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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

Ubuntu Necklaces now available! $10 of each purchase supports Ubuntu in schools

Tuesday, Nov 13th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Almost a year and a half ago, in June of 2011, I wrote about Ubuntu Earrings being sold by Boutique Academia in Gold plated and Rhodium plated (silver color, but doesn’t tarnish). They were so popular that they have sold out of them, but have more on order.

But not everyone wanted earrings! This week Boutique Academia started selling an Ubuntu Necklace!

And to show the size and that these too come in the Rhodium plated silver color:

Even better, $10 of each purchase goes directly to supporting Partimus, a non-profit in the San Francisco bay area that puts Ubuntu-based desktops and laptops into area schools.

I just bought one of each (and the Steel Pleiades necklace made it into my cart as well, this shop is too awesome).

Filed under: partimus, ubuntu planet

Updates from the deployments in Ghana

Monday, Nov 12th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I mentioned in my Ghana trip summary blog post that the deployment of and training for the 100 Edubuntu computers shipped over would be continued by volunteers from Africa ICT Right.

I’m happy to report that Daniel Kwaku Ganyoame has been keeping us updated with progress and has been sending photos!

On Tuesday, 30th Oct. 2012, Madina No.1 school pick up their computers from Pig Farm at 2pm.

On Wednesday, 31st Oct. 2012, Gomoa East also came for their computers from Pig Farm at 3:15pm.

On Thursday, 1st Nov. 2012, West Gonja also came for their computers from Pig Farm around 4:30pm.

We have been providing training for Jubilee Int. Church volunteers for the past three (3) days. The volunteers are 11 in number. We will conduct the last training for the Pig Farm site on Sunday from 1pm to 5pm.


Computers being picked up for shipment across the country

Classroom for training at Jubilee International

On Sunday 4th Nov., we organize our last training session in Pig farm with the support of two volunteers from the Accra Linux User Group.

Today, Monday 5th Nov., we donated 10 computers to Madina No.1 School and also set up their lab for them. We will start with the training from tomorrow.


Madina receives their computers!

We have so far train 13 teachers from Madina Demonstration JHS as well as 14 trainers from Jubilee International church.

We will be continuing with our training at Madina since the teachers have show more interest in the program.


Training at Madina

We were quite disappointed that the shipping issues caused us to be unable to be around to help on the ground with these deployments, so it’s really exciting to get these pictures and see things progressing well.

Filed under: ghana, tech

Travel wraps up with a visit to Philly

Monday, Nov 12th, 2012 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

I left home on October 10th and went on a whirlwind tour that brought me to Accra, Copenhagen and finally Philadelphia – 3 continents!

The weekend I went from Copenhagen to Philadelphia was an extremely long one. I left Copenhagen on a 6AM flight on Saturday, connecting with a 3 hour layover in Frankfurt (my 4th stop in Frankfurt during this month of travel, for those who are counting). MJ picked me up at the San Francisco International Airport when my flight came in Saturday at 2PM California time. We went home, swapped my suitcases and got him packed for the trip, stopped for some lunch and to do some tidying around the condo to prepare for the pet sitter. Around 9PM we caught a cab with all our luggage for our 11PM redeye flight to Philadelphia. Thankfully I managed to sleep for much of this flight, and when we got to Philadelphia we were able to get a nap as soon as we settled in before meeting up with some of MJ’s relatives.

The trip to Philadelphia this past week was almost exclusively family-based, and the first I’d had with MJ this month. We were in town to coordinate a move for one of his relatives and that left time for little else. While my other trips this month certainly weren’t vacations, this one was even less so with mornings starting around 6AM each day so we could be on site to coordinate with packers, movers, storage considerations and more. Nights were also late, returning back at our place of lodging (we stayed 3 different places) after 9PM each night.

We were able to carve out some time for some fun though. When driving through Mt Airy one afternoon we passed the Trolley Car Diner where I had to stop and take pictures of a very familiar form – a PCC street car!

Once the furniture part of the move was done, we had no where to sleep! So we made our way over to the Joseph Ambler Inn for a couple nights. Just a couple miles from the wedding venue, this is the inn where we’ll be staying during our wedding in April and have reserved a number of rooms for guests coming in from out of town. The visit gave us a nice opportunity to visit and check out the grounds, we hope to get a proper tour next time we’re in town as the one we had scheduled fell through due to scheduling issues. They had an amazing complimentary breakfast including pancakes and eggs and we were able to enjoy a great dinner one night while visiting with our friend Nita one evening.


Entrance to series of buildings at Joseph Ambler Inn

On Saturday I was able to meet up with Nita, Crissi and MJ’s cousins Ariel and Lauren to go wedding dress shopping! I was pretty apprehensive about this, dresses aren’t my thing and in spite of looking at some dress pictures these past few months, I still was completely clueless when it comes to dress styles and had no idea what would look good on me. I spent the next 90 minutes trying on 7 dresses and selected the 2nd one I tried on. I love it, it sure made this Leia feel like a Disney princess! I bought a tiara to go along with it.

Saturday night it was dinner with family and then back to finish the remaining portions of the move. After 3 hours of sleep, we were on the road again by 6:30AM on Sunday doing some final storage runs and spent the rest of the day packing and finishing last minute errands.


Sun rising as we drove over the bridge to New Jersey on Sunday morning

We made it to the airport pretty late, but thankfully Hertz does a courtesy drop off at ticketing when you have a lot of luggage in a rental car and we’re both enrolled in TSA Pre which allowed us to sail through security without a line and with our shoes on. We were able to grab a couple hoagies to eat on the plane and board as soon as we got to the gate. The flight home was uneventful and I was relieved when all of our luggage joined us at the end.

Some more photos of the trip are available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157631991639918/

I’m now trying to get unpacked and do laundry, adjust to the time zone and get a handle on my to do list before returning to work on Wednesday. I anticipate it taking some time for me to get back into the swing of things but it’s great to be home!

Filed under: family, philadelphia, travel, wedding

Tourist in Copenhagen

Monday, Nov 5th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

With the Ubuntu Developer Summit ending a day sooner than it has in the past, I decided to take the opportunity on Friday to do some touristing in downtown Copenhagen. I didn’t have many plans, but I did want to see The Little Mermaid statue and do a little shopping. The night before I sketched out a plan that would take Pasi Lallinaho and I through downtown and up to the mermaid. After breakfast in the hotel we were off.

A quick Metro ride put us in the city center. From there we walked north and quickly found ourselves in the central courtyard of the palaces of Amalienborg. From there we walked along the waterfront in my journey to see The Little Mermaid.

And I saw her!


Visiting the little mermaid!

Now, she is just a statue and even at 10AM there was a crowd snapping pictures. But I’m a shameless tourist and there is no disappointing me when it comes to visiting a famous landmark.

Once a sufficient number of photos were taken, we headed back south and started walking around about half of the huge Kastellet star fortress.

To warm up after the morning of walking we stopped for some drinks at a small cafe before heading over to the Design Museum. Half the museum tracked the long history of Danish classical design and then had some other exhibits of design from around the world. The last half was a lot of modern design. There were a lot of chairs (and other furniture), Danes really like designing chairs.


Furniture at the Design Museum

We stopped for a lunch of steaks on our way walking back to the city center. I got some of my shopping done and then were able to walk through the castle gardens of Rosenborg Castle. The castle itself was closed that day (sad!), but we did end up buying tickets to see the royal treasury and I paid the extra fee to be able to take pictures inside.


Crown of King Christian IV

From here we did a little more shopping and then went to another cafe where I enjoyed a delicious hot chocolate before heading back to the Metro so Pasi could get to the airport for his flight. I grabbed some dinner in the very expensive hotel restaurant and turned in early so I could be up at 3AM to make my 6AM flight.

I’ve uploaded photos from the Ubuntu Developer Summit as well as my tourist day here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157631927163838/

I wish I could have spent another day in the city, my guidebook was brimming with suggestions of things I wanted to see, including doing at least one of the palace tours, a river ferry ride, their lovely zoo with the huge elephant exhibit and a brewery tour at Carlsberg. Some day!

Filed under: travel

UDS-R in Copenhagen Day 4

Thursday, Nov 1st, 2012 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Today was the last day of UDS. Ending a day sooner has been strange, but I’m spending my bonus day playing tourist tomorrow in Copenhagen.

– Community Roundtable –

We were able to have some web design folks from Canonical in the session so we could discuss the community page on Ubuntu.com. They were able to tell us that the ommunity can provide content and web team can handle design, but they weren’t able to commit to a timeframe to work on that. Instead, the proposal was made to create a separate site where community members can have access to editing and we will be creating a blueprint to spec this out. I’m really happy about going in this direction, onboarding new contributors is important and so I took a bunch of work here.

– Community IRC Workshops and Classrooms –

We have one of these sessions every cycle to sketch out the plans for the next Ubuntu Classroom events for the next cycle, paying close attention timing-wise for each event to the release cycle. Once those were sketched out, we also had some time to brainstorm what other classes outside of big events we’d like to have, including:

  • HaveLoCos come in and showcase some of their work
  • Session about the new localized ISO tracker
  • Bug squad sessions
  • QA/UTAH session (do this early in the cycle)
  • IRC Team “how-to” – team and channel structure, what channels we have, how they work (in user level)
  • Top 10 things to do after installing Ubuntu
  • Cloud/juju and charm school online
  • Enterprise-level sessions
  • Lightning talk session (like roundtables)

It would be great to see some of these happen during this cycle, the Classroom is so often empty between the major events.

Full notes from the session: community-r-irc-workshops

– Xubuntu: General planning for R (II) –

In our second session of the week we spent a fair amount of time on how we would grow the core project community by continuing to reach out to our users. We also discussed some of the marketing initiatives, including some proposals for the formats of flyers we wish to design and some updates to the website. There was also some talk about artwork and it was generally agreed that while more default background options would be nice, if we wish to stay CD-sized space is precious and we probably don’t want to use it on those images.

Full notes here: community-r-xubuntu-planning-2

– Plenaries –

Today was lightning talk day! I did a 5 minute roundup of the work we did in Ghana.

I uploaded the photos I used in the talk here: http://people.ubuntu.com/~lyz/ghana/

Other presentations included overlayroot demonstration, datamining in Ubuntu related to bug handling in launchpad: showing improvements, see chrisarges.net/papers.html for more, askubuntu review feature, kde home run, getting opengl code on mobile devices (see jogamp.org for more), testing competition testing and review of winners, tips on improving compiling speed: replace Make with Ninja, replace LD with Gold, use precompiled headers (see: voices.canonical.com/jussi.pakkanen), a couple fun apps: variety wallpaper changer and livewallpaper, the developer of gottengeography (which allows you to put photos on maps) talked about GExiv2 for Vala but with added python bindings with GObject Introspection, and wrapped up with a presentation on a juju charm to get a running steam server which games can then be deployed against.

– Ubuntu Women UDS-R Goals –

We’ve been having an Ubuntu Women session at UDS for a few years now. While we do eventually get work items and a blueprint speced out, these sessions tend to lean more toward a great opportunity to meet women who are at UDS and can bring some fresh ideas and perspectives to the project. The main thing that came out of this session is the desire to do another big event this cycle where we give out prizes and get people excited about the project.

Full notes from the session here: community-r-ubuntu-women-project-goals

– LoCo Council –

A team brought up an issue with re-approval troubles and a team asked whether it was OK if their team doesn’t grow – yes, not all teams grow all the time.

Talked about some ideas for checking in with teams, perhaps encouraging them by offering help and showcasing their work, events and photos on the LoCo Council blog. Talked some about how regions should be encouraged to collaborate (ie United States, Scandinavia). Also discussed the proposal for having more state-based LoCos beyond just the United States.

And with that – UDS sessions were done! The closing plenary was the last thing on the schedule where track leads talked about what decisions were made at UDS.

The closing party was at Rosie McGee’s and we got a fun photo of the Xubuntu team:

It’s after midnight now, off for tourist things in the morning!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet, UDS
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