• Archives

  • Categories:

  • Other profiles

San Diego Zoo Safari Park

Monday, Dec 17th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

After LISA ’12 MJ joined me in San Diego for a weekend of San Diego Zoo adventure!

We stayed at the Loews Coronado Bay hotel, which made for a very comfortable stay Friday night. We made our way up to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park late Saturday morning, arriving around 11AM.

The park itself is beautiful and it was quite enjoyable to simply walk around and take in the views.

It was also an exceptional opportunity for MJ to use his shiny new DSLR camera for the first time “in the wild” so to speak.

But the reason I felt so strongly about coming here was for one particular animal who I recently learned lived here, the northern white rhinoceros. I first learned that a pair of them lived here when I watched the second episode of Last Chance to See with Stephen Fry that was specifically about the northern white rhino. I’d read the book by Douglas Adams that the series is a follow up to while in high school and while sad, the book and subsequent shows are very good. From the show I learned that there are only 7 of the northern white rhinos left in the world, 4 in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, 1 in a zoo in the Czech Republic where the other 4 also came from (this 5th was not able to travel) and the 2 at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. It was sadly clear that the only way I’d get to see one is by visiting the safari park there in San Diego.

And see them I did! Their male, Angalifu was up walking around and I got some pictures of him from the tram safari (included in park admission):

Their female Nola was laying down on the plains, I got a picture of her here.

Later in the day we went on the Asian Cart Safari which took us out to the Asian section of the park. That brought us very close to some of their greater one-horned rhinos, which our tour guide took some time to feed so we could visit with them.

The smaller one in the photo was a rhino born last year, after the food was gone her and her mother came down closer to us as well. Rhinos are so great!

We stayed at the park almost until closing, visiting elephants, giraffes, lions and even seeing the Cheetah Run. I was particularly happy to see the elephants, as the Chumby on my desk spends most of its life feeding me a webcam stream from their enclosure and the polar bear at the San Diego zoo, I could finally see them in person!

More photos from the day are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157632266586435/

Once processed I hope to be able to share some of MJ’s photos too, he got some great shots, including one of a Przewalski’s Horse from the Asian Cart ride that came out very well.

That evening we decided to continue the African theme by having dinner at Muzita bistro. I’d never had Ethiopian food before and I have to say it was quite the delicious adventure. The dishes we ordered were all stew-like and you eat them by scooping up the food with a spongey bread that comes with the meal, no utensils. It was a perfect end to our day!

Filed under: animals, travel

Restarting the Ubuntu Learning project

Sunday, Dec 16th, 2012 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

For the past several months I’ve been quietly working with a few folks to get things going again with the Ubuntu Learning project. This morning I sent a version of the following to the ubuntu-learning mailing list:

The Ubuntu Learning project has been quiet for some time, but we’re hopeful that there are a lot of folks still interested in the efforts outlined in our initiative to develop class material for students learning about Ubuntu.

In order to get things going with this project again, I wanted to quickly re-introduce myself and my own current visions for the project.

I work as a Linux systems administrator by trade, but in my free time I volunteer with a non-profit that deploys Ubuntu in schools and earlier this year I had the opportunity to travel with another non-profit to Ghana to deploy Ubuntu and train the educators there. Through these projects, it’s become clear to me that the development of training materials is essential for Ubuntu and other free software to be successful in these deployments.

Now, when it comes to this project one of the things I feel most strongly about is that we are not a documentation writing project. Documentation writing is well-covered by the Ubuntu Documentation and Ubuntu Manual teams. In places where documentation is lacking in these projects we should take it upon ourselves to volunteer our time to improve their source material. I hope that several members of our project go on to make significant contributions to these projects.

So what do we do? We write the material for teachers to teach. Think of the Ubuntu Documentation or Manual as the textbook and what we’re doing is the supplemental lesson plan, learning objectives, assessments and other tools that the teacher receives with the textbook. We’re also be working to put material in the Moodle teaching framework.

To help us with this, Jasna Benčić has put together a document that gets deep into the methodologies that we should be using when developing course material. Her document is available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pLqSuStmh5PGfiUBfamPQIYbUVSQDCrvbKX2J2VBFAI/edit?pli=1

Additionally, we’d also like to assemble a small team to write our first course which can then be used as an example for future ones. So please sign up for the mailing list to join the discussion and get involved!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

LISA ’12 in San Diego

Friday, Dec 14th, 2012 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

This week I attended my first Large Installation Systems Administration conference, LISA ’12 in San Diego. I worked Monday and Tuesday this week and took a 7AM flight to San Diego on Wednesday morning.

I made it to the conference center just in time to see the beginning of Vint Cerf’s keynote where he talked about the rapid expansion of devices on networks, IPv6, some of the networked gadgets he’s been using and wrapped up by talking a bit about strategies for interplanetary networking being employed by the Mars rovers and beyond.

Thankfully they had my room available early so I was able to drop off my bigger laptop in my room.


My room had a nice view!

I then headed to the “OpenStack: Leading the Open Source Cloud Revolution” talk by Vish Ishaya. I played around with DevStack in the spring, but have recently been giving myself more of a crash course in it. The more I learn about this project the more excited I am about it, so it was great timing for me to hear Ishaya’s talk where he covered the project history, core components and key plans for the future and technical requirements for projects wishing to join. I’m continually impressed with not only how very solidly grounded it is in general open source ethos and ability to support many different back-ends, but how much amazing corporate sponsorship it has managed to gather in it’s relatively short lifespan.

The other talk I attended that day was “System Log Analysis Using BigQuery” by Gustavo Franco. While I currently don’t have a need for massive log analysis tools, it’s always nice to know that products like BigQuery and Splunk exist should the very real need arise.

Once talks wrapped up for the day I met up with Philip Ballew to wander around a bit of the San Diego downtown before heading over to a local Starbucks for the San Diego Ubuntu Hour.


Goodies from the San Diego Ubuntu Hour

There were a total of 6 attendees at the hour and I had the great pleasure of meeting David Stilson who I had previously only conversed with over email. A former teacher, David has experience with Moodle and is interested in working on developing the Ubuntu Learning materials. I’m always apprehensive about talking to formal teachers about my (lack of) college-level education, but talking with him about his impressions of the current education system was quite interesting and made me feel significantly more comfortable discussing it. Conversation also went to the struggles I had in primary school, which prompted him to point me in the direction of John Gatto’s Underground History of American Education. As a teacher and course developer, he was also able to explain some of the key parts of what will make the classes we write effective, I’m really excited to start working together.

Thursday morning started off with Selena Deckelmann’s “Education vs. Training” talk. It was quite the inspiring talk to hear following my experience at the Ubuntu Hour the evening before!

What I’ve really had impressed upon me these past few days regarding developing educational material for these things I want to teach on the Ubuntu desktop is how vital the process of explicit objectives and defined outcomes so that students can be appropriately taught and evaluated. Deckelmann also shared some great links to free sysadmin-focused courses that are being developed: LinuxTraining.be and Ops School. The discussion that occurred following her talk was also very interesting, getting into how we “teach students to learn” as well as having a focus on core objectives which are to be defined and whether it was at all possible to get the very valuable mentorship relationships that many sysadmins depend upon to succeed to scale.

I then went to Dude, Where’s My Data? Replicating and Migrating Data Across Data Centers and Clouds presented by Jeff Darcy where he outlined the challenges of Big (and Bigger!) Data as our infrastructures become more virtualized and computing is further abstracted into the cloud. He covered many facets of the challenges, including volume of data, rate of change, variety of data, distance over which you’re replicating (LAN, WAN, worldwide…), how many copies are being made and how concerned one should be about data divergence (how much divergence is a problem for a specific application or service, etc). He then went on to talk about syncronous vs asyncronous data backup methods through the years, including some of the legacy strategies and even use of rsync.

The next panel was the one I was on, “Advancing Women in Computing”! I realized once I got up there that it had been well over a year since I’d been on such a panel. I was really impressed with the tactfulness of my fellow panelists on this difficult subject, and their ability to be so open about their own experiences and successes. I think the general tone of the panel was positive and helpful, giving real advice to folks looking to increase the number of women and other minorities in computing and in their own organizations. And thanks to everyone at the conference who came up and talked to me after the talk, it always means a lot to hear positive and encouraging words after such a panel.


Thanks to Ben Cotton for the Advancing Women in Computing panel photo!

The day wrapped up with a really fun plenary session, NSA on the Cheap by Matt Blaze. His team at the University of Pennsylvania discovered a number of security weaknesses in P25 two-way radio system used by the US government, military and local services. He discussed the lack of authentication, susceptibility to traffic analysis, vulnerability to specifically-crafted DoS attacks that can be accomplished with a $15 instant messaging toy and the many social and human problems with the technology and UI that lead to a “significant” amount of sensitive data going over the air in the clear. The University has been working with several government agencies to discuss their findings work through these problems.

The LISA ’12 Reception was held that evening, with attendees boarding a bus to take us to the boat for a 6:30PM cruise around the San Diego harbor. I don’t know a whole lot of people here so I was a bit shy about attending, particularly knowing I’d be stuck on the boat for the full 2 hours regardless of whether I wanted to flee. Fortunately the night turned out to be really awesome! On the bus ride over I met Jennifer Hadley of the University of Saskatchewan and once on the boat had dinner with her, Deborah Wazir and Meryll Larkin. I always enjoy hanging out with other sysadmins, but to be spending time with a trio of other female sysadmins who had left their husbands at home was a particular delight. Thanks for a wonderful evening, ladies!

Friday was the last day of LISA! I started off my day by going to a couple of DNSSEC talks. I was happy to learn more about an EDNS+old firewall packet blocking problem I had recently encountered so I have something to look at when I get back to work on Monday. The second talk was about the US Federal .gov transition to DNSSEC and the challenges they faced and tips they have for others who embark on it, including: insuring each organization has up to date point of contacts for technical and security-related changes, encourage automation for many of the DNSSEC maintenance operations and foster an internal community of admins to share solutions.

The last panel and talk of the day were remarkably similar – the first was a panel on “Disruptive Technology” talking about our world now with an ever-changing variety of technologies, the latest of which is the whole cloud world with the specific networking, configuration and storage needs that it presents. The last was “15 Years of DevOps” where presenter Geoff Halprin provided a history of where he saw software development and systems administration from the 1980s onward. It was an interesting history and a perspective of DevOps in the world of sysadmins and developers that I hadn’t really thought about before.

In all, great conference! Had some nice talks with people and it was nice to catch up with others who I don’t get to see often.

Filed under: events, tech, travel

Wedding planning, mission statements and Macs

Tuesday, Dec 11th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

We ended up having a busy weekend. Saturday and Sunday we spent planning a trip to Philadelphia at the end of the year, selecting florists to visit and starting to line up appointments for tastings and with a DJ. I also ordered some sample wedding invitations. I was feeling so satisfied with what we accomplished when MJ reminded me that we still have a honeymoon to plan. Oh bother!

Saturday evening we headed out for dinner and the serpentine belt went on the car, leaving us waiting for a tow truck. Oh, cars. Fortunately we weren’t that far from home and were able to find dinner at a nearby place on our way home. I’ve been so busy and stressed out these past few weeks it was interesting how easily I was able to handle the situation, for once my mind immediately went to “aw, it’s ok, we can handle this” and we had a fine evening anyway.

Sunday I headed out to Berkeley and met up with the BerkeleyLUG folks before heading off with Grant Bowman to put some finishing touches on the Partimus Mission Statement proposal. We’ve been working our way through the proposed steps in The Fieldstone Alliance Guide to Crafting Effective Mission and Vision Statements, and while the process isn’t short, it’s been a really interesting exercise for our organization.

Sunday night we had some errands to run, including picking up a new battery for the Mac Book Pro, which was an interesting experience. I don’t care for most Apple products so this foray into Apple-land is bound to be strange for me, but the store really wasn’t a pleasant experience at all. You need an appointment for someone to look at a laptop – even for a simple battery replacement and advice about upgrading the software. We managed to just buy the battery there and for now are just grabbing the Snow Leopard version of OSX. In spite of the software situation, the hardware is pretty nice, the previous owner upgraded the RAM to 4G and put a 500G harddrive in it.

We had dinner at Burger Bar over Union Square where we got a window seat and could enjoy the holiday lights and watch to watch the ice skaters.

This evening I spent some time working to get a draft post out to the Ubuntu Learning mailing list in an effort to get some of that discussion rolling again. I’d really like to see the training materials reach a state where we can use them at our Partimus schools and ship out .pdf versions to the schools in Ghana. There’s certainly a lot of interest in the project and I’m hoping that with minimal effort I can get a team rolling and then let the experts in course development take over.

Never a dull moment, tonight I’m packing to leave for San Diego very early in the morning. I’ll need to catch the first BART train of the morning to get me to the airport in time for my 6:59AM flight. Just writing about it makes me tired :)

Filed under: life

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 295 released!

Tuesday, Dec 11th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Yesterday the Ubuntu News team released the 295th issue of Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter!

Over on Google+ this caused Michael Hall and Alan Pope to muse about just how long Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter had been around for.

So, when was the first issue? Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter – Issue #1 for the week of May 28 2006 – June 3 2006. Quite a long time ago! And reading that very first newsletter, along with a sampling of others throughout the years is what continues to drive me to work on the team, the ability to have these snapshots in time of where our project was, the articles that were out at the time and how the relationship between Ubuntu and the world has changed over the past 6 years. We’ve watched the Ubuntu Developer Summits like those covered in the first issue grow to events that host hundreds of attendees, seen whole fan sites spring up that are dedicated to covering even the slightest changes that come down the release pipeline and the number of pop culture and mentions in press from the BBC to the New York Times steadily rise.

My own involvement reached the most rewarding when I was able to leave for much of the month of October this year to travel to Ghana and then UDS and leave the Newsletter in the very capable hands of other volunteers. During this time Jasna Benčić did most of the article collection throughout the week and I could count on Amber Graner and José Antonio Rey to make sure the weekend volunteers were contacted and could complete all the finishing touches of the newsletter by the end of each weekend. Upon my return I’ve found that Jasna continues to do much of the article collection, allowing me to tune my own process for scouring articles without fear of missing any great ones. In addition to our ever-reliable editor Matt Rudge, we’ve also had the added benefit of Jim Connett’s editorial expertise almost every week since he began volunteering in July.

I’m very excited about the team we’ve built here, but we could always use more! Summary writers are where we could use the most help.

Summary writers. Summary writers receive an email every Saturday with a link to the collaborative news links document (currently a Google Doc) for the past week which lists everything that needs summarizing. These people are vitally important to the newsletter. The time commitment is limited and it is easy to get started with from the first weekend you volunteer. No need to be shy about your writing skills, we have style guidelines to help you on your way and all summaries are reviewed before publishing so it’s easy to improve as you go on.

Interested? Email editor.ubuntu.news@ubuntu.com and we’ll get you added to the list of folks who are emailed each week and you can help as you have time.

Filed under: ubuntu planet

The reindeer of San Francisco and more

Saturday, Dec 8th, 2012 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

On our visit to the San Francisco Zoo on Thanksgiving we were able to visit some of their new visitors, the reindeer!

More photos from that day at the zoo here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157632168098698/

Last Sunday we decided to head out to see the final weekend of the baby ostriches at the California Academy of Science’s Earthquake Exhibit.

We also had a chance to walk through their indoor rain forest and for the first time visited their planetarium.

Naturally, we also visited the reindeer that are living there at the academy for the season as well.

More photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157632163802107/

The rest of the week was very busy for me. I am still working, but my job search continued with some exciting news yesterday that is game changing for me, I hope to have an announcement on that front soon.

One of the highlights of my week included meeting up with a neighbor who was moving and looking to sell his laptops, a pair of macs. The first is an old PowerBook G4 (2004) and the other is a much newer (2007) Mac Book Pro. Both seem to be in very good physical condition aside from the batteries (which don’t last long) so I took them off his hands. Now, Apple products aren’t my thing and I haven’t really used much OSX so I figured I’d give it a try. I quickly realized upon booting up the PowerBook that using OSX on it would be impossible as it had been EOLed for that hardware. I knew that Apple had dropped support for their PPC systems, but it wasn’t until then that I fully appreciated what that meant: this old PowerBook G4 is a solid piece of hardware with a gig of RAM and a faster processor than my netbook! I almost took it as a personal offense that such a nice machine has been written off to the scrap heap because there was no longer an OS supported by the manufacturer for it, no updates, no modern web browser… Fortunately for me there are still plenty of Linux PPC ports and the fine folks at Lubuntu still maintain one. The install was a breeze and the only things I needed to do upon bootup were install the firmware-b43-installer package for the wifi and hit up the FAQ for the keyboard backlight fix. I’m now writing this blog post on this charming old PowerBook. Now, I don’t need another laptop, and this thing is quite heavy, so for now I think I’ll end up using it as a test box for Lubuntu development releases. I should probably get around to giving the Mac Book Pro a try this weekend just to confirm it doesn’t have any major issues, I decided to keep OSX on that one so that will be my OSX test system, it currently has Leopard.

On Wednesday I started work early so I could leave early for an appointment and then make it to the San Francisco Ubuntu Hour that I was hosting a week earlier than normal to avoid conflicts with my travel schedule next week. It made for quite the long day. The Ubuntu Hour went well though, one of our attendees brought the new ARM version of the XO (the OLPC laptop) to show off and there were some great discussions about packaging developmental kernel modules for testing and some of the current innovations in mesh networking on Linux.

From there it was off to the Debian Dinner at Henry’s Hunan. We had a couple of Debian Developers in attendence and a couple other new faces to make up a total of 8 people at dinner, which is a good turnout for a dinner, particularly in December when these things tend to be more lightly attended.

Last night we went out to Fort Mason for MJ’s work holiday party where I was finally able to meet several of his new colleagues. This weekend we have some errands to run but we really will be staying in for the most part. We have a lot of wedding stuff to do and a trip to plan at the end of the month to go back to Philadelphia to do the food and cake tastings, meet the DJ and the photographer, look at flowers and probably 47 other things. This Wednesday morning I’ll be flying to San Diego for LISA ’12 (Large Installation System Administration Conference) which I’m really excited about, and it will be great to meet my fellow panelists on Thursday. While I’m in town I’ll be meeting up with the San Diego Ubuntu folks at an Ubuntu Hour and MJ will be flying down Friday evening so we can spend the weekend together at the world famous San Diego Zoo and the wild animal park. Systems Administration and Zoos, what an exciting week I have lined up!

Filed under: animals, computers, life

In which I ramble my way through November

Saturday, Dec 1st, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

It’s good to be home! I’ve now been home for almost three weeks and still trying to catch up with everything. I’ve slowly been reducing the number of boxes in the condo as we’ve handling a lot of paperwork following the Philadelphia trip. We still have a fair amount of mail to go through, going to try and tackle a chunk of that this weekend. We’ve also been doing other home things and recently a City Target opened up just a couple blocks from where we live. I headed over there during a lunch break a couple weeks ago to pick up some storage containers and found the perfect laundry basket replacements for our bedroom, prompting a weekend of buying a couple more small pieces of furniture for the bedroom, hooray! I’m probably more excited about the Target than I should be, but the store includes a grocery section and it’s super nice to have the basic stuff available in such close proximity to home now, we’ll see how this impacts the frequency of our big shopping trips.

While I was gone my Raspberry Pi also went on a vacation. My friend Dan was doing a Raspberry Pi presentation and asked to borrow it so I got it sent off before my trips. It came home to me recently along with the great slides from Dan’s presentation. Now that it’s back home I’m still not sure what I’ll do with it. A lot of people are using them for little media/streaming servers, but we’ve got a great setup between what our TV does natively and the capabilities of the PS3. For now it’s running an IRC bot.

Since my return we’ve also gone full speed ahead with wedding planning. Coordinating the selection and hiring of vendors for flowers, music, photography and more, trying to plan our next trip out to Philadelphia (which needs to be soon!) where we can have appointments with all of them. We’ve been using Google Docs for all of this stuff so we can both edit all the documents and keep tabs on precisely where each other is in the process, it’s working very well. I’m also in the middle of going through options for invitations, I really need to make some choices and order some samples by the end of the weekend.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time in meetings as I catch up and continue with with various work and volunteer-related things and I really hope to have some good, announceable news on the job front soon. I’ve been able to meet up with some of the Partimus organization folks and have been having some great chats with our lead engineer on some of the projects he’s been spending time on in Oakland. It was also exciting to learn that the Ubuntu Necklaces have been very popular and are turning out to be an even better fundraiser than the earrings (which should be back in stock soon) last year! My own necklace order came in recently (pictured with the earrings):

I haven’t been able to make it out to many events in the past month, but I did get out to BerkeleyLUG for an hour last Sunday and BALUG for their recent meeting on FreeBSD. I’ve also finally gotten back into the swing of things with Ubuntu Hours and will be hosting one on Wednesday, with an unofficial Debian dinner following it.

Also, a few updates on Ghana stuff. The lightning talk I did at the Ubuntu Developer Summit has been published online, my talk starts 5m36s in: Ubuntu UDS R – Thursday Lightning Talks. I was also approached by Ubuntu User Magazine about publishing an article covering our work, which I happily did and will appear in issue 15, but you can view it online before it hits the shelves: Edubuntu in Ghana. The folks at Africa ICT Right on the ground in Ghana are continuing the work and recently published some press releases, including AIR Donates 50 Computers in Gomoa East, I’m really happy that we’re being kept in the loop as their work moves forward, they’re doing a great job of keeping records.

And holidays. For Thanksgiving we kept it pretty low-key, had a Thanksgiving lunch at the Beach Chalet and then did a quick trip to the San Francisco Zoo, they had dinosaurs.

The December holidays are quickly approaching and dealing with this time of year has been a struggle for me. I love the lights and trees and music around the secular celebration of Christmas, but I’ve committed to having a Jewish household with MJ, and there really is no place for a lit up tree here. For now the compromise has been limited “Hanukkah Lights” in blue and white with some dradle and star Hanukkah garland. It’s still not really doing it for me as I fondly remember traditional celebrations from my childhood and how culturally significant a time it has been in my life both because of my Americanness and my Germanic heritage (there were so many beautiful German Christmas decorations at the Frankfurt airport!). I’m hoping this gets easier as I begin to feel more affinity for Jewish holidays throughout the year and so no longer need to put all my festive holiday eggs in the Christmas basket (I swear, the amusing characteristics of that metaphor in this context only hit me after I wrote it).

It’s been an unusually rainy week and that continues today. It’s further encouragement for us to stay in and work on home projects and wedding stuff that needs attention rather than going out on beautiful day adventures. Now to just make sure I don’t spend all day playing video games… played with my Xbox last night for the first time since my return, it’s still calling to me.

Filed under: life

Simcoe’s November Checkup

Friday, Nov 30th, 2012 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

On November 24th we brought Simcoe in for her quarterly checkup, her last checkup had been on July 28th (I wrote about it here).

This visit was a few week later than quarterly due to our travel schedules, but she’s been doing very well with the CRF treatment. She has been more vocal lately, but I suspect that’s because she gets a bit upset with us traveling and working so much so we weren’t too concerned. The exam went well, her teeth look good and she’s even put on a several ounces since last time, She’s now 9.68 lbs (4.39 kg)!

On Tuesday the vet called us with her blood work:

BUN: 44 (normal range: 14-36)
CRE: 3.0 (normal range: .6-2.4)

BUN stayed pretty constant since last time (was 45) and CRE has gone up a tad, previously at 2.6. Her phosphorous levels remain within normal ranges and her red blood count looks good. The vet was happy with her status, saying that while her condition will continue progress, it certainly has slowed considerably.

We’ve stopped being able to give her the fish oils that were prescribed but the vet was OK with that. We stopped with the soft food too because she’s really doesn’t seem interested in it. On the bright side she is happily eating the dry prescription food (Hill’s Prescription Diet k/d Feline Renal Health) and rarely goes after Caligula’s food any more.

All good news! Even if she still doesn’t like going to the vet…

She’s much happier tonight, relaxing with me on the couch.

Filed under: simcoe

Holiday cards 2012!

Sunday, Nov 18th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Every year I send out a big batch of wintertime holiday cards to friends and acquaintances online.

IMG_3606

Reading this? That means you! Even if you’re outside the United States!

Just drop me an email at lyz@princessleia.com with your postal address, please put “Holiday Card” in the subject so I can filter it appropriately. Please do this even if I’ve sent you a card in the past, I won’t be reusing the list from last year.

Typical disclaimer: I’m not religious and the cards will be secular in theme.

Filed under: holiday cards

Time for a new challenge

Wednesday, Nov 14th, 2012 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I’ve been working for almost 6 years as a Linux Systems Administrator for a small technology services company based out of Philadelphia. What drew me to this job initially was their dedication to Open Source (particularly Debian) and the opportunity I’d have with them to not only grow my career as a Systems Administrator, but to work on Debian packages as a paid part of my role there.

Over the summer I came to the realization that it was time to move on. As much as I enjoy my job and the flexibility I was allowed to pursue my Open Source work, my role has become the most senior possible in the company and I have grown to handle a lot of company operations and management tasks. What I really want career-wise is to leverage my growing Systems Administrator skill set in a position that would allow me to tackle larger systems and solve more challenging problems. In August I approached the owner of the company to explain my intention to seek new opportunities and we’ve worked together to develop a transition plan to make sure my role could be sufficiently covered when I left. With this plan in place, I began my job search.

Now, there are no shortage of Linux Systems Administrator jobs here in San Francisco and I’ve had some great interviews with some interesting companies. I’ve spoken with a couple of start-ups who hoped to bring me on board to take over key portions of operations, but it quickly became apparent that, while satisfying my desire for a stronger technical role, the time involved working for these start-ups would be more than full time and would eat into the time I spend on Open Source. I’ve also had interviews with companies who have interesting roles but are completely indifferent to my work in Open Source and are strictly hiring standard Linux Systems Administrators. While such a traditional systems role remains a valid option that I’m still considering to satisfy my technical career goals, I may be disappointed to see my Open Source work largely ignored at a company like this.

Given that my Open Source work these days centers around Ubuntu projects related to the community, I looked into some Community Management roles. I’ve discovered that the vast majority of these roles, even in Open Source-focused companies, are very marketing-oriented and I was told directly by one hiring manager that my technical skills would be wasted in such a position at their company (she put me in touch with their Systems Engineer recruiter instead). I haven’t been able to find a position that mixes my technical prowess with my skills as a community organizer. The inability to find such a role, as yet, is unfortunate. When I talk to actual contributors from projects, they’ve expressed an interest in having a more technical person in place as the liaison between community and company.

So, my dream job? A position that values, and perhaps even leverages, my Open Source work as well as the systems work to which I am so dedicated in my career.

At this point, I continue to work for my current employer and have begun this week to train my replacement. Now that I’ve wrapped up my major international travel for the year, I’m continuing to interview for roles both at companies here in the city of San Francisco and as well as remote opportunities. My primary focus remains systems administration positions, though I still hope to find the right fit and balance for my skill set.

Filed under: work
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »