In my last post I mentioned that I was coming down with the flu and while mostly gone I still seem to have the lingering cough and some sniffles that tend to hang on weeks after the worst of it is over. That flu ended up knocking me out of the game for several days though, many unproductive nights and it wasn’t until this week that I was finally able to get back to the gym.

We’ve now gone to three Intro to Judaism classes and they’ve all been quite interesting. The classes aren’t just covering the 101 facts, but diving into a lot of Jewish thought around God and the responsibilities of humans in this world according to Judaism. As a non-believer I’ve felt somewhat awkward in some of these discussions, but I have been able to draw on my general scholarly knowledge of the Hebrew Bible to contribute meaningfully to the discussions in at least an academic way. Speaking of which, I finished going through my Torah Study Guide with the completion of Deuteronomy and ordered this copy of the Tanakh to continue studies, and so read the Book of Joshua earlier this week.

In other learning stuff, I’ve been putting the finishing touches on my Puppet development environment (learning a bit about Ruby along the way) and have fully committed to finally really learning Python. No more hacking randomly scripts and praying! I will know it properly! Dive into Python has been essential to this journey, it’s probably the best programming book I’ve ever read. I’m also super excited about so many of the features of Python and tools that have been built around it. Every week I have a new “I love virtualenv!” “I love the Python shell!” It also occurs to me that I haven’t done such a deep learning of a language since I dug into Perl over 7 years ago, I forgot how fun this learning process is. I’m sure it helps that Python is just all around cool itself and there is a massive community of cool people supporting it.

The Ubuntu Classroom has been quite active lately. I was quite pleased that my idea for the Quality Assurance Team to do a series of sessions come together logs and details available here. And on February 9th we pulled off yet another Ubuntu User Days, logs here, I did my standard Xubuntu section of the flavors class (logs here. In other Linuxy event news I was able to meet up with the DVLUG folks last Friday to talk about Ubuntu Women for their podcast. I also took time this week to host another Ubuntu Hour and Debian dinner evening, the Debian dinner in particular drawing out 8 people, including a Debian Developer from Wikimedia and Rick Moen of Bay Area Linux fame (I first encountered his work years ago in the Linux User Group HOWTO). As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m presenting on my Ghana work at BALUG on Tuesday. Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to run the Ubuntu Global Jam for San Francisco this year due to time constraints, but I do hope we’ll be having one downtown here on March 2nd. Finally, I have confirmed that I’ll be giving an “Ubuntu in the Cloud” talk next Friday at Ubucon at the Southern California Linux Expo! I’m very happy that I get to go again this year and this presentation will be a fun one to give.

This week I’ve done some remote working experiments. I work from home and now have a job which doesn’t tie me to a phone and so allows me the flexibility to work from anywhere with a good internet connection. I was doing code and config reviews from Ferry Building where I had lunch on Wednesday and got some of my best work done from the roof yesterday afternoon. It’s been a fun week!

Workin’ on the dock of the bay

Wedding stuff is still coming together. The invitations went out and we actually managed to get our registry with Macy’s done. We’re now rushing around to get the hotel rooms we’ll need squared away. We also really need to make solid plans for our honeymoon.

Last night MJ and I enjoyed Valentine’s Day dinner at the historic Palace Hotel Garden Court Restaurant. It was beautiful! He also gave me roses!

Tomorrow morning I’m flying to Las Vegas with a trio of friends to enjoy a weekend of shows, thrill rides and too much food! I’ll be back Monday night.

January flew by. We’ve had a lot of wedding stuff to do, the bulk of which recently was finalizing invitations, from ordering to making sure we had all addresses to finding a calligrapher and, this week finally getting them all stuffed and sent out. This past weekend we also started to finally populate the gift registry. The Intro to Judaism class I’m taking in preparation also just started this past weekend (we started one in the fall, but it had been cancelled due to low attendance). To top it off, things with my new job are really great, but it’s a lot of work to get up to speed with everything and it’s leaving me quite exhausted in the evenings.

A few weeks ago my friend Cheri asked if I’d be interested in a small online group she was putting together to learn some of the basics of electronics via Sparkle Labs’ Discover Electronics Kit. I ordered mine before leaving for Philadelphia and it was there to greet me upon my return. We started our weekly meetings a couple weeks ago and it’s been a fun experience so far, we’re meeting weekly over Google Hangouts to share our discoveries and progress. Plus, having a group to work with is actually motivating me to complete the homework assignments we’re assigning each other, the same of which I wish could be said for some of the Coursera courses I signed up for (oops). It’s also cool to have my very own bread board, I made a light happen! :)

In other fun stuff news, I met up with my friend Mark last week to attend Rifftrax Presents Night of the Shorts IV: Riffizens on Patrol at The Castro Theater. In spite of my long history of MST3K fandom, I’d never actually seen Mike, Crow and Tom Servo live in their human forms before. It was a really great show, and finally going to a show has inspired me to find something interesting for MJ and I to go to in the near future.

I’m happy to report that Partimus is chugging along. The Ubuntu earrings and necklaces fundraiser did exceptionally well over the holidays, fellow board member Grant Bowman has been putting a considerable amount of effort into learning how to make us a more professional organization and James Howard has spearheaded work in Oakland with labs at the Prescott and ASCEND schools (some details here). We also had a board meeting a couple weeks ago where we were able to have some great discussion and vote to bring on Bethany Doolin on to our Board of Directors.

One of the things I need to do for Partimus is update my bio, which I’ve been putting off until I could get professional headshots done. I finally got around to last weekend! A few weeks back we contacted Melissa Morelli, the woman who did our engagement photos to see if she’d be interested in flying to Philadelphia to do our wedding photos too (she’s a known variable, quite welcome in the midst of all these wedding choices!). She happily agreed, which inspired me to also ask if she does professional head shots, which she does! After some discussion of exactly what we wanted, we decided to meet at Cavallo Point, just across the Golden Gate Bridge which had some great places for generic head shots, but also some opportunities for some very San Francisco shots with the bridge and city in the backround. The winning photos from the shoot should be available next week and I will get to profile updating.

February is going to be a crazy month, and in preparation my body has decided that this relatively free weekend will be the one where I’ll be sick. I came down with a cold and fever on Thursday and so yesterday and today I’ve pretty much only been working and sleeping. The fever’s gone down so I’m hoping just to be able to recover this weekend and be in better shape next week as I prepare for some upcoming travel and events.

While traveling home from Philadelphia I made the very wise decision to book a spa appointment for Monday night. It was great to get some relaxing time in following all the running around we did in Philadelphia and before work we still have to do for the wedding.

Wednesday I hosted a San Francisco Ubuntu Hour. Along with several locals, we had the pleasure of having Michelle Rowley, executive director of Code Scouts, join us while she was in town and were able to have some great education and non-profit focused discussions.

Thursday night we stayed up late but finally got our wedding invitations ordered. We were put into slight panic mode following the venue visit as we realized the date for finalizing the number of hotel rooms we would need was coming up quickly (btw, if we sent you a Save the Date card, let me know if you need a room :)). Getting those completed was only brief relief however, as we have a whole lot more work to do in the coming weeks to finalize plans with vendors and actually get the invites addressed and sent out.

In open source stuff, I’ve had to cut down to bare minimum these past few weeks to accommodate our recent life and travel schedules. I’ve been keeping up with basic email, Ubuntu Classroom requests and the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter at least. And I did take time to answer questions for Emma Marshall, who is tracking down past interviewees in the Ubuntu Women project to do refresher interviews, mine is up here: Ubuntu Women- Where are they now? Follow up with Elizabeth Krumbach. On the speaking side I’ll be presenting on our work in Ghana for the Bay Area Linux Users Group on February 19th and hope to be speaking on “open source cloud stuff” at Ubucon at SCaLE 11x on February 22nd …and I just realized how close these are together.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Seattle for on-boarding at my new job, I’ll get to meet my boss and a couple other members of the team who are coming in for a couple of days. More on that upon my return!