the view from the venue was really nice:

Wednesday morning my final (and primary, not miniconf) talk was first up at 10:40, on Systems Administration in the Open. This is a modified version of my Code Review for Systems Administrators talk where I instead focused on the benefits of projects and organizations open sourcing their operations – or at least making it more available to others in their organization to submit changes to. Working on the OpenStack Infrastructure team continues to be a great experience for me, and it’s funny how I’m feeling about how other projects manage their infrastructure now that I’m so used to how we do it. Submit a ticket to fix something and wait? Can’t I pitch in? I do see more open source projects moving to a more open model, but I’d like to see more. My slides are here.


Thanks to Clark Boylan for taking this photo

And then my talks were done! I could relax and enjoy the rest of the conference.

One of the highlights of the day was a talk on The changing Linux kernel development process by Jonathan Corbet. It was particularly interesting to see a general view of how the ecosystem has changed in relation to folks working on core Linux kernel components vs the mobile-specific changes that support so many new devices today. It was also noteworthy to see that the companies working on the core are largely static, whereas many of the newer commits in new kernels are coming from the mobile-specific vendors.

Karen Sandler did a great talk on the Outreach Program for Women. I’ve heard bits and pieces about this program and have met several participants (one of whom now works with me!) but I hadn’t seen the statistics and successes that Karen shared in this talk. The increase in applications from women in the Google Summer of Code went from 1 to 7 in some projects following the launch of the GNOME program, and this was not an outlier. What this really drove home for me was that there are women out there who are interested in open source and participating, but there are still perception barriers preventing many from applying themselves to a project (“it’s not for me” “I am not good enough”). There were also other things the program does, which she outlined:

  • Offer internships for non-students and non-coders
  • Connect applicants with pool of mentors
  • Require a contribution as part of the application
  • Provide small, manageable tasks throughout the internship rather than one big project
  • Require participants to blog regularly about their work and join project planets if possible
  • Sponsored travel when possible to collaborate with project members in person (conference, summit, sprint, etc)

I’m excited to see such a program be so successful, and look forward to seeing the number of women in our communities continue to rise as a result.

And a highlights post wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Marc MERLIN’s Live upgrading many thousands of servers from an ancient RedHat 7.1 to a 10 year newer Debian. It was as crazy as it sounds, and was super interesting to listen to. More about the talk, including detailed slides here (a link to the paper for a more thorough read is also in that directory).

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference and I’m looking forward to seeing talks by several of my colleagues, Clark Boylan on Processing Continuous Integration Log Events, James Blair talking about Zuul, Robert Collins doing a deep dive into Diskimage-builder and Devananda van der Veen on Provisioning Bare Metal with OpenStack.

Filed under: events, tech, travel, ubuntu planet

OpenStack on the first two days of LCA

Monday, Jan 6th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

As seems to happen a lot at open source conferences lately, I had a couple of OpenStack heavy days these first couple of days here at linux.conf.au in Perth, Western Australia.

After the keynote on Monday I made my way to the Sysadmin Miniconf. It began with a talk by Glen Ogilvie on using Foreman with Puppet, and then my first talk of the week was up! I had a 15 minute slot to talk about “Open Sourcing your entire puppet configuration” (slides). I think my favorite part about giving talks like this is the feedback I receive afterwards about other teams and organizations who are also moving to more open infrastructures. The gem yesterday was learning about Mozilla’s PuppetAgain.


Thanks to Anita Kuno for taking this photo

Right after my talk I skipped over to the Continuous Integration track where I spent the rest of the day, arriving in time to catch James E. Blair’s “OpenStack CI: See how OpenStack runs a massively scalable test infrastructure in the open” where he gave an overview of the work we do on the infrastructure team for CI (slides).

Robert Collins gave a talk later in the day where he discussed the work we’ve been doing in TripleO in a talk called “CI Testing of cluster software using multiple machines.” Given how much work I’ve put into this over the past couple months it was really great to see Robert step the audience through our solutions and progress.

Later in the afternoon Anita Kuno did a talk on “Third Party Testing with OpenStack” where she gave a quick overview of what our infrastructure currently covers testing-wise and then why and how one would go about adding third party testing.


I really enjoyed the nodepool stars :)

The day of CI wrapped up with a Birds of a Feather (BoF) on OpenStack infrastructure. We had some interesting discussions around the current state of third party testing results and what criteria that should exist for 3rd party infrastructures that comment and vote on changes.

Tuesday had an actual OpenStack miniconf at the conference where the OpenStack fun continued.

It kicked off with us getting t-shirts with Raul’s winning design on them!

Miniconf sessions began with a casual overview of project governance by James E. Blair and Michael Still. That was immediately followed by a talk by Paul Holland on “The OpenStack Project and Moving to a Foundation” where he went through some of OpenStack’s history. Particularly interesting was when he covered some of the current discussions happening in the community, including the discussion of core and trademark usage.

The miniconf continued through the day, but after lunch I headed over to the Haecksen miniconf where I was presenting later in the afternoon and interested in other talks being presented, including one by Anita Kuno on her experience with the GNOME Outreach Program for Women which was a starting point for her own involvement with OpenStack.

Tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk on “Systems Administration in the Open where I’ll talk about how we navigate hosting the OpenStack infrastructure project in the open. On Friday several of my colleagues are also doing OpenStack-related talks that I’m looking forward to.

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, travel

The adventures of 2013

Tuesday, Dec 31st, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I had a great year in 2012, but 2013 was really exceptional.

Biggest news, on Sunday April 28th MJ and I were married in a ceremony just outside of Philadelphia!

We also hosted a California reception in August.

Second biggest news, in January I started my job with HP where I now get to work on the OpenStack Infrastructure with a team of amazing colleagues.

I also managed to log about 65k miles in flights this year, getting on a plane at least once a month for every month except for March, the rundown:


MJ and me at Ek Balam Mayan Ruins, Mexico

Khai, Clark and me at Ice House Street, Hong Kong

I also bumped the number of speaking engagements from 7 in 2012 to 10 in 2013, in spite of taking a few months off for wedding prep.


Presenting at Reflections | Projections conference

It was also a good year for interviews and publications:

  • January 1, 2013: Ubuntu Women- Where are they now? Follow up with Elizabeth Krumbach
  • February 20, 2013: Share The Bytes: Episode 10 – Women of Ubuntu
  • March 7, 2013: Ubuntu UK Podcast: S06E02, interviewed about Xubuntu
  • June 2013: Linux Identity Starter — Ubuntu Family 13.04 Raring Ringtail: Controlling your Xubuntu System
  • July 19, 2013: OpenStack Blog: Open Mic Spotlight: Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph
  • August 27, 2013: Meet the HP Cloud Team: Elizabeth Krumbach, OpenStack Infrastructure
  • October 4, 2013: Frostcast Episode 084 Xubuntu

    • Wrapping up the year in southern Florida with family

    While 2014 won’t feature a wedding (of my own!) and a job change seems unlikely, it’s already shaping up to be a great year. It’ll kick off with a trip to Australia for my first linux.conf.au (plus my first time in Australia!) and I learned this morning that I’ll be speaking at SCaLE12x Los Angeles in February. I’ve submitted talks for and been invited to a few other conferences and I’m also scheming to go on a trip somewhere interesting with MJ this year, we shall see!

    Filed under: EOY, life, reflection

    South Florida trip

    Tuesday, Dec 31st, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

    Everything came together really nicely in the planning for this Florida trip. We stayed with MJ’s cousin at their beach house in Hollywood, so we were able to spend several meals with them during our stay. It was a great opportunity for me to get to know them better.

    Our flight came in slightly delayed on Monday night, putting us at the beach house just after midnight. Tuesday was our first chill out and relax vacation day, sleeping in late, getting lunch at a nearby place by the beach. I then did my 3rd Couch-to-5K run/walk that afternoon before joining MJ at the pool. Thankfully there was a breeze, as I was really worried about continuing my workouts in the south Florida heat.

    On Christmas we continued my evolving tradition of going to a zoo on Christmas. It ends up being a wonderful time to go, it’s a holiday that we don’t celebrate, but both have off from work, most zoos are open (at least for limited hours) and it’s never very crowded. I wasn’t actually familiar with the Miami Zoo but it really is quite a nice zoo! First off, it’s huge. We were there for 2.5 hours and only covered about 1/3 of it at a casual pace. I’ll definitely have to go back.

    I enjoyed leisurely mornings on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, sitting outside on the porch with my laptop catching up on some things, or just reading on my tablet or Nook.

    On Thursday we met up with my cousin Shannon for lunch at a small taco place on the beach. It was great to see her and Rich, and see how adorable little Frankie has grown! Plus, good tacos. That night we found a proper diner to enjoy, I sure miss east coast diners!

    Friday we had lunch with MJ’s cousin Rachel, who we’re staying with. After some relaxing by the pool in the afternoon we headed down to Miami itself to meet up with my Aunt Pam for dinner at the Rusty Pelican. The restaurant offered an excellent view of Miami and the food was great. Afterwards we headed back to her apartment to check out the view and visit with her sun conures Baby Bird (who we first met in Phoenix) and baby Skittles.

    Saturday afternoon we grabbed lunch by the beach and I got my run/walk in before embarking upon our drive north to spend the night in Melbourne. On our drive up we stopped in Vero Beach to meet my Aunt Meg and cousins Melissa and Brad and his family for dinner near where they were vacationing. I hadn’t seen my cousin Brad in several years, so it was nice to catch up, and always a treat to visit with my Aunt Meg and Melissa.

    Sunday was spent visiting with my Grandfather and his wife Jo in Palm Bay. I also got to see my Uncle Don, who I haven’t seen in a few years. Joining us for a sit down turkey lunch was Shannon’s father Frank and his wife Amy. It made for quite the relaxing and nice time to catch up with everyone. We made the long drive back to Hollywood in the early evening to meet up with MJ’s cousins for dinner. Dinner took us to Taverna Opa where a belly dancer encouraged me and won to dance on a table with Rachel. I was sober, this is what peer pressure does!

    Monday morning I got some more relaxing on the porch time and after lunch at a nearby diner I did my final run/walk of Couch-to-5k week 2 and we spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach.

    Monday night we met up with MJ’s cousin Stephie and her fiance Ben. Much of the conversation centered around wedding planning, with us sharing as much useful tidbits as we could from our experience.

    It’s now Tuesday morning, New Years Eve. I’m sitting on the porch and have spent some time this morning catching up on some work and project stuff. I do wish I had taken more pictures on this trip, I saw a lot of family members who I don’t see all that often and it would have been good to get pictures together. Next time!

    Today my plan is just to relax, perhaps read a bit more and make the most of the day until we have to pack up and catch our flight around 5pm. We’ll be in the air during the new years of a few US time zones, so it will be an interesting flight! Should be back in SF shortly before midnight.

    More photos from the trip here http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157639046100495/

    Filed under: family, travel

    Tidbits from December

    Monday, Dec 23rd, 2013 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

    December has flown by, and I’ve already written about much of it! But I do have a little catching up to do.

    On December 10th I met up with Benjamin Kerensa who gave me a tour of the Mozilla office here in San Francisco. I’ve walked by it plenty of times, but this was the first time I’d actually been inside, and to their stunning roof deck that has a great view of the Bay Bridge.

    I’ve been having some trouble with Comcast outages lately, so a couple weekends ago MJ completed our multi-homing setup so we now have automatic failover, and wifi connects over the secondary connection by default. These improvements also inspired research into finally building our home storage servers – one for serving media (movies, music) over DLNA and photos, and a second server for backups. The specs for both are identical, a basic mini ITX motherboard w/ AMD cpu, 2G of ram, CFI A7879 Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis, 4 3T harddrives and a small SSD for the operating system (which in turn required a PCI-E SATA controller, since the motherboard only had 4 connectors). Over the past few days we got them put together and installed with Debian. Unfortunately we’ll have to RMA one of the eight harddrives but everything else seems to work well so far. When we get back from our travels we’ll finish configuration of the systems and get them installed in their permanent home in my office.

    I was able to catch up on a lot of Ubuntu work last weekend, including getting out the Call for Instructors for Ubuntu User Days. Nomination emails also went out for new Ubuntu California leadership, hopefully we’ll get some more names on the list! This morning I got the latest issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter completed, the next issue will cover 2 weeks since many of us are busy and the holidays tend to be pretty slow for news anyway.

    This past week has been busy too. Monday and Tuesday of this week I spent at the silicon valley office meeting with my team and on-boarding some new folks. Two days of commuting cemented my determination never to do that commute on a regular basis. This work continued into the rest of the week as we worked through some of our infrastructure configurations. I also had a lot of work to wrap up before holiday travels, which I found will quickly bump into my Australia trip, I come home the night of December 31st and fly out the evening of January 3rd to go to Perth. On Monday night we had a nice team dinner here in the city. Tuesday I hosted an Ubuntu Hour in Mountain View since I was in the area anyway. MJ and I went out to a nice dinner on Wednesday and then Thursday night was his company holiday party.

    In the midst of this, it’s been nice to get out and go for walks (and runs) when I have time or need to do errands as the weather has been beautiful.

    Finally, I’m excited to say that my Haecksen talk was accepted! So my schedule for LCA is as follows:

    • Monday, January 6, 2014: “Open Sourcing your entire puppet configuration” at Sysadmin miniconf (link)
    • Tuesday, January 7, 2014: “‘But the audience won’t like me!’ and other myths” at Haecksen miniconf
    • Wednesday, January 8, 2014: “Systems Administration in the Open” at linux.conf.au main conference (link)

    Here’s hoping jet lag doesn’t get the better of me (too much).

    Speaking of which, time to finish packing for our trip to Miami to visit family and beaches! Let the jet lag begin.

    Filed under: life
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