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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

    I think I’ll go for a run

    Saturday, Dec 21st, 2013 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

    The subject of this blog post has long been a joke for a long time. As I kid asthma prevented me from many over-strenuous activities, including running, and it’s something I’ve avoided ever since because running? Hah! I don’t see any lions!

    But over the summer I had a tough time health-wise, and I’m now on some medication that is linked to weight gain. Since the wedding in April I’ve put on 20 lbs and low energy has caused increased inability to get myself to the gym on a regular basis. I’m now in this unhealthy cycle that I’m really unhappy with and trying hard to break.

    Unfortunately, I hate exercise. I like swimming for fun, so I joined a gym that has beautiful outdoor pools. I then realized that swimming takes up a fair amount of time (more prep and cleanup than other exercise) and the pools at the gym are often crowded if I go at peak times. During non-peak hours I find I’m just too tired (even if late evenings are beautiful times to swim) or otherwise occupied (working during the day). So I ended up mostly using just the gym, going to the pool only a few times a month.

    I also hate being on a restrictive diet. Eat more fresh vegetables and fruit, fine, but once you start telling me I have to stop eating pizza and cake I get grumpy. I love food and I live in an amazing city for it. Yes, I’ll have dessert, and pass me the beer list again.

    It’s been pretty obvious to me that I either needed to gather the energy to get back on the gym bandwagon, or figure out something else. At first I started thinking about joining a gym that’s closer to home, which would lack a pool but I’d be more likely to go if there wasn’t an obligatory 1 mile walk each way. Then I started feeling mopey about the idea of living in a beautiful city and cooping myself up in a gym again to torture myself. Then I thought about a torture-starving, “I hate my life and want cake” diet again, but thought better of it.

    Now here we are, “I think I’ll go for a run” has turned from a joke to actually a pretty decent idea, all things considered. I have a number of friends and family members who are runners and have found them to be a pretty friendly crowd, assuming they forgive me for the years of “running, are you CRAZY?” comments. Oh, and that beautiful city! I have an amazing array of options for places to run. It also takes pretty much no equipment, toss on some sneakers and my gym clothes and walk out the door, exercise begins immediately. Also, cheaper than a gym. I did buy a heart rate monitor though, because I’m a geek and new toys for new hobbies are a thing.

    This week I started Couch to 5K, and now I’m blogging about it so I can hold myself accountable. The first week of workouts is 5 minutes of brisk walk warm-up, then 20 minutes of alternating 60 seconds of jogging with 90 seconds of brisk walking, then a 5 minute cool down. I survived, but I didn’t have fun, it was not easy for me. My calves were sore and I was totally making fun of myself for it. The internet assures me that this is normal for us newbies and it’ll get easier.

    Tomorrow morning I’ll do another 2 miles of running and walking. And because I’m the queen of timing, over the next three weeks I’ll be spending a week in Florida and then a week in Perth, Australia. Here’s hoping that I can aim for running early in the morning so the heat won’t kill me.

    Filed under: health

    Your favorite fantasy books

    Saturday, Dec 21st, 2013 by pleia2 | 14 Comments

    A few years ago I asked for recommendations of favorite scifi/fantasy books, with the request leaning toward hard scifi.

    I’ve made it through a nice chunk of those recommendations, but as I read more these days I’m finding that I really enjoy balancing non-fiction books I’m reading with some of the lighter side of scifi and fantasy.

    I’m currently reading The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett (big fan!) and Stephen Baxter, and enjoying it thoroughly. To get an idea of what else I like, I just searched through my collection for authors I’ve already read a fair amount of fantasy-wise:

    • David Eddings
    • Neil Gaiman
    • Larry Niven
    • Neal Stephenson
    • William Gibson
    • Douglas Adams
    • Orson Scott Card
    • Robert A. Heinlein
    • Frank Herbert
    • Robert Jordan
    • Robert Asprin
    • Roger Zelazny
    • Anne McCaffrey
    • J. R. R. Tolkien

    That said, with the exception of Orson Scott Card, Douglas Adams and Tolkien, I haven’t read everything from these authors, and have mostly just read Discworld stuff from Pratchett.

    I’m about to leave on a couple of big trips and want to load up my Nook. Recommendations? :)

    Filed under: books

    Sharing the Beauty: Religious symbols and worship environment of Sherith Israel class

    Saturday, Dec 14th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

    The second class on Sharing the Beauty at Sherith Israel (I wrote about the first here) took place this past Monday and several of us arrived early to do a tour of the dome, as seen from the outside here and which you can look up into from the main sanctuary as in this photo.

    I had never been up in the dome, so it was neat to be able to walk up the several flights of stairs it took to get there and finally see the large space the top part of the dome took up.

    And to be able to look up at the artwork in the top most part of the dome closer than you normally could from the sanctuary.

    Perhaps best of all, was the view looking down into the sanctuary itself from the dome.

    But it was tricky to get a real feel for the space given the limitations of photographing inside a circular space with a small camera, so I took a video too so I could share it (might mute it, our guide was continuing the tour while I was recording):

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3swVQsQ4ZE

    Upon going back down the stairs, I took a moment to visit the area where the organist sits, sometimes accompanied by the choir during the High Holy Days. That was also offered a magnificent view of the sanctuary.

    Shortly after 7PM the actual class began. Joan Libman, a member of the board of trustees, began by talking to us about how she worked to rediscover the history of the synagogue about 10 years ago. Her research adventure began when the congregation learned that they needed to raise several million dollars in funds for a mandatory seismic retrofit of the building. As part of this campaign, she offered to put together information about the historical significance of the building and quickly learned that many of the records pertaining to the construction had been lost during the earthquake and fires of 1906 that essentially leveled the city of San Francisco. She then dove into the unsorted records that had been kept over the years and began piecing together the history.

    Joan also showed us a picture of a couple rare pieces of artwork done by Emile Pissis, the artist who did the amazing stained glass that is found throughout the synagogue. An article she wrote back in 2005 has some details: Beneath its beautiful dome, a beloved synagogue finds it houses rare artistic treasures

    Prior to the synagogue’s detective work, Emile Pissis’ award-winning work was hidden away in a storage room of the museum of the Society of California Pioneers, along with a companion canvas.

    She also went into discussing the stained glass windows. During her research she reached out to Dr. Virginia Chieffo Raguin (whose book, Stained Glass: From Its Origins to the Present, is now on its way to me!), who, referencing the same sfgate article is quoted:

    “This is first-class artistry in using opalescent stained glass,” says Raguin. “Often, with windows of a popular design firm, such as Tiffany Studios, you get the same designs that were used in other installations. This sanctuary has one-of-a-kind designs, and I’ve never seen anything like them.”

    Unfortunately the class was taking place in the evening during the winter, so we couldn’t really see the windows! We were given a handout that I could perhaps get a digital copy of that had more details about the windows, and here is a little information on the Sherith Israel website: Stained Glass Gems. I’m also hoping to attend another class in the spring where they plan to bring in a glass expert to give a tour.

    I also found this great article online: Art and Architecture – San Francisco: A San Francisco Jewel

    Finally, she spoke briefly about what was know about the stunning frescoes by Attilio Moretti that cover the walls of the synagogue. It’s said that he worked with the Pissis brothers (architect and stained glass artist) to consolidate their vision, and came out with a very Byzantine-influenced feel for the interior, and much of the design which would be familiar to those of Islamic traditions. She mentioned that the architecture itself was in the Beaux-Arts style.

    Nancy Sheftel-Gomes, education director at Sherith Israel, was next up. She began by mentioning some of the great acoustics in the sanctuary and then discussed the historical importance of the layout, very similar to that of “tent of meeting” described in the Torah. When the building was built, electricity was not ubiquitous in San Francisco, so it was originally lit with gas lighting, some of which remains. The electric lighting that exists today was all an addition once the building was wired for electricity.

    She then invited us up on the bema to look inside the ark and at one of the Torahs. They even gave me permission to take pictures!

    The Torah scrolls are made out of parchment, which by tradition is made of kosher animal skin. It was also interesting to learn that the “big” torahs in the back of the ark aren’t actually big, it’s just their blue covers that are big!

    More photos from this visit are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157638537252903/

    Last up, reading through the application for the building to be a part of the National Register of Historic Places is interesting draft here. The building was added to the registry on March 31, 2010, NRHP Reference No. 10000114.

    Huge thanks to everyone who put this class together, it was really a pleasure to learn about the building and do some of my own reading since then.

    Filed under: events, spirituality

    December updates from Ubuntu California

    Friday, Dec 13th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

    Ubuntu-related events have been chugging along here in California.

    On Wednesday evening here in San Francisco I had the pleasure of hosting an Ubuntu Hour and Bay Area Debian Dinner. Both events attracted new attendees, which was great to see during December, a month that’s historically pretty quiet for us.

    On Thursday night I joined Professor Sameer Verma over at San Francisco State University where I did a presentation on Open Source for his “Managing Open Source” business school class. Given the audience, I gave the somewhat tongue in cheek title of “Open Source for love, money and fame” to the talk. I fear it was still a bit too technical for some of the students, but there were a number of great questions at the tail end of my talk.


    Thanks to Sameer for the photo

    My somewhat sparse slides from the talk are here: SFSU-2013-open-source-love-money-fame.pdf

    On Tuesday I’ll be meeting some of my HP colleagues for a couple of days at the office in Sunnyvale, so I thought this would be a great opportunity to host a Mountain View Ubuntu Hour, so I am! 7PM at Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View, details here:

    http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-california/2661-ubuntu-hour-mountain-view/

    Looking onward to next year, we have a leadership election coming down the pipeline in a few weeks. Richard Gaskin is putting together an Ubucon at SCaLE12x in February and we have Philip Ballew heading up efforts for our booth at the conference, details coming together here: CaliforniaTeam/Projects/Scale12x

    Huge thanks to everyone on the team who has been pitching in lately, it’s a pleasure working with all of you!

    Filed under: events, LoCo, tech, ubuntu planet

    OpenStack Infrastructure December Bug Day

    Tuesday, Dec 10th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

    When I joined the OpenStack Infrastructure team this year one of my first challenges was going through the list of bugs, during which time I discovered that some of the bugs were out-dated.

    Enter Bug Days!

    Thirsty Lady Bugs

    The process for our bug days has evolved over time, starting quite manual but I’ve since automated as much as I can.

    First, I create an etherpad: cibugreview-december2013 (see etherpad from past bug days on the wiki at: InfraTeam#Bugs)

    Then I run my simple infra_bugday.py script and populate the etherpad.

    Then I grab the bug stats from launchpad and copy them into the pad so we (hopefully) have inspiring statistics at the end of the day. Once bugday makes it into infra proper I hope to update that to include us too, there is a bug for that, and I updated it today!

    Then comes the real work. I open up the old etherpad and go through all the bugs, copying over comments from the old etherpad and making my own comments as necessary about obvious updates I see (and updating my own bugs).

    Last step: Let the team go to town on the etherpad and bugs!

    We had our December bug day today, here are those stats:

    Bug day start total open bugs: 213

    • 32 New bugs
    • 29 In-progress bugs
    • 2 Critical bugs
    • 13 High importance bugs
    • 3 Incomplete bugs

    But day end total open bugs: 186

    • 2 New bugs
    • 28 In-progress bugs
    • 2 Critical bugs
    • 13 High importance bugs
    • 3 Incomplete bugs

    Nice work, thanks everyone!

    Filed under: openstack, tech

    Simcoe’s November Checkup

    Tuesday, Dec 10th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

    In December of 2011 Simcoe was diagnosed with renal failure. It was a very upsetting time for us, with the vet giving us initial estimates of her only living another couple of months.

    Through diligent daily care (a pill every day to control nausea and subcutaneous fluid injections every other day) and quarterly check-ups over these past couple years we’ve been able to manage her symptoms. She’s was able to gain weight to now be back at a healthy level. Day to day, she acts like our normal Simcoe! It’s impossible to tell that she’s sick.

    On November 30th we brought her in for her latest check-up, the last one having been done in May and the vet being happy about waiting 6 months. We also had to bring Caligula along because he’s suffering from a cold that’s causing him to have productive sneezes (yuck!) and watery eyes. Poor guy. Blood work shows he’s healthy over all though, just on some supplements to try and help beat the cold.

    At this checkup Simcoe was 9.5lbs, up slightly from 9.46lbs. We were pretty happy about it all until we got the results from her blood and urine work, all her levels have gone up.

    BUN: 53 (normal range: 14-36)
    CRE: 3.5 (normal range: .6-2.4)

    Urine proteins are higher (10.19) and her Amylase has gone up from 23.77 to 29.74. Finally, her calcium levels are higher, which may mean she’s having hard time getting calcium out of kidneys and that could be concerning, so the vet called for an ionized calcium test that we brought her in for this past Saturday.


    She wasn’t thrilled about going to the vet again.

    In order to have a better idea where we are at, I scoured through records to dig up the BUN and CRE levels over time and made pretty graphs! For the BUN and CRE graphs I specified the ranges, which she’s mostly been above. For weight, she’s a small cat and we are happy if she’s over 9 lbs.

    Today the vet called us to let us know that her calcium levels came back ok. Hooray! So for now we’re going to hang tight and see what the levels look like in a couple months, if she’s continuing to behave ok, retain weight and the levels don’t move much hopefully we’ll be able to continue with her care as it is now.

    Filed under: simcoe

    Skaggs Family Extreme Brownies

    Monday, Dec 9th, 2013 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

    Every year I send out holiday cards by request. This year Ubuntu QA extraordinaire Nick Skaggs reciprocated in the most fantastic way – I received a Skaggs family card with a brownie recipe!

    Finding espresso powder took some doing, fortunately a specialty cooking store here in the city carries it. Tonight after class I was on my way to baking these delicious-sounding brownies.

    So I mixed:

    And I baked:

    Then we ate!

    Awesome brownies! Thank you Skaggs family!

    And in true open source spirit, Nick gave me permission to share the recipe, enjoy: skaggs_family_brownies.pdf

    Filed under: food, ubuntu planet
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