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Street Academy, AITI and fufu

Saturday, Oct 13th, 2012 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Friday was my first full day in Ghana. We had breakfast at the hotel and then met up with Daniel so we could begin our meetings for the day. We also learned that there were some customs troubles that were delaying the release of the computers, a situation we later learned is exceptionally common here.

I got my first sights of Accra in the daylight and was able to share in Nancy’s admiration for the people everywhere who were carrying all kinds of things on their heads!

Our first stop was The Street Academy where we were able to spend some time talking with the Executive Director of the school, Ataa Lartey. He was keen to see more computers come to the school, as the children tend to fight over using them and it makes it so routinely only the stronger children get turns with using them.

We did get our first taste of what Ubuntu bug #1 looks like though when we had a look at the computers that Computer Reach sent them several months ago:

Yes, that’s Windows, replacing the copy of Edubuntu that had previously been on there. The origins of the copies of Windows were a dubious, and one of the 3 working computers had a completely corrupted version that prevented it from booting. This is one of the major challenges faced with these deployments when you don’t have constant on the ground staff (which we’re working on getting), the people who end up maintaining the systems there tend to reinstall the systems with something they’re familiar with – meaning Windows. We took the computers with us back to the hotel to get Edubuntu reinstalled so they could get all their educational software back.

We then went to the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT. I wasn’t familiar with the organization so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but we were quickly blown away by their progressive, pro-open source agenda. At the core they are a technical training center, but they also host a lot of pro-open source events and a lot of their training is focused on open source (they also do some Oracle and other major certs). We also learned about the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) meeting upcoming up on Saturday, which Beth Lynn decided to attend.

We met with Dorothy K. Gordon who related some stories about some of their own attempts at bringing in recycled computers for deployments, particularly with how challenging it was. Given costs on both ends, customs hassles and more they determined that it wasn’t in their best interest to continue the desktop programs. She was quite interested in seeing terminal service deployments instead, which were generally cheaper to begin with and would help with security (much less likely for a single thin client to be stolen since it’s somewhat useless on its own).

We also had the opportunity to see a central node for some of the country’s network infrastructure that goes out to ITC centers, as well as one of the computing clusters that they’ve been using for weather analysis and other major projects. It was really fun hearing from their core Linux gurus who run everything there.

Following this visit it was off to lunch where I got to try my first Ghanaian disk: chicken and fufu with soup. We ate our food with our right hand and washed up at the table. Sadly I quickly discovered that I’m not the biggest fan of fufu! The chicken was great though, as was the fried plantain Nancy shared and the experience was certainly worth it!

We also had a chance to briefly meet with Hubert Akumiah who works with a Jubilee International Church branch in Ghana. He was more optimistic about handling customs hassles and sketched out the basics of a method for shipping we may use next time.

That evening we reimaged the Edubuntu machines with the PXE boot laptop imaging server that Dave brought along. I also spent some time debugging some of the issues on the Edubuntu installs we had related to web browsing, which turned out to be the firewall which we now have a plan to deal with. I think we’ll also make sure Firefox is upgraded on all the machines, but I’ll work more on that Saturday evening.

Sadly, my luggage has still not surfaced. It put quite the damper on my evening last night as I started to have to come to terms with the possibility that it wouldn’t show up at all. This morning we’re planning on heading over to a couple open air markets to do the tourist thing and so I can buy some clothes. We’re also planning on seeing a few other sights today and then going to visit the Accra Linux Users Group later this afternoon. I mentioned that Beth Lynn would be attending the FOSSFA event, which was tempting, but after my bag woes I could really use a good ole tourist day.

Dave has written some about our first day here: Settled in on Oct 11, 2012

And Nancy’s posts from our day:

Street Academy
Friday Lunch
AITI

Filed under: ghana, tech, travel

Arrived in Ghana

Thursday, Oct 11th, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

On Wednesday the 10th MJ dropped me off at San Francisco airport’s International terminal where I grabbed some lunch before boarding my 2:55PM Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. Aside from being long (around 11 hours), the flight was uneventful, I made significant use of their on-flight entertainment system and even managed to get a couple hours of sleep.

Distance plus time zone change means I arrived in Frankfurt at 10:55 AM on Thursday. After getting quite turned around and accidentally leaving the secure area (my luggage is being sent on to Accra automatically? Oh, good!). I eventually made my way to the Lufthansa lounge near my gate for an hour or so of enjoying their water and Internet access. The flight to Accra was slightly delayed for boarding, but in spite of that the plane boarded quickly and we were on our way almost on time by 2:10PM. Flight time on this was just under 7 hours, putting us on the ground in Accra around 7PM. I took the opportunity this flight to doze a fair amount, probably getting about 4 hours of sleep broken by waking up hourly. During one of my moments of wakefulness I was able to snap a picture out my window as we flew over the Sahara.


The Sahara from my plane!

I think flying over the Sahara is when things really got real for me. I was really flying over Africa, seeing a desert I have only heard stories and legends about!

We arrived in Ghana on time and were welcomed by hot but not unmanageable weather and a cool terminal following a quick ride from the tarmac in a shuttle. They checked our documents for Yellow Fever vaccinations and getting through passport control and customs was easy with properly filled out forms (thankfully given to us early on our flight out of Frankfurt).

Then I got to baggage claim, but my suitcase did not. I spent 20 minutes waiting in line to submit a lost baggage report, and was able to give them hotel and contact information of Daniel, our on the ground contact here. Fingers crossed that they find it and it gets to me some time on Friday, I’m not thrilled about another day in the clothes I traveled it. I’m not sure what I’ll do if it doesn’t get here!

I bought a SIM card for my phone on they way out to meet my fellow travel companions who had arrived on an earlier flight, they were waving at me as soon as I reached the public area of the airport. Within the hour I was checked into my own room at the hotel.


Settled in hotel room in Accra

Between what Daniel could quickly buy and Nancy brought along as extra, they got me sorted with some basic toiletries and Dave (the USA-based leader of our team) loaned me a t-shirt to sleep in. I got my SIM on my phone sorted before bed and was probably finally able to fall asleep around 11PM. I woke up at 3AM and couldn’t fall back to sleep, it’s now just after 4AM and I’m going to try to get some more rest before breakfast around 8AM. Friday really starts our adventure on the ground here in Ghana with, at the very least, a visit to our first school and meeting with another contact here.

Finally, the Internet access here at the hotel is slow, but usable. I’m not sure how long this will be the case so I’ll do my best to at least write updates even if I can’t always post photos or have access to Internet to post them immediately upon (or even within a few days of) writing.

Filed under: ghana, tech, travel

The 1 and other streetcars, San Diego plans and final Ghana prep

Tuesday, Oct 9th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This past weekend was a beautiful and eventful one in San Francisco. For the first time since moving here, I was finally in town for Fleet Week and the second series of events for America’s Cup was also being held. Add in The Giants landing themselves in the playoffs and you have a crazy weekend here. Given all these events, they also had streetcars on the E-Line running down the Embarcadero!

We started off this weekend of events by taking Caligula to the vet for a follow-up to some appointments last year. He’s doing fine and we just had some bloodwork done to make sure his levels are still alright. After that we headed down to Ferry Building for some lunch at the Farmer’s Market and to see the first of the Fleet Week planes.

Then it was over to the SF Railway Museum & Gift Shop where we met up with Peter Ehrlich, who worked for the San Francisco Municipal Railway as a streetcar operator from 1979 to 2005, the last ten years as an F-Line operator. These days he’s a photographer who specializes in transportation systems. I came into contact with Peter when he emailed me about this photo to ask if he could use it in a book he was writing. I happily gave permission and in return he gave me a copy of his book, published in August. San Francisco’s F-Line: The Story of How America’s Most Exciting and Successful New Transportation Experience Was Built!. I’m delighted to have a photo of mine included and it was great to meet someone who has been so involved with and interested in streetcars for so long.


My photo in the F-Line book!

That afternoon we spent some time on the roof deck watching the Fleet Week planes and chatting with our neighbors, more photos from that over here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157631713594866/

Sunday I headed out in the morning because I learned that Car 1 was running on the F-line. The 1, like the name suggests was the first car in the fleet in 1912 and was first publicly-owned big city streetcar in the United States. This isn’t just a repaint job, this is the actual car from 1912, having gone through a few refurbishments over the years and now painted back to its original colors (full history). I ridiculously excited about getting to ride it. I pulled up the F-Line Live site and headed down to Ferry Building to catch it – and was just in time! I didn’t care where it was going. It turns out it was going to Pier 39 for the Fleet Week celebrations, I took it there and then grabbed the 1010 home – or at least I would have gone home if it didn’t happen to be travelling all the way down to 4th and King street, it was an E-Line car! Since the E-Line was running as a special event this weekend I decided to take it all the way to the end, under the bay bridge, past AT&T Park. It was a delight. Then I went home to get some much needed trip prep and other things done!

I took a lot of photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157631722077804/

That afternoon we sketched out and booked our trip to San Diego in December. As a LISA ’12 panelist I was given the option of either getting in for free on just my panel day, or getting 50% off the full 3 days of technical sessions (that’s in addition to the discount for being a LISA member). Given that I was paying for the flight and hotel out of pocket to be down there anyway, I opted to do the full 3 days. We got my flights and hotel booked and decided to have MJ come down and join me for the weekend in San Diego. Why the weekend in San Diego? Before I was old enough to know about Hollywood, San Francisco or anything else in California, I knew that the San Diego Zoo was in California. I’ve wanted to go every since! This is finally my opportunity. We’ll also be going to the Safari Park while we’re there, I’m hoping to get a glimpse of one of their northern white rhinos.

As for my trip to Ghana, I got my 2nd Hepatitis A&B shot (add another $112 to my expenses list) and the last of supplies and medications I’ll need on the trip (another $75 there!). Last night I bought some much needed new boots, since I didn’t actually own any hiking or stompy-in-mud boots at all and they could certainly come in handy.

I started taking the antimalarial medication (Malarone) this morning. Tomorrow I fly to Ghana! I’ll be arriving Thursday evening UTC time.

Filed under: life

Proofreading begins for “Getting Started with 12.10”

Tuesday, Oct 9th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Tomorrow I leave for Ghana and one of the things I’ve packed is my old print copy of Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04 (for a variety of reasons, the non-profit organizing this shipped them with with Edubuntu 10.04). I’ll be leaving this copy there in Ghana with one of our contacts. We’ve also loaded up the PDF copy on USB sticks which will be distributed to the schools and community centers we’ll be working with across the country.

Documentation is always difficult to write and maintain, and in this project that is no exception. But one of the great things the Ubuntu Manual folks has done is really strive to leverage a variety of tools to make contributing to the documentation a process which is as easy as possible for the contributors, even those who don’t have a highly technical background. They also have very detailed instructions for each role, so it’s easier for new contributors to get started. I’ve been able to learn from their choice of tool sets and methods employed by this team and it’s my hope that other documentation projects can as well.

This cycle they are seeking to release the 12.10 edition of the manual along with the release itself, so have put out the following call for proofreading so I figured I’d pass this along:

The Ubuntu Manual Project is finishing up work in Getting Started with Ubuntu 12.10.

We would like to release the manual on October 18 to coincide with the release of Ubuntu 12.10. To do this, we need your help!

We’ve uploaded a draft of the latest manual to http://ubuntu-manual.org/proofread/gswu1210/en and would like you to help us proofread it. Check for spelling errors, grammar problems, out-of-date or inaccurate information, formatting bugs, etc.

You can annotate the manual on that site or, if you prefer, file bugs at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-manual/+filebug or email us at ubuntu-manual@lists.launchpad.net.

Thanks for your help!

–Kevin Godby

Originally sent to the ubuntu-manual mailing list on Tue, 9 Oct 2012

The Get Involved page on their site has more ways you can get involved with the project.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

My recent Xubuntu work

Tuesday, Oct 9th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’ve been event more involved with the Xubuntu project this cycle. For the first time the team had a full marketing blueprint, as well as one for the website. I’ve also been more involved with testing, from the Global Jam to just standard testing. I was able to happily cheer along with everyone else when our Xubuntu Beta 2 finally got down to a size small enough to fit on a CD (even if we did sacrifice the defaults of The Gimp, Gnumeric and some language packs to do it).

We also rewrote the offline documentation for 12.10. This was a Herculean undertaking. The struggle with documentation writing is always one where you have to find people who are not only talented at writing and documenting, but who can also use the tools required to make maintainable, translatable docs (which, in our case, meant DocBook). We spent a fair amount of time brainstorming how we’d make this work after an attempt to just toss it out to the community and “hope they can figure out something” was ineffective. Since we were doing such a comprehensive rewrite, we decided to just toss up a temporary wiki on one of my servers, redo the structure, and have people copy over content from the old docs manually and update it. Then we had a team of editors sweep through the wiki and Pasi tracked the reviews in a spreadsheet. Finally, Pasi rewrote the theme and manually converted it all to DocBook! Moving forward we’ll strive to do all changes in DocBook directly, and to do it sooner in the cycle so we don’t need to scramble for access and doc approval at the last minute (thanks Matthew East and Jeremy Bicha for helping us out!). We also have created a blueprint for the next cycle to tackle some refinements we didn’t get to this time around. I’m really happy we got this done and we had so many community members pitch in at the end, I have to admit I had my doubts as things were so slow to start.

I ordered some case badge stickers from NameThatComputer.com several weeks back, and they arrived last week. The recommendation to use them came from Emma Marshall of System76, thanks again!

Up close they have a slight pixelated quality, but the size makes it so it’s not easy to tell on the stickers themselves. Next time we’ll work closer with them on the artwork we provide so we can get the most crisp results. They are custom-sized for the image with rounded corners, which is really nice and on this page the options we had were “flexible” and “flat” and they aren’t kidding when they say the “Adhesive REALLY STICKS” – it’s great. With these options and the custom images they came out to $1/ea for 100 of them, plus $8 shipping.

After my trip to Ghana (which I leave for tomorrow so I’ll miss the 12.10 release itself), I’ll be heading to the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen. I’m excited to finally meet the project lead, Pasi Lallinaho, and to see Micah Gersten again and hopefully some of the other project members who may be able to pay their own way out to the summit. I’ll be bringing along the case badges and regular stickers, and I’ve started making a pile of ping pong balls with my eggbot!

The next cycle will be launched with me spending an extra day Copenhagen with some of the Xubuntu folks to discuss plans moving forward and to do some sight-seeing. This is made significantly easier by UDS itself being a day shorter, so we all have Friday to go on our own adventure (even if that does mean paying for the hotel myself the last night). I’m excited about the sight-seeing too, I’m currently reading through my Copenhagen travelers book!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet, xubuntu

More learning about Judaism

Friday, Oct 5th, 2012 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I am now the proud owner of a massive pile of books:

Most were from lists both our local Rabbi and the one we met in Philadelphia who will officiate our wedding gave us. I also picked up the pocket Book of Psalms translated and published by the Jewish Publication Society to take along on my travels this month. I read the King James Christian Bible version years ago, but it’ll be interesting to read them again in these direct from Hebrew translations.

The history and studying geek in me is having a field day with all this. I am a secular humanist (which defaults me to atheist) and I discuss the reason for this study here in a post from April and now I’m quite in the depths of it. I mentioned then that it wasn’t something I’d be over-sharing about, but there are some points I would like to share.

I attended my first Jewish High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, this year at the synagogue we belong to. They were beautiful services, including beautiful stories from members about their paths to Judaism and a touching general memorial service for loved ones who are no longer with us. One of the Rabbis also took some time during one of the services to talk a bit about one of the less traditional interpretations of God that had me going home to read more about the traditional Jewish interpretation. It’s been… confusing. But I am enjoying the no-pressure exploration of the question of God again.

The memorial service really hit home as well. Since I am not a Christian, I find many of the mourning practices in our modern Christian-focused society to be lacking, and as an unbeliever I feel doubly unsatisfied as people would talk about seeing their loved ones again in Heaven. It’s come to be clear recently that I really didn’t do a good job dealing with my father’s death. I lacked a solid support structure for handling it, both in terms of people and general structure of how to mourn. I was left feeling empty and angry and only sought to move past it. In Judaism there is both a community and formal structure around mourning and loss, I suspect partially because it really is the end for them and it’s tough for us to come to terms with that. I think taking the time to properly remember my father is what I’ve been missing.

This week I also started taking an Intro to Judaism class at the synagogue, as a precursor for getting married but also because I keep bumping into texts warning me against studying Judaism alone, oops! Unfortunately my travel schedule will cause me to miss several of the classes, but I have the book we’re using in class and the syllabus so I can catch up on what I missed and maybe even catch some of the classes I missed the next time the class is offered.

I touched upon our wedding, but we are indeed planning on having a Jewish wedding to begin our “Jewish household” life together. The Rabbi in Philadelphia we’re working with is actually from San Francisco, so we’ve been able to share our love for both cities with him in our discussions. We have a draft of our ceremony now and are working through what we’re all most comfortable saying and doing since I’m not Jewish. It was all quite intimidating at first, but I’m growing more comfortable with the ceremony as we work to personalize it and I become more familiar.

Finally, I also finished writing my Torah study guide and have almost finished Numbers. I’m hoping to finish the last book this month, but we’ll see how lucky I get with reliable power and Internet access while I travel.

Filed under: books, spirituality

Some Partimus work, a space ship and the rest of September

Friday, Oct 5th, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

September was quite the overwhelming month. In retrospect I really took on too much at once and then was slammed by timing of several things, including increased work-related activities, time crunch for some of the wedding planning, all my upcoming travel and the Jewish high holy days.

I squeezed in some Partimus work this month, first by attending a BALUG meeting where we held a silent auction for Raspberry Pi donated to us by James Tatum and a generous donor walked off with a fun new toy. The trio of local board members also had a meeting with our lead technologist and the principal of one of the schools that has been re-evaluating their technology policy and brought us in to see where we wanted to be coordination-wise. It’s really great being a part of these planning talks with schools and I’m excited to see that they’re seeking to build the infrastructure to support the technology that we can bring in to them. We also were able to meet with an SFSU student who worked with us last semester to gather information about the organization and offer some logistical tips about what our strengths and weaknesses are, and where our organizational time will be best spent moving forward. It was great to have his insight to bolster what we’ve been hearing from Grant’s experience this year going to Foundation Center classes and what I’m learning about statistics and metrics gathering from my upcoming trip to Ghana.

On September 21st the bay area was treated to one of the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s flyovers. It would have been very cool to see it from the Golden Gate Bridge, but being a work day I instead took my laptop up to the roof to work from there and joined my other neighbors for about an hour as we waited and then finally saw it circle the city!

It was quite far away, but I did manage to get some heavily zoomed photos of it passing a couple San Francisco landmarks that are visible from our roof, the Bay Bridge and Sutro Tower.


Endeavour passing Sutro Tower

More photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157631590020239/

That week I also had a Google Hangout with fellow Ubuntu Women leader Cheri Francis and tech geek and novelist Veronica Henry who was writing an article about the project for the popular blog, ReadWriteWeb. The article came out on September 28th: Meet The Ubuntu Women – They’re More Involved Than You Think. Exciting!

Last weekend I was on call weekend while my boss was out of town speaking at a conference and the San Francisco summer decided to strike as that was wrapping up. Temperatures this week headed into the 80s and our condo still hasn’t quite cooled down. It’s hardly worth complaining about, 3 days of discomfort is much less than any other place I’ve lived! And this “summer” was shorter than in the two years past. I joked that San Francisco was preparing me for my stay in Ghana, as the temperatures here and in Accra were about on par during those days. On Tuesday I hosted an Ubuntu Hour, 8 days early. There only ended up being 4 of us, and 3 who came to dinner after, but there were some great conversations and connections made. I was particularly interested in the voice-command work that one of the attendees from the South Bay was working on for fun and how he was quickly learning about the accessibility implications, which allowed me to go into my own speech about the need for more developers on open source accessibility tools.

Warm weather also caused me to seek out relaxation on the roof a lot this week, indeed, that’s where I’m writing this post from! Actually in the same spot this picture was taken on the 30th, but it’s dark out now.

I’ve been filling free moments lately with reading a lot, taking my Nook with me when I go out to grab as I’m waiting for the bus or on a train somewhere (I drew the line at reading while walking down the sidewalk when I realized being aware while walking through a city is the smarter thing to do). And I’ve spending the time before bed watching A History of the World since 1300 Coursera lectures. I’m so taken with these classes, and my dorking out for history has me really loving this class, particularly when I can supplement it with documentaries on Netflix. I don’t think I’ll formally do this class with the assignments though, time for that is just lacking and I think I’ll get a sufficient enough out of it the way I’m going. I wish I had more time for these, I’m part of the way through a Python class but had to put it on hold until I have more brain bandwidth.

Oh, and we’re planning a wedding! We finalized the guest list and sent out emails to get people’s addresses last month, heard back from about 40% of the people. The Save the Date cards we ordered are on their way to our home, but aren’t scheduled to arrive until Tuesday, the day before I leave. Not sure how I’m going to manage to get everything I need done and write 50 addresses on envelopes. We’ll see how far I get. I’m planning to meet up with my maid of honor and one of my bridesmaids to see if we can pick out my dress and theirs while we’re in Philadelphia next month. Still so much to plan, but I don’t think we’ve sailed past any important deadlines yet.

Finally, on Wednesday I leave for Ghana. I’m really excited about the trip and we had a Google Hangout a couple nights ago to work out some of the logistical details and all get on the same page about timing. We also now have more details about the areas we’re visiting, even if we don’t actually have a solid schedule of who we’re meeting and when, hopefully I’ll have time to write more about this before I leave. I mentioned that two days after that trip I’m heading to Copenhagen for the Ubuntu Developer Summit, but I didn’t actually mention the trip following that to Philadelphia for a week. I’ll be on the ground in San Francisco for 9 hours following the Copenhagen trip before MJ and I finally get to spend some time together, on a plane and then handling family stuff all week. Phew.

I’ll come home on November 11th and stay put for a whole month before I snag another plane to head down to San Diego to participate in the panel at the LISA ’12. It was exciting the other day to receive the program in the mail – there’s my name!

Hoping to get this trip booked this weekend, along with all my last minute preparations for the Ghana trip.

Filed under: life, partimus, san francisco

Ghana travel details coming together

Sunday, Sep 30th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On September 24th I got my Visa for Ghana, and was able to breathe a huge sigh of relief! Having already booked my tickets, bought a number of items for my trip and made solid plans with the team I’m traveling with it would have been troublesome if I didn’t manage to get my Visa, or had to scramble to reapply due to a mistake (even though I checked the forms 400 times). I can relax now as everything falls into place.

The leader of our group, Dave Sevick, has started working to secure accommodations. We should have Internet access where we’re staying, but we won’t know how fast, reliable or generally useful it will be beyond simple checking of email and blogging until we get there. I suspect sorting and uploading of photos will be a project for me to do quickly during my 2 days home before heading off to Copenhagen rather than during our travels. And regardless of our Internet access situation, I simply doubt I’ll have time to keep up with things online as our schedule has us quite busy. I’m really excited that one of the things booked for us is going to visit the Accra Linux Users Group!

My shopping and expenses list seems to have leveled out with the following:

Plane Ticket (less $500) $1,282.40
Malarone (co-pay) $48.69
Azithromycin (co-pay) $3.15
Travel clinic visit $50.00
Hep A&B vaccination $112.00
Polio booster $65.00
Typhoid vaccination $87.00
Yellow Fever vaccination $121.00
Water purification bottle & filter $115.00
Water purification tablets $10.00
Alcohol wipes, sunscreen, bug repellent,
first aid cream, etc		 $35.00
Ghana Visa, photos + shipping $110.00
Total $2,039.24

Thankfully the community has generously donated for this trip and I’ve reached the $2,000 goal I set, thus covering most of my out of pocket costs. I’ll also be buying a local SIM when I land to put into my old Nexus One (“my” Nexus S is actually one I’m borrowing from MJ, so I don’t want to risk damage or loss). I’ve also bought some clothes, but I didn’t include them since nothing is very Ghana-specific so I’ll certainly be able to find uses for them beyond this trip. I’m sure there will be incidentals and I am taking unpaid time off of work for this trip, but I’ve managed to handle that sufficiently in my budget.

While looking for things to read about Ghana, I found Travels in Ghana and Folk Tales from Ghana as some quick, light reading on my Nook (and in spite of both being quite short, you couldn’t beat the cost at $2.99 and $1.99 respectively!). I was also delighted to find a travel book published this year! Ghana (Other Places Travel Guide) which I’ve been reading over the past week, and intend to re-read portions of before I travel. I’ll probably leave this guide with the Computer Reach folks so they can take advantage of the tips within, as they will have multiple teams going over during the next few months and years and by the time I get my next opportunity it’ll probably be time for another book!

I also got a haircut. I hadn’t planned on getting one prior to the wedding, but when I started thinking about all the travel I have coming up, and how nice it’ll be to have my hair off my neck while in an equatorial country, it seemed to be the smartest thing to do.

The Computer Reach folks have updated their blog regarding the trip: New Details of our Ghana Trip. Beth Lynn Eicher has put a page together with her travel details here and Nancy Latimer has set up a website and a blog to discuss preparation and the adventure itself.

I still need to hand off some of my project work on the Open Source side, but I’m feeling quite ready for this trip now, just 10 days to go!

Filed under: ghana, tech, travel

San Francisco Tourist: September edition

Sunday, Sep 30th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

A huge amount of my time lately has been spent preparing for upcoming travel and getting things in order on the work side. However, I’ve managed to sneak out for quick jaunts around the city, usually while doing other things.

On the 18th we had some time to kill and decided to swing by the Golden Gate bridge on our way to an event at the Palace of Fine Arts

In spite of living here for over 2 years now, I’d only ever seen the Palace of Fine Arts when driving past it on the expressway (so no, I haven’t been to the Exploratorium either!). It’s a huge domed structures that they use for events, plus gardens, a big pond and in general is a beautiful place to be.

From there it was off to a lovely dinner at Sutro’s at the Cliff House, another place we hadn’t managed to visit yet in spite of passing it often. They seated us next to the window, so we were able to watch the sun set.

I’ve put a bunch more pictures from the day here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157631568263514/

Today I went tourist again and headed to the California Historical Society, which is just a block from where I live. They are wrapping up (on the 14th) their A Wild Flight of the Imagination: The Story of the Golden Gate Bridge exhibit that I’ve wanted to see but never took the time to. The venue is small so the exhibit just took up a few rooms, showing many images of the Golden Gate area prior to the bridge, documents related to raising money and drafting initial bridge designs, and then photos and stories of while it was being built. The exhibit wrapped up with some celebration photos from when it was opened. All in all, quite worth the $5 “suggested donation”! I’m looking forward to visiting more exhibits there in the future, might even join to get a subscription to their magazine.

I had blocked off an hour to visit that exhibit and only used a small portion of it, so I then decided to go over to the Cindy Sherman Exhibit at SFMOMA. I also closes soon (October 8th) so I wanted to have a look and with a membership there this year I’m able to get in for free. I’ll be the first to admit that modern art isn’t really my thing, so having a membership has been quite the experiment, but one I thought I should do because we live so close to this museum. I guess I can sum up the Cindy Sherman exhibit in the word “weird” but it was interesting to see it.

My “to visit” museum list for San Francisco is not anywhere near reaching completion, but my travel dates are fast approaching. I’ll have to pick up local touristing when I get home from all that far away touristing! Which reminds me, I’ve gotten through the meat of my Ghana travel book for the areas I’ll be visiting… time to start on the Copenhagen one.

Filed under: life, san francisco

31 years old

Sunday, Sep 30th, 2012 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

Yesterday I turned 31, and lest I be accused of growing up, I thoroughly enjoyed and celebrated my birthday.

First, MJ surprised me with a trip down to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I had been in the building before for a holiday party, but they hadn’t completed the major Revolution exhibit that they have now.

We arrived just before 2PM, just in time for one of their tours around the exhibit. Our tour guide selected portions of the exhibit to highlight, which was particularly interesting because he covered some of the lesser known items on display, while glossing over major ones like ENIAC and skipping the UNIVAC (below) entirely. The first stop on the tour was the a replica of the Hollerith Electric Tabulating System from the 1890 US Census. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I didn’t quite know how pivotal the requirements of the US census had been to the history of computing, fascinating stuff.

Now, the trouble with a computer history museum on your birthday is it has a tendency to make one feel old, as somewhere around 1/3 of major computer history happened within my lifetime. They had an NES on display, as well as the first computer I ever had (which happens to have been born the same year as me!):

It’s a really great museum and we could have spent all day there, but we’ll explore more at a later date.

I’ve uploaded piles of other photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157631659097510/

After the museum, we were able to head over to the Android Sculpture Garden so I could see the new jellybean sculpture (the previous one blew up before I could see it). Upon close inspection you can see that the new jellybean droid has a number of cooling holes so to prevent this new one from losing his head.

For dinner MJ took me out for a spectacular dinner at Le Papillon in San Jose. Every course was delicious, and I wrapped up with their signature soufflet:

Perfect birthday!

Filed under: food, life
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