• Archives

  • Categories:

  • Other profiles

Who is the Ubuntu Community Council?

Friday, Oct 4th, 2013 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

As we come up on just a few more days left to submit nominations for the Ubuntu Community Council, I thought I’d take a few minutes to write about my experiences on the council for the past 4 years (and 2 more if you’ll have me!) and why I highly encourage others to nominate themselves of folks in the community who they feel are qualified.

First up, here’s the call for nominations, for context: Community Council Call for Nominations

For this nominations call I grabbed FAQ I received during the last nomination period 2 years ago and I am hopeful that it does a decent job of setting expectations.

The Ubuntu governance page gives this description of the Community Council:

The social structures and community processes of Ubuntu are supervised by the Ubuntu Community Council. It is the Community Council that handles appointments to and elections for official project boards and councils. The council is also responsible for the Code of Conduct and tasked with ensuring that community members follow its guidelines.

The council is ultimately responsible for dispute resolution, should it be required. For example, in the past, we have helped to resolve conflicts in LoCo teams and in the Ubuntu forums – both very important parts of the community that have their own leadership structures carrying authority delegated by the Community Council.

The Community Council meets every two weeks on Internet relay chat (IRC). You can propose an item for discussion at a council meeting on the Community Council Agenda page on the Ubuntu Wiki.

Golly, impressive! But at the heart of it, we’re just community members who care about Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community and have decided to dedicate time and effort to helping both in our roles as Community Council members and in our projects in the wide Ubuntu community.

Community Council Members
Only one of us has been to space!

We’re a mix of people’s parents, sisters, sons and spouses with jobs and very different lives, but a shared passion for Ubuntu and track record in the community. The diverse perspective of council members allows us to have great discussions (sometimes contentious, but always civil) about the direction of Ubuntu and how we can help and make ourselves available to the community through changes and announcements that come out. Among our ranks have always been a nice mix of Canonical employees and those of us employed elsewhere, members who are development-focused and not so development-focused, contributors to LoCos, marketing, translations and more.

It’s a great opportunity to work closely with these other strong community members and seek wisdom for each other. Our regular sync-ups keep each other up to date with various parts of the project and having Mark available to talk to has led to some great triage work by the council when issues do crop up.

So, want to join us? Nominations details here: Community Council Call for Nominations

Once we have collected all nominations, Mark will review them and set up a poll so all Ubuntu Members can vote.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

32nd Birthday in Squaw Valley

Thursday, Oct 3rd, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Friday MJ and I left to head toward Tahoe to spend the weekend at The Resort at Squaw Creek to celebrate my 32nd birthday on Sunday. With my still recovering sprained ankle I wasn’t as mobile as I generally like to be for a mountain adventure, but the weather was cooperating for some nice enjoyment of their heated pools and the suite we booked had a fireplace. I prepared for a weekend of recreational swimming and reading by the fireplace.

We got a late start after work on Friday night, so it was after 3AM by the time we made it to the resort. Upon arrival I promptly enjoyed 8 hours of great sleep.

Rising at noon meant it was lunch time! We headed down for lunch at Sandy’s Pub where I indulged in a steak sandwich and a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale – perhaps a boring classic, but I could resist ordering a Sierra Nevada while in the Sierra Nevadas.

Then pools!

The temperature was only in the low 60s, so it wasn’t balmy but it was quite decent for an enjoyable afternoon.

Dinner was at Six Peaks Grille where I enjoyed their scallops appetizer, the surf and turf entree and wrapped up the meal with lava cake and a very grown up hot chocolate.

Sunday was my birthday! Started off with room service pancake breakfast, then more reading and casual catching up with some Ubuntu work. I’ve been doing a lot better these past several months of taking time off when I need it, so it wasn’t stressful for me to squeeze some work in – indeed it’s gone back to being largely an enjoyable activity.

The rest of the day was more of the previous day, enjoying the pool, reading by the fire as I enjoyed the view of the mountains and the sunset. Bliss!

We checked out in the late evening and made our way to the town of Truckee where we had dinner reservations at Cottonwood Restaurant where we enjoyed another exceptional dinner. Their Caesar salad was excellent and I really enjoyed the filet I ordered. Dinner wrapped up with a birthday brownie and some decadent salted caramel ice cream.

And then it was time to head home! Wonderfully relaxing birthday weekend complete :)

Filed under: beer, events, life, travel

CodeChix OpenStack workshop wrap-up and materials

Wednesday, Sep 25th, 2013 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

As I announced in a previous post on September 22nd I ran a CodeChix workshop in Palo Alto on OpenStack.

In the weeks leading up to it I worked with my session assistants Ryan Lane and Anita Kuno to hash out our plans for the workshop. Ryan was able to put together an image for VirtualBox that had all the DevStack dependencies pre-cached, so students only needed to run stack.sh without having to download everything on the shared network.

We also drafted the following prerequisites for the class:

  • A laptop that has at least 2G of RAM available to allocate to a virtual machine.
  • At least 10G of harddrive space to allocate to disk images
  • VirtualBox installed
  • If you wish to contribute to OpenStack, a basic understanding of Python is necessary, but this class will also be useful to folks who are interested in using it

In retrospect I should have thought about system architecture as well, my assumption had been that everyone would be running 64-bit, but thankfully Anita suggested getting some 32-bit images prepped as well just in case. So Ryan, Anita and I spent Saturday evening working through final testing and spinning up of the images, and I was able to copy them down to 10 USB sticks containing 64-bit and 32-bit DevStack images to bring along to the workshop.

We arrived at the workshop venue, Groupon, around 11:30. This gave us time to scope out the room (need power strips!) and enjoy some catered lunch before attendees arrived. From noon – 1PM attendees trickled in, had lunch and we began passing around the USB sticks so everyone would have the images before we began the more formal portion of the event.

At 1PM Rupa Dachere, founder of CodeChix, kicked off the event by talking about CodeChix and what they do. She then handed things off to Shraddha Ladda who was handling coordination of this specific event so she could do introductions.

Then it was our turn! As I got my laptop set up with the projector Anita had the opportunity to talk to the attendees about the GNOME Outreach Program for Women that she participated in. I’m really glad we were able to find time for that, as several of the attendees had expressed interest in a more formal program for getting involved with OpenStack and open source in general.

Anita then passed me the mic and I did an introduction to OpenStack talk using the GenericPlatformDeckMay-23-2013.pptx slides from the openstack.org/marketing page, which worked out really well since a poll of the room only showed a couple of people really familiar with OpenStack.


Thanks to Rupa for this photo!

In addition to the images on the USB stick, attendees also got a .pdf copy of the OpenStack Operations Guide which I was able to talk about some in my presentation.

Our next step was getting everyone loaded up with their DevStack images. This is where having Ryan and Anita there with me really made a huge difference, we had a room of 50 people and a few hiccups here and there with the installs. They were able to work with attendees to get the issues quickly worked out so we could move on. It did take a while though, so I think next time I run one of these I’ll try to come up with some exercises for folks who have faster systems or didn’t run into any issues.

For the workshop I also handed out printed copies of a short documentation sheet (also a .pdf version from the USB stick): CodeChixworkshopOpenStackDocumentation.pdf

It gives some basic OpenStack Documentation links as well as the core basics of what we walked through in the class, both in the dashboard and at the command line. Attendees were able to bring up a basic VM via the dashboard and see it and the details of the VM by issuing a few basic nova commands.

Around 3:30 I wrapped up the workshop by giving a quick crash course into the Gerrit Workflow for those interested in contributing. We’re hoping to host a follow-up session in the coming months to do a more in depth dive into contributing specifically.

It was really a pleasure to present this workshop with Anita and Ryan. It was clear how much work Rupa and Shraddha put into preparation for this workshop, so I’m really thankful for their coordination. Rupa also took the time to present each of us with a beautiful personalized plaque in appreciation for our participation in the workshop – wow!

We wrapped up the workshop around 4PM. Huge thanks to all the attendees for coming and offering feedback!

A few more photos from the workshop here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157635885645825/

Filed under: events, openstack, tech

OpenStack TripleO Sprint

Tuesday, Sep 24th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last week I headed to the HP office in Seattle to meet up with my colleagues from HP, Red Hat and others for a TripleO Sprint which was proposed in July and fleshed out last month.

We started off on Monday by attempting to get everyone set up with a TripleO environment by walking through the instructions in devtest document and then working through bugs as folks encountered issues.

My primary interest during this sprint was pushing forward baremetal testing and working with my fellow -infra team members to begin hashing out a plan to test TripleO itself. Monday afternoon through Tuesday I worked with Clark Boylan to step through my notes from attempts to get a basic baremetal testing infrastructure up within LXC. Unfortunately we bumped into this bug and I had to adjust my goals for the week.

As others attending the sprint continued to focus on TripleO bugs and features, I took the opportunity with Clark to make new -infra diagram for our team wiki page based on updates we made this cycle to the infrastructure which James E. Blair documented here that includes gearman, our new cgit install and multiple Jenkinses.


(Click to see full diagram)

It was great to see several representatives from the Tuskar project participating in the sprint and hashing out how the projects can most effectively collaborate, which led to this thread on list and the exciting announcement today that Tuskar is merging with TripleO. We also had a nice walkthrough of the os-*-config system TripleO is using by Clint Byrum, whiteboard sketch here.

As the week wound down Clark, Monty Taylor, Robert Collins and I were able to walk through some plans for how to move forward with TripleO testing in the infrastructure. We have a good plan now, which Robert outlines here and some concrete steps for making it happen. I was also able to spend some time Friday morning going through devstack-gate and nodepool build configurations with Clark and Anita Kuno.

It was an excellent and productive week for me, I was really happy to be involved and meet some of the other key players working in this space!

A few more photos from the week are available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157635624275593/

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, travel

A Cylinder and a Sprain

Thursday, Sep 19th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Saturday evening MJ and I spent a final meal together before my trip, breaking the fast following Yom Kippur. On Sunday we went to the Asian Art Museum to visit the Cyrus Cylinder and In The Moment exhibits.

The Cyrus Cylinder exhibit was small and busy, but the history geek in me loved it.

Accompanying the cylinder, they also had other artifacts from the time period and region.

I uploaded a few more photos from the exhibit here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157635624257963/

We weren’t really familiar with the In The Moment exhibit before getting to the museum, and I’m not super into Japanese art, but I do love animal art and this exhibit had a lot of it, so it was a pretty captivating.

Sunday evening I was headed to the airport for my work trip to Seattle, where I am now. The weather has been beautiful most of the week and we’ve got a considerable amount of great work done here, which I’ll write about later. Unfortunately on Tuesday morning I was a bit sleepier than I should have been as I made the short walk to the office and missed a step coming out of the hotel, down I went! Scraped my knee and hurt my ankle, but I limped to the office, just a twisted ankle, I’m fine!

Well, I wasn’t fine. Swelling, bruising and more pain followed that evening and Wednesday morning, at lunch on Wednesday I finally decided to see a doctor, which is how I ended up cabbing it to a U.S. HealthWorks Urgent Care center.

I was pretty apprehensive about going to some random care center in a city I’m not familiar with selected based on acceptance of my insurance and proximity to the office, but I totally lucked out. The center was clean, staff was friendly and efficient and within an hour of arriving I had x-rays done and a diagnosis in hand. Nothing broken, just a bad sprain. They provided a simple brace to keep it stable and I’m to give it rest for a few days, take Advil and add a dose of ice and elevation as I can. So I’ve managed to hobble around this week and thanks to the Advil the pain has been kept to a dull roar. It’s getting better, I still can’t put all my weight on it but this evening the swelling was down and the visible bruising is fading.

Tomorrow is my last day at the office here and I have some work to get done in the morning. Tomorrow evening I fly home! Saturday I’ll be spending prepping for the OpenStack Workshop I’m hosting on Sunday.

Filed under: health, life, san francisco

A Dragon and The Thinker, San Francisco style

Sunday, Sep 15th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Labor Day I made my way over to the San Francisco Zoo to meet their latest resident: Big Daddy Bahasa, a 2 year old Komodo Dragon. His exhibit opened just days before so it was quite busy as I peered in to get my glimpse of the active little dragon.

Jillian the “baby” tiger continues to grow by leaps and bounds, and I was able to visit the whale exhibit there before it closed. More photos from the day here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157635349876249/

The Jewish High Holy Days have also come and gone. While I’ve never called myself a religious person, I certainly am appreciating the meaning of these holidays and the pause it causes us to take to reflect. I should probably write more extensively about this at some point, but having specific times to communally meditate on specific portions of ones life has been a very valuable experience for me. Secular living doesn’t do that much.

Rosh Hashanah also gave me an opportunity to experiment with a new Challah shape – round! I found a very helpful video on youtube on how to do 6-strand braiding for a round loaf (I did the first demonstrated in the video) and got to work. The result was round…ish:

Last weekend MJ and I took Sunday afternoon to go to the Legion of Honor to explore the Impressionists on the Water exhibit. It’s one that had been recommended to me by a friend and I have wanted to visit the museum since moving here for some of their other cultural items, so it was a treat to finally go. Impressionism isn’t really my style, but I do love the water theme and impressionism lends itself well to it. They had several Monets on display, but I found myself particularly drawn to those by Renoir. We were able to check out some of the regular exhibits as well, and of course visit the cast of The Thinker that they have at the entrance to the museum, making it my 2nd visit to a cast of The Thinker, the first being the one in Philadelphia.

More photos from outside the Legion of Honor on that oh so foggy day here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157635499889555/

On Wednesday I hosted an Ubuntu Hour where my friend Grant Bowman brought along his Nexus 7 with Ubuntu Touch running on it for attendees to play with. The Touch was a hit with attendees as we got to explore the swipe gestures that really make Ubuntu Touch an exceptional interface. The build didn’t have camera support, which was pretty disappointing since the Nexus 7 was the device all the initial demos were done on last year at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen. Grant also blogged about getting the device installed here: Touch Demo Preparation

Over these past couple of weeks as MJ reworked our network I also worked to get a physical KVM setup at desk now that I have a work desktop, in addition to my personal desktop and my firewall/Nagios server/backups machine that I also have connected to a monitor. I now have a combination of physical KVM and Synergy connecting my 3 machines to 2 monitors and a single set of keyboard+mouse. And it all ended up being more complicated than I anticipated, with my insistence upon using my old IBM keyboard that is PS2 (rather than USB) with the USB-based KVM and needing an extension USB cable for the goofy physical KVM setup I wanted. I also took the opportunity while ordering parts to upgrade my personal desktop to 16G of RAM (changed my life!) and buy new speakers and headphones for use at my desk, and in the case of headphones, for travel too.

Finally, I have to admit that I’ve been quite tired lately and my schedule has been partially driven by unusually frequent headaches. I’m working to address this but it has caused me to be hyper-focused on my paid OpenStack work and less diligent with my volunteer Ubuntu work these past few weeks. Instead I’ve been sleeping more and doing more media consumption, which means a bit more television than usual and a lot more reading. I’m happy to say my stack of magazines is significantly smaller and I’ve enjoyed catching up on some fiction, but I do hope to get back to my productive self soon. Thankfully I work on great teams and am able to prioritize things so that I don’t think much is blocking on me at this point and I can get the rest I currently need.

Filed under: life, san francisco

Hosting a CodeChix OpenStack Workshop in Palo Alto

Sunday, Sep 8th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Several months ago I met Rupa Dachere, founder of CodeChix, “a CA non-profit public benefit organization dedicated to the Education, Promotion and Mentorship of female engineers and students.” Given my work with OpenStack, we chatted about the possibility of doing a workshop on OpenStack for CodeChix.

CodeChix

This has now come together! Ryan Lane of Wikimedia and my colleague Anita Kuno of HP will be joining me to present on key OpenStack components, get participants set up with DevStack in a VM on their own laptop and set up for contributing.

When: Sunday, September 22, 2013 from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Where: Groupon, 3101 Park Boulevard, Palo Alto, CA 94306

Following lunch and introductions, we plan to do the following:

  1. Presentation of basics of key OpenStack components.
  2. Basic VM setup so we can get the DevStack going.
  3. Demo of a system that is running DevStack
  4. Hands-on exercise – log into the OpenStack Horizon dashboard and walk through basic components, run a VM from Horizon, run a few commands at the command line for listing and manipulating VMs
  5. How to get involved and contribute code (thoroughness will depend upon time available).
  6. Signup for Launchpad/Gerrit and sign Contributor License Agreement
  7. Time allowing, have everyone add a simple feature and test it
OpenStack

Registration is required, along with a small donation ($5-20) to cover expenses. Registration, full details, pre-requisites and more here: OpenStack – What is it, How do I use it and What jobs can I get?

Filed under: events, openstack, tech

Day of Rest, 5 months later

Monday, Sep 2nd, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Back in April I wrote the blog post “Day of Rest” about my intention to take a day off from “things that feel like work” once a week. Since I’m studying Judaism and have joined a synagogue with MJ the logical selection for the day was Saturday.

The following are some take-aways I’ve had since starting this.

It doesn’t work when I’m traveling

When I’m traveling it usually means that my working day is significantly longer than 8 hours when you take into account commuting, socializing and dinners out. I also rarely have access to the solid internet connection I have at home or the computing power there. In all this means I’m stuck with a laptop, a sub-optimal internet connection and limited time for actually working on it. While I do try to plan accordingly, I still highly value any down time I get and often find that moments I can sneak online even on Saturdays to get work done are important. Additionally, it’s quite common for me to be presenting or otherwise engaged in conference activities on the weekends I travel for work.

Sometimes it’s hard to avoid scheduling work on Saturday

I’m a systems administrator, and although I now work on a larger team there are times when we have to schedule work on weekends, sometimes that lands on Saturday. There are also times like in a couple weeks that I’m working to do final prep a workshop with an out of town colleague and our available window for that is between a business trip with return from on Friday and the workshop on Sunday. Local conferences and events sometimes land on Saturdays too.

I had to define for myself what is work and what is not

This was perhaps the hardest thing of all. Jewish teachings have lists and rulings and such that give guidelines, but it didn’t really work for me so I really played it all by ear. My strategy was “if it feels like work I won’t do it” and that seemed to serve me well. I quickly had to put all OpenStack and Ubuntu work into the off-limits category, as much as I enjoy it all, it was work. I tend to stay away from dishes and laundry, and things like cleaning up storage. I will sometimes bank on Saturday just because of logistical limitations, and we do shopping sometimes but I try to avoid things like grocery shopping and lean toward the more fun types of shopping (or at least which takes us somewhere interesting).

There is a lot I want to do in my life that is not work

I live in an amazing city and there are so many things I want to see and do! Saturdays have become my go to day for visiting museums and spending leisurely lunches with MJ. There’s also a lot I want to learn, so I’ve started using Saturday to catch up on reading personal and news blogs, magazines and books. This Saturday I also took some time to play with my electronics kit.

People understand

I was a bit worried that my work would suffer if I wasn’t hovering over my keyboard all day to work with those weekend community members, but it turns out that people understand more than I thought they would. After a few months in some of my communities it became accepted that I’m away on Saturdays and will be back in full swing on Sunday to help out. Today I even get messages from colleagues I work with that end with “but look at this tomorrow, I know it’s your day off!”

It gets easier

The first few weeks I did this it was really hard to let go. I made a lot of exceptions (“well I have to do Ubuntu Weekly News prep on Saturday morning”) and doing something as drastic as not checking email all day seemed completely unnecessary (“not all of my email is work”). But as I started cutting back in some areas, it naturally became easier to cut back in others. I never intended to stop checking email and obsessing over social media on Saturdays, but this Saturday I decided to do just that and found a comforting liberation in not checking my phone all the time, and every moment I reached for it I was able to become mindful of what I was doing and keep myself in the physical present instead of checking my phone.

It’s awesome

I work a lot because I truly enjoy what I do, but even I needed a break. I’ve noticed that not only do I enjoy my day off, but it brings me back to my work projects energized and excited to get on with work. I also get the satisfaction of having visited a museum for an exhibit I really wanted to see or finally finishing a book I’ve been enjoying because now these things aren’t just scattered among the “more important” work items. I had honestly feared that taking a day off would mean the lost of productivity, but it’s actually had the opposite effect since I’m more productive on the other 6 days and I’m happier and better rested in general.

Filed under: life, reflection

Help out with the Saucy Ubuntu Docs!

Sunday, Sep 1st, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Throughout this cycle I have been working with the Ubuntu Doc team in my capacity as a Community Council member to assist in building up the number of team administrators and work to improve the Getting Started documentation to get new contributors involved with the documentation that ships with Ubuntu. I’m happy to say that the actual amount of work I did was personally pretty minimal; administrators Doug Smythies, Kevin Godby, Benjamin Kerensa really worked hard this cycle to get things into shape, and there is a significant amount of activity on the mailing list today from other contributors.

Ubuntu Desktop Guide

Now that some of the major hurdles have been tackled, the team is slowly reaching out beyond the immediate community to get more contributors — that’s where you come in!

We need reviewers for the new Ubuntu Desktop Guide how-to: DocumentationTeam/SystemDocumentation/UbuntuDesktopGuide

Does this guide make sense? Does it give you the introductory tools and information you need to start working on documentation? What is missing? Let us know on the Ubuntu Doc mailing list (if possible, sign up for the mailing list so your mail doesn’t get moderated, we want to make it easier on our new list admins!).

Not ready to dive into full documentation writing with Mallard? We also need folks to simply review the documentation. You have a couple options for reviewing the current documentation:

1. Review the 13.04 documentation on the web

https://help.ubuntu.com/13.04/ubuntu-help/

This is the easiest way to quickly get involved.

Note: We have already updated some of this in the latest development version for 13.10, but there still may be errors to find so reviewing this is useful to us.

2. Build the current development documentation as html

This method is more complex and takes a little time, but you will be reviewing the actual development version of the documentation.

  • Install the following packages: bzr xsltproc libxml2-utils yelp-tools yelp-xsl
  • At the command line, type: bzr branch lp:ubuntu/ubuntu-docs (this took 10 minutes for me, be prepared to wait!)
  • Change to the new ubuntu-docs html directory: cd ubuntu-docs/html/
  • To build the HTML documentation, just type: make
  • View the resulting HTML documentation in the html/build/en/ directory. You can open file:///path/to/ubuntu-docs/html/build/en/index.html in your browser (where “/path/to/” is where you put the docs, like /home/elizabeth/)

Tip: When reviewing documentation built on your system keep an eye on the address bar to make sure the pages you are reviewing are still your local file:/// ones, there are some links in the documentation that take you to other sites

Reviewing instructions

To prevent everyone from reviewing the same few pages over and over again, we’ve created a spreadsheet to track which pages still need to be reviewed. Visit the spreadsheet and find a page that hasn’t been reviewed yet and add your name to the Reviewer column. It looks quite empty now, but don’t be shy :) If all the pages have been reviewed once, feel free to pick a page and review it a second time!

Keep in mind that the Ubuntu Documentation adheres to the style guide here: DocumentationTeam/StyleGuide. Of particular interest may be the Grammar, Punctuation, and Spelling section. Also note that the Ubuntu documentation uses US English spelling and grammar rules.

If you find a bug, please report it here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-docs/+filebug

If you have any questions or run into any problems, please feel free to email the Ubuntu Doc mailing list at ubuntu-doc@lists.ubuntu.com or chat with us in the #ubuntu-doc IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

Thanks to Kevin Godby for working with me on this post!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Miscellaneous life stuff from July and August

Sunday, Aug 25th, 2013 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

It’s been a crazy busy summer. Looking back through my blog, I see that for the past 2 months all my posts have somehow been event, open source or travel related. Crazy! I assure you, I have been doing normal life stuff as well, like…

Doing laundry.

Taking pictures of street cars as I wander around downtown.

Making raisin challah when I’m in town to do + enjoy it!

Getting a new bedroom set (the mattress came a day later).

Hosting Ubuntu Hours, during one of which a kid dropped by our table and asked the unforgettable “Who do you think would win in a fight, a salamander or a penguin?”

And enjoying oysters by the bay.

I love San Francisco.

We also managed to get out to the movie theater to see Iron Man 3 last month. I’ve been going down to Mountain View a couple times a month too in order to meet up with MJ and some Google folks for dinners, which has been fun and a nice distraction from being in the city all the time. Plus, train ride! Say what you will about Caltrain, it is fine for the occasional jaunt down the peninsula.

I also gave my Introduction to Ubuntu talk at ITT Tech in Concord again in July. It had been a year since I’d done so and it was pretty astonishing to see that the class this time was really interested in learning about Linux and Open Source in order to pursue a career in that direction. I was also interviewed during OpenStack’s 3rd birthday flurry of blog posts in July: OpenStack Blog: Open Mic Spotlight: Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph which ended up causing a quote of mine about in production adoption being passed around a couple of articles. I had a chat with Rikki Endsley about the best advice I’ve gotten as a sysadmin, which ended up in her article Advice from sys admins, for sys admins.

Throughout all my crazy travel I’ve been releasing the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter each week, worked with UnixStickers.com to get them to begin selling Xubuntu stickers and helped coordinate the XMir testing, which was a lot of fun because it engaged so many more users than our standard testing does, even if we didn’t end up defaulting to it in the end. These past couple weeks in Ubuntu Women land we launched both a Project Survey and a new competition in the form of a Fact Finding Scavenger Hunt.

Books! On the fiction side I’ve not read much, but after a recommendation I did pick up Everything Matters! Ron Currie Jr. which was great, even if it defied my moratorium on apocalypse books (and satisfied the reason why I imposed such law upon myself). For non-fiction I picked up Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan, which is turning out to be very good for me since my tech brain is very skeptical of all this meditation stuff, it’s nice to have an author who gets that and offers up studies backing up his claims. I also have been browsing a couple of time management books, so far Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think has been the most useful as far as perspective changes go, she reminds me that I really do need to start making time to go to the gym again. Travel time has also afforded me the ability to make a nice dent in my magazine stack.

It was really great to have our friend Danita in town last weekend. In addition to the penguin breakfast and our California reception, she joined us on our first visit to the new Exploratorium, now located at pier 15 on the Embarcadero. It was really crowded, so we may consider going on a calmer day some time, but I was really struck by how many adults without children were there – and not only were they there, they were right there along with the kids trying out the science exhibits! As an adult who did this but always felt a bit awkward at science museums back east, it was nice to see a science museum here that was so engaging to everyone. I’ve uploaded photos of our Exploratorium adventure here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157635136622926/

Last Monday shifted my schedule up an hour so I could join MJ and Danita in Santa Cruz where we spent the evening riding on rides, including my favorite roller coaster, the Giant Dipper! We also played some mini golf and I ate too much salt water taffy.

Which brings us to this weekend! Our wifi router has been going bad. It completely fell over a couple weeks ago and we left it unplugged for about a week (no wifi at home at all!) and then plugged it back in while Danita was visiting and it magically worked for a few more days. MJ decided to take the opportunity of this failure to redo our entire network this weekend. It’s been a fun weekend of rewriting and reorganizing our computers and network. There is still more to do (like install a faster secondary NIC in my desktop, replace my speakers and add a KVM switch for my new work desktop) but things are coming along nicely as far as the network configuration goes, and we have wifi back. Hooray for a formally planned network strategy!

Filed under: books, life, san francisco
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »