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Philadelphia Wedding Venue Trip

Thursday, Mar 29th, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Our trip to Philadelphia went by far too quickly. We had 6 wedding venue visits scheduled, ended up with 8 by the time we had finished collecting and reviewing recommendations from friends and family. I am really happy with what we ended up seeing, and upon browsing through a local weddings magazine we were given at one of the venues (they were featured) I couldn’t really find any we were missing out on. I’ll probably share the list of contenders once here after we make our decision, but I’m happy to share it privately until then, just drop me an email.

I will admit to one venue though because it was an attraction and I took a bunch of pictures: Morris Arboretum hosts weddings. It’s an amazing place and would make for an absolutely stunning outdoor wedding, if it didn’t rain. We were able to walk around the arboretum until closing to get a feel for it and I took several photos (including some of alternate wedding sites), I’ve uploaded several here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629331826836/

We’ll probably pass on it due to a variety of factors (not the least of which is depending upon no rain on a day in April in Philadelphia is not a great thing). We have narrowed it down to, at most, 4 venue options. We’re now going to work with the potential officiant to figure out about dates and then work from there to decide on our final venue. I’m excited, nervous, and had my first wedding-related nightmare a few nights ago – about rights to our wedding photos. I’m exceptionally laid-back about all of this planning, but if there is one thing I’d go bridezilla about it would be photos. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that we’ll be paying out of our nose to get full resolution digital copies and a non-commercial license that grants us the ability to print AND put the photos online ourselves. I wouldn’t be at all happy with just prints or with some digital photos on a website owned by the photographer that I can’t store securely myself.

This trip has uncovered dozens of other things we need to decide. The wedding is still over a year off but the venue selection is a major dependency and once we make that decision we’ll be able to move forward with many of the other decisions. We’re also dealing with not only planning remotely, but a wedding party that’s scattered all over the country. We’ll most likely be skipping the bridal shower entirely and be doing destination bachelor(|ette) parties (Hello Las Vegas!). Thankfully my maid of honor, Danita, has offered to help in any way she can with wedding planning stuff.

We were also able to catch up with some of our friends and MJ’s family while we were in town, but not nearly as many people as I always want to. I got to enjoy some of my favorite foods (Cheesesteaks! Soft pretzels! Rita’s! Dunkin’ Donuts! Hoagies!), this time I didn’t overdo it too much and I made it to the hotel gym twice. We’re planning on coming back at least twice before the wedding to take care of some things, do the catering tasting, get our marriage license…

We also went to the Giant Mysterious Dinosaurs exhibit at The Franklin Institute. I was excited when this exhibit came out but feared I wouldn’t get to see it. It happened to be the perfect thing to do to keep us awake after the redeye that put us in Philadelphia early Wednesday morning. I had a couple cups of coffee at a diner following the flight and being entertained by dinosaurs (Mamenchisaurus!) was enough to keep us awake until we were able to drive up and check in to our hotel in the afternoon.

It was a good trip. I will say, I adore San Francisco, but I am always sorry to go home after a visit to Philly. Next to Maine, the Philadelphia region is where I’ve spent the most years of my life and it’s where I finally found a great deal of strength and independence. Upon reflection, there were no doubts, and barely any discussion, when we decided that we’d go there for our wedding.

Filed under: philadelphia, travel, wedding

Dyslexia

Thursday, Mar 29th, 2012 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

I couldn’t read until I was 8 years old.

Over the years, the number of people I admitted that to has been very low and it wasn’t until recently that I realized I was hiding it because it was an intense such a source of shame.

My decision to start talking about it came in October when I listened to an podcast of Radio Times where Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz talked about his own struggle with dyslexia (mp3 available for download on this page). I was on a plane when I listened to it and remember it very vividly, it made me cry. It’s taken me this long to actually write about it in public.

See, I didn’t really believe I was dyslexic. Both my parents were dyslexic, I was diagnosed when I was in 1st grade, but I convinced myself that I had been misdiagnosed. In spite of my slow start, I didn’t really fit the typical symptoms of random-dyslexia-website-I-found-in-2003 (which, in spite of seeming dubious now, I was happy to accept, who wants to admit to having a reading disorder?). By 8th grade I shocked myself (and my parents!) by scoring in the 97% percentile on reading comprehension in the state of Maine and receiving an award. Today I love books, enjoy reading and have a successful career where being able to quickly read, absorb and apply information is critical. This doesn’t sound like someone who is dyslexic to me! By accepting the diagnosis I thought I was doing a disservice to people who struggle in their adult life with the disorder. I wrote off all my problems to some nebulous “late bloomer” excuse and never talked about it again.

Listening to the interview with Schultz made me realize I was wrong. Here was Pulitzer Prize-winning poet talking about his struggle with dyslexia. While his symptoms didn’t strictly match mine, it made me realize that there was much more to dyslexia than a few generic symptoms I once found on a website. I bought his book, My Dyslexia.

I began to understand that successful dyslexics don’t necessarily “overcome” the disorder, but instead develop ways to cope. Some obviously cope by selecting career paths which require limited reading skills, but some (particularly fortunate ones like me who were diagnosed early and benefited from early Special Education) learned or were taught tricks which allowed us to function on par with our peers, and even excel. Looking back to my childhood, it was my dyslexic father who inspired my love of books, he was a journalism major and spent the most successful years of his career as a writer at an insurance company. I have the fiction book he began writing in my office. I didn’t actually need to look any further than dyslexics in my own family to find the success and coping mechanisms I found in the interview with Schultz!

Back to my own academic career, I realized that in my eagerness to dismiss dyslexia I did myself a great disservice. I now understand that many of the struggles I had in high school were due to my dyslexia, and not because I was particularly lacking in intelligence. I could pull general academic success if I was given more time for tests (which my teachers were often able to grant, but my SATs were a disaster) and with a significant amount of studying time via repetition through mixed media (if all reading, I would read multiple views of the same thing), creation and copying of detailed notes and studying alone. This is all still true for me today.

Self-confidence wise there is this meme in US geek culture about public high school being “boring” or “too easy” or otherwise a waste of time. It’s a painful one for me because that was never my experience, I found my, admittedly very highly rated, public high school to be very challenging and I had to study a lot to do well. I even enjoyed many of my classes and took additional history electives when I was a senior rather than taking free periods. I’ll sometimes say that life circumstances and money are the reason I didn’t go to college, which is all true, but people overcome those every day. The actual reason I didn’t go to college boils down to sheer terror of having to struggle through classes like I did in high school and the vast amounts of time I’d need to put in to do well.

I’ve since read dozens of stories similar to those of Schultz, my father and myself. It’s opened a whole world for me that I didn’t bother to explore previously. I’ve grown infinitely more interested in the research into alternative learning styles so kids like me wouldn’t necessarily have to learn coping mechanisms to keep up with the other kids, instead instruction could be altered to cater to a broader range of learning style — and ones that make sense for our information age world.

Most importantly for me, I want be more open about it, stop being ashamed of it and want to gain back the self-confidence I’ve lost along the way because of it.

Filed under: reflection

Pangolins, parrots, Partimus, Philadelphia

Tuesday, Mar 20th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

These past few weeks could only really be characterized as normal, no big events or anything lately. I have been struggling with an ear ache this month and working with a doctor to treat it. The issue is fluid buildup in my sinuses and the treatment is allergy medication until it stops. As of now it’s only really hurting when the allergy medication wears off so at least it seems like we’re on the right track.

While at BerkeleyLUG on February 26th I spoke with Michael Paoli who was trying to find a presenter for Bay Area Linux Users Group (BALUG) in April and suggested an Ubuntu presentation. I agreed, along with Grant Bowman to fill in some of the desktop stuff that, as an Xubuntu user, I may not be as familiar with changes-wise between 11.10 and 12.04. We’re now on the schedule for April 17th and in preparation I installed 11.10 on my new laptop and then upgraded to the 12.04 daily build. I’ll probably write a whole separate post about how impressed I am with Unity in 12.04, they’ve really done an exceptional job polishing it and I’m excited about this presentation.

On March 3rd I met up with Evan Broder for an impromptu Ubuntu Global Jam at Coffee Bar. We certainly worked a lot through the afternoon but both of us seems stuck on solutionless problems. C’est la vie.

That same beautiful weekend I was walking to the gym when I saw lots of people crowded around a blooming tree, which to my delight was full of the Telegraph Hill parrots! They’re always hanging around that park, but it’s rare to see them so close.

I spent the following weekend on various things, including getting my feet wet with Ubuntu ISO Testing. I was inspired following some last-minute testing when the Xubuntu beta1 came out and I felt bad not being able to help. The beta2 would be different! My learning how to use the tracker and test is part of what inspired the laptop purchase, VirtualBox tests are great, but real hardware tests are even better!

Last week MJ was gone for a couple of days, during which I gave Simcoe her SubQ fluids by myself for the first time. For a process I was so apprehensive about early on (sticking a needle under the skin of your cat and filling it with water!), I am impressed with how quickly I’ve grown used to it and doing it alone wasn’t a massive undertaking. However, it is a consideration when taking a trip and we had to figure out how to handle this upcoming trip to Philadelphia. Our options were pretty much either board Simcoe with the vet for 8 days or find a pet sitter who could do pills and SubQ fluids. Like most cats, Simcoe does not like going to the vet, we really wanted to avoid that so I started looking for pet sitters in the city. I was fortunate to find one I’m thoroughly impressed with after meeting. She regularly takes care of kitties who need injections, is happy to give pills and in general I’m going to sleep well at night knowing she’s coming every day to check on them. I’ll give a full report of the experience after our trip.

This past weekend we spent most of our time preparing for our Philadelphia trip, but I did take about 90 minutes out of that to meet up with the rest of the Partimus board (and Beth Lynn via phone) at the Creative Arts Charter School for a board meeting, photo:

The Creating Arts Charter School had a fire late last year that has caused significant changes in their needs computing-wise which we’re working to help them with. Beyond that Partimus is seeking to expand more generally so we have the resources to help more schools, not a trivial task. In all it was a great meeting, and it was very nice for all of us to get together, it had been quite some time.

Finally, the Philadelphia trip! The main goal of this trip is to select a wedding venue, which we have to do by visiting the contenders. We have appointments to visit 7 venues while we’re there, which when combined with visiting friends and relatives means we’re shaping up for several busy days. We’re flying out tonight (in fact, I’m wrapping up this post while on the train toward San Jose Airport) on a redeye to Philadelphia via Phoenix. The plan following our flight is to have a leisurely breakfast, head over to the Franklin Institute for their Giant Mysterious Dinosaurs exhibit, and then finally drive up to our hotel to check in (and possibly take a nap!). We’ll see how it all goes, it’s going to be a long day. We fly home mid-week next week.

An now my train ride is coming to an end, time to wrap this up and hop a taxi to the airport!

Filed under: life

Lenovo G575

Monday, Mar 12th, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Back in 2008, on the tail end of a particularly rough year, a few of my friends got together and bought me the pink mini9. It was the first new portable computer I’d ever owned. That little mini9 is still chugging along and the only thing that doesn’t work anymore is the speakers (the wires are in the hinge going to speakers next to the screen, I think they’ve gotten worn over time, it can probably be fixed).

Yesterday I bought my first new laptop. When I reviewed the ZaReason Strata Pro 15 Laptop back in 2010 I discussed some of my computing habits and where a full size laptop would fit into it. Ultimately the reasons for getting one weren’t overwhelmingly compelling, but they did pop up every so often. During the holiday season in 2011 I began browsing Frys ads for a super cheap laptop. I don’t care about branding these days as I sadly don’t expect modern laptops to last more than a couple years, but I did want a processor with hardware virtualization. The search was fruitless until this week, when I saw this advertisement:

And since I assume the product page will disappear soon, uploaded a copy of the advertised specs here. Not bad! 2G of RAM, upgradable to 8G, AMD E-450 which does indeed have virtualization support and a good Ubuntu Friendly report.

I called ahead to make sure they had some in stock and them MJ and I made the trek down to Fry’s to check it out. Predictably I ended up coming home with one.

I loaded up the pre-installed Windows 7 when I got home to make sure everything came up as expected and then installed Ubuntu 11.10 on it. Everything was detected and the installation was a breeze even with the resize of the Windows partition (with 320G of harddrive space, it doesn’t hurt to keep it for now).

They keyboard is nice to use, includes a keypad (love!) and the the laptop isn’t too heavy to bother me when actually using it on my lap. The form factor makes the whole thing pleasant to work on. The display is beautiful (hooray for the popularity of backlit) and so far it’s all pretty speedy. If I were to complain about something it would be that I can hear the fan, but I think I’m just spoiled by my fanless mini9.

I think what struck me the most about it is how immediately comfortable I was using it. I spent all of yesterday evening getting my work done on it barely giving it a second thought except for the moments when I’d forget the placement of the PgDn key or similar. I rarely adjust to new devices this quick.

In addition to adding more RAM, I’ll probably swap out the current harddrive for an SSD, but for now it’s a great little machine and I couldn’t beat this price.

Filed under: computers, tech

Oakland zoo, street cars, Chumby and TV

Sunday, Feb 26th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last weekend we took advantage of the long weekend and MJ and I finally made it over to the Oakland Zoo. I’ve wanted to go for quite some time because they have some exceptional animals that the San Francisco Zoo no longer has… elephants!

But what actually prompted the visit at this time was the news of a new baby giraffe.

More photos from my visit are over on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629413089059/

In spite of the short work week, I had a particularly productive one. I wish I could say the same on the volunteer work side, I’ve been catching up with a lot of things and a bit more focused on some personal projects we have going on.

On the local tourist side, when I first visited San Francisco MJ arranged our schedule one evening so he could take me on a street car. Love at first sight!

Several months back I developed a habit of snapping pictures of the street cars (collection here) and then began following the Market Street Railway blog. Finally this week I became a Market Street Railway Member. I guess that means I’m now a card-carrying train geek.

Last month Woot! had a Chumby on sale for $99 which I ordered and then used at the Ubuntu SCALE booth. Since coming home I’ve wondered what to do with it. Keep it in the box until the next Ubuntu booth? Hack it to run something else? I decided to start with checking out some of the apps available for it and eventually discovered that it can run, in rotation, a variety of zoo webcams. That’s how I discovered the San Diego Zoo Polar Bear Cam

It’s pretty much the best zoo cam ever. When I go to the zoo I frequently just see the bears sleeping, but when you have the cam running on your desk all day you can watch them eat, swim, run and be otherwise interesting. Polar bears are pretty awesome.

Polar Bear Cam on Chumby

Coincidentally I also listed to a Quirks and Quarks episode recently that included segments about polar bears (and dolphins in mirrors!), very worth the listen: http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/episode/2011/12/17/december-17-2011/

Long term I’m not sure what I’ll do with the Chumby. It makes a great Ubuntu booth accessory because it can rotate through images. Putting something else on it is quite tempting, so it writing an app or two for it if I can come up with something I think it’ll be well-suited for.

I have also been watching some TV. After seeing the advertisements on hulu I began watching Alcatraz. It’s a bit dorky, but I’m a sucker for shows based in San Francisco. It’s filmed in Vancouver but, like Monk, they do all these flyover and similar shots of actual San Francisco for appropriate scenes. One the other night caught my attention:

The Embarcadero, and hey, those pools on the right are the Golden Gateway Tennis & Swim Club where I go to swim and work out!

On the home front, this week we finally got someone in to finish the work on our new bathroom fan and overhead light done, now we just need to get the bathroom painted and the towel bars rehung. The same day we contacted a local lamp repair shop recommended by a representative from the lighting store where we buy all our specialized light bulbs. He picked up the lamps and we should have them back and running like new in a few weeks.

Finally, since SCALE there have been a couple articles come out where my talks were mentioned. The first was a passing mention on SCaLE celebrates a successful tenth year as a premier Linux conference and the other was an extensive report on my talk and another from the Open Source in Education track for LWN, SCALE 10X: The trickiness of the education market by Nathan Willis. Awesome!

Filed under: animals, life

Started wedding planning, news from my little sister and other recent life stuff

Sunday, Feb 19th, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

I had the flu earlier this month that I’m now living in the tail end of, my cough hasn’t completely gone away but I did make it back to the gym finally this week and am back to a reasonable sleep schedule. Aside from missing much of a day of work, I sadly also ended up missing a triage fest for Partimus (details of their work here). I am looking forward to feeling completely better.

MJ recently got a new phone so I now get to use his Nexus S. Along with the phone itself (running ICS!) he bought me a custom sparkley pink fitBAG, which I think is actually nicer than the awesome soft case the Nexus One came with. I am liking the phone itself more than I thought I would, I really loved the solid metal feel of the Nexus One but the Nexus S is quite nice, and so is ICS.

We had one of MJ’s friends from back east visit for a week, she visits the area a couple times a year and it’s always a nice excuse to do some tourist things and check out some new or interesting places to eat. Ended up with some amazing dinners at Waterfront Restaurant and Hillstone.

I made a trip out to the San Francisco Zoo once I started feeling better in order to get some fresh air, some photos from that trip here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629212169667/

This past weekend was the calmest weekend I’ve had in a while. Went to a little party Saturday evening, got some laundry done, groceries, made dinner on Sunday. So far this weekend is shaping up to be a bit more productive. For breakfast today I enjoyed a very good bagel, which is quite the statement for San Francisco, it can be hard to find good bagels here. We discovered the place of delicious bagels at House of Bagels. They also have lots of yummy jewish pastries and Challah. This afternoon I need to do some shopping for a new light jacket to replace my fleece jacket when going to nicer places and events. Tomorrow the plan is to head over to the Oakland Zoo!

For Valentine’s day MJ surprised me with roses – including some pink ones! And we had dinner just a couple blocks from home. Good conversation and good company made for a lovely evening.

This past week MJ and I went to a Bay LISA meeting on OpenLDAP Backend Improvements by Howard Chu, chief architect of OpenLDAP. I last saw him speak about OpenLDAP at the UKUUG Spring Conference in 2009 (post here). This time he talked about the development they’re doing on the new OpenLDAP backend that they want to replace BerkeleyDB with: MDB (Memory-Mapped Database, some details here). It’s very cool, the benchmarks for reads were impressive and I like that they actually built something that is not OpenLDAP-specific, instead they built a database and then built a handler for it in OpenLDAP.

We started planning the wedding and are officially shooting for spring of 2013. I’ve reviewed dozens of venues and requested information from the short list. We’re planning on heading to Philadelphia some time in March so we can actually start visiting the venues in person to further narrow down our choices. It’s also quickly become clear how expensive this is going to be and how many sites there are giving terrible advice for cutting costs. We’re also going to scope out some caterers who aren’t tied to the venues. I need to get a proper to-do list together.

Speaking of major life changes, on January 11th my little sister Annette messaged me on Facebook (is that how we do it now?) to let me know she is pregnant! We learned this week that it’s going to be a boy. The pregnancy was a surprise and she will be a single parent and largely still lives with my mother, but she has decided against putting him up for adoption. We’re planning a trip to Maine in July and I expect I’ll be buying a fair amount of baby and child clothes in the coming years to help as much as I can from the other side of the country. I’m going to be an aunt!

Filed under: family, life

Linaro Dinner, Ubuntu and Debian Evening and Saving Pangolins

Friday, Feb 17th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On February 5th several people from the Ubuntu California team headed over to Redwood City for dinner with Ubuntu-loving attendees from the Linaro Connect conference.

It was Super Bowl Sunday so we lucked out at a pizzeria that lacks a television – they seemed to be doing a brisk delivery service but the restaurant was pretty empty! Thanks again to Chris Johnston for contacting me prior to the event to arrange a time so I could find a venue and we could organize this.

I also hosted had another Ubuntu Hour and Debian Dinner evening the following evening. It was a lot of fun, even managed a small GPG keysigning at dinner.

Finally, I love animals, but I didn’t know what a pangolin was until Mark Shuttleworth announced Precise Pangolin as the 12.04 release name. He explains his selection of the pangolin:

Now, I’ve recently spent a few hours tracking a pangolin through the Kalahari. I can vouch for their precision – there wasn’t an ant hill in the valley that he missed. Their scales are a wonder of detail and quite the fashion statement. I can also vouch for their toughness; pangolin’s regularly survive encounters with lions. All in all, a perfect fit. There’s no sassier character, and no more cheerful digger, anywhere in those desert plains. If you want a plucky partner, the pangolin’s your match.

What an interesting creature! Now I haven’t yet met one (San Diego Zoo does have some tree pangolins, but that’s pretty far from here), but I have had a chance to learn about them over these past few months. The first thing that is abundantly clear is that they’re now endangered due to loss of habitat and poaching.

The SavePangolins.org site is an aggregation of information about pangolins and organizations that folks can donate to to help the preservation of them and other animals sharing their Asian and African habitats.

I bought a spiffy t-shirt, 100% of profits go to support pangolin conservation.

The pangolin toy came from Amazon.com, great for booths when people ask what a pangolin is!

Filed under: animals, events, LoCo, tech, ubuntu planet

Simcoe’s latest blood work and supplies

Saturday, Feb 4th, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

On Thursday the 26th we took Simcoe to a follow-up exam for her dental work. The visit went well, the site of her tooth extraction had healed. While we were there we decided to do some more blood work to see where we stood with that, as it had been a month since the last check.

The test results took longer than usual to get back, but vet got back to us today to report that BUN was down to 46 (normal range: 14-36) from 56 and CRE was at 2.4 (normal range: .6-2.4) from 2.9. It’s the best news possible for a cat with kidney failure, it means she’s responding to treatment and we’re hopeful she can remain in this stable state for a long time, I’ve now read reports of cats with her stage of renal failure and proper care living 5+ years.

Getting the supplies to maintain her treatment has been an interesting adventure. We managed the following:

  • Lactated Ringers Solution, DEHP Bags, Hospira: with a prescription through Walgreens, but we had to follow these instructions (thank goodness for them!). The box of 12 1000ml bags was $22.96 with the Walgreens prescription discount plan the instructions recommended.
  • Sub-q needles: with a prescription through Walgreens, easy! Even better, with the prescription discount plan we signed up for in the instructions given for the fluids they are only $11.99 for a box of 100.
  • Subcutaneous (S.Q.) Macro-Drip Fluid Administration Set: with a prescription through drsfostersmith.com (direct product link), we can probably shop around more for these but $3.99 each is quite reasonable and we got free shipping with our order of 12.
  • Nutramax Welactin Feline Soft Gel Caps – 60 Count: no prescription, just bought a couple bottles from Amazon.com (direct product link), bought two to qualify for free shipping.
  • Pepcid AC: easiest one on the list! We just bought OTC and picked up a pill chopper so we can cut up the appropriate dose (we had to do this will the pills from the vet too).

For now we’re still getting her food (Purina NF Kidney Function Feline Formula dry, and Hills K/D wet) through the vet, but we’ll re-evaluate that over time.

Throughout this whole process I was struck with how difficult it was. I suspect a lot of people just get the supplies exclusively through their vet so they don’t have the hassle, but I’m hopeful that now that we’ve figured this all out and have scripts and accounts on file with the appropriate vendors we won’t need to deal with much trouble in the future.

I haven’t quite worked out a system to manage where to store all this new cat stuff, but I’m working toward one.

Simcoe feeling better and getting into trouble again

So we continue her treatment and assuming things continue to go well we’ll take her back in for blood work in 3 months.

Filed under: simcoe

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Needs You!

Tuesday, Jan 31st, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Today commemorates the release of Issue 250 of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter (UWN).

So first off, congratulations to everyone who has worked on UWN since the first issue in 2006!

Secondly, we need help. The current bus factor of UWN is 2. Both of us have full time jobs, travel a lot and have a variety of other commitments throughout the Ubuntu community and beyond. If Amber Graner and I are at a conference at the same time? You better believe the UWN release for that week is going to be late or rolled into a 2 week newsletter the following week.

So here’s what we need:

Summary writers. Summary writers receive an email every Saturday (sometimes Sunday if we’re running late) with a link to the collaborative news links document 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, 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.

Core volunteers. We need to improve our bus factor. We need folks who will make a commitment to the newsletter, who are interested in spending time with us in #ubuntu-news on irc.freenode.net, getting familiar with our community and processes, pitching in with summaries and editing as needed and eventually lending a hand with release procedures. Interested? Join #ubuntu-news, introduce yourself, and help out where you can!

We’re still working to improve our team wiki pages, but the current burden UWN on our core volunteers has caused this to go slowly. I’m hoping this call to the community will help reduce this burden so we can more forward.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

SCALE 10x

Sunday, Jan 29th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I spent last weekend at the the Southern California Linux Expo. I flew down to Los Angeles Thursday evening.

Friday morning I gave my Ubucon talk on Getting Involved with Ubuntu. To accompany this talk I had handouts that gave a bunch of URLs to resources within the project that I covered in the talk. I particularly enjoyed the Q&A where people took the opportunity to ask specific questions about areas they were interested in getting involved with and I ended up having several follow-up discussions with folks. I’ve uploaded the materials for my talk: slides, handout.

Next on the Ubucon schedule was “Audience Introductions and Lightning Talks” which, with such a big crowd, ended up being long introductions with stories woven in. It’s always inspiring to learn all the things people are working on in F/OSS that aren’t well-publicized, and the session was great for figuring out who you should have a chat with later.

Next up was Ralf Pieper’s Meet the Cloud session. He didn’t really cover the rapidly evolving ecosystem that is the Ubuntu cloud community today. Instead his talk was more general, giving an overview of what “cloud” is and information about the open source resources available, as well as covering proprietary SaaS, PaaS and others provided by companies like Google and Sales Force.

After lunch was Jorge Castro’s The Power User’s Guide to Unity. Most people know through my involvement with Xubuntu that I’m not a Unity user and I’ve only ever really used Gnome in passing. However, I found myself quite interested throughout this talk! He didn’t cover customization, but instead his whole talk was demonstrating some of the key features of Unity that increase productivity but people may not know about. He based much of his talk on a post he made of the same name The Power User’s Guide to Unity in which he collects resources from questions and answers on askubuntu.com.

Ubucon audience

From there I departed from Ubucon to head over to the juju Charm School. Over the past few years there has been an explosion of configuration management, quick deployment and other systems administrator tools to make the lives of us sysadmins easier when it comes to rapid deployment. Puppet is the only one I’ve explored recently with any depth, and even that we’re not yet using in production at work. The juju toolset is more of a quick deployment and service relationship management tool, although configuration can be included or used in collaboration with an existing system like Puppet. I had seen juju demos floating around the online Ubuntu community previously, but this charm school was a good opportunity to hear from fellow sysadmins about what they thought of the tools. It was an interesting session and the presentation finished with handing out juju t-shirts to attendees, including ones in women’s sizes. Now, I was the only woman in the room of 30+ people and a joke was made that the box of women’s t-shirts was brought just for me, but I went out of my way to thank them for the consideration. It really, really meant a lot (read more about why here).

I then went to Richard Gaskin’s Customizing Unity talk. It was another very demonstration-oriented talk where he explored the Unity Plugin section of the CompizConfig Settings Manager. He’s a really great speaker who had the audience laughing at several points, particularly when he kept impressing upon us that “I didn’t tell you to do this, it’ll probably break your system” with every change he made.

Congrats to Nathan Haines and the rest of the volunteers at Ubucon for making it another great event this year. There were a few sessions throughout the day that had standing room only!

Friday evening 11 of us ended up going out with an Ubuntu California (and friends!) dinner at a nearby diner.

Ubuntu California dinner

Saturday morning I was up bright and early to start putting together the Ubuntu booth on the expo floor.

The booth really came together nicely, the banner and tablecloth from Canonical make a huge difference in how things look. And Eric P. Scott had the clever idea of M&Ms put into dishes that make the Ubuntu logo:

The candy was quite the hit at the booth

Once the booth was set up I ran off to give my second talk of the conference, Bringing Linux into Public Schools and Community Centers. Unfortunately it was at the same time as the keynote on Saturday and in a room that wasn’t on the map because it was on a different floor than the rest of the talks, but I did manage to have a great audience of 40-50 people. In this talk I gave examples from a deployment at a community center that Ubuntu Pennsylvania worked on in 2007 and a couple of the public charter schools Partimus.org works with. From there I expanded upon several of the lessons we’ve learned as an outside organization getting involved in learning centers and charter schools. I knew there were educators and tech professionals in my audience who had worked on deployments like ones I’ve worked on, so I actively encouraged audience participation throughout my talk, and I’m very glad I did. The audience participation was spectacular, drawing from different types of deployments, I even was able to divert answering of some of the questions to some audience members who had more experience than I do in certain areas. I also ended up having several discussions after my talk and throughout the weekend with others interested in schools and was able to swap contact info with people from organizations similar to Partimus. I’ve uploaded the materials for my talk: slides, notes.

Thanks to Richard Gaskin for taking pictures during my talk

I spent much of the weekend at the Ubuntu booth, the EXOPC Slate running Ubuntu that Akkana Peck brought to demonstrate Ubuntu on a tablet ended up being quite a popular demonstration.

Huge thanks to all our Ubuntu California booth volunteers: Jess Bermudes, Mickey Lyle, Philip Ballew, Eric P. Scott, Nathan Haines and Jack Deslippe. Also thanks to Eric Hammond and David Wonderly who brought along a bunch of materials that were vital for the booth. It was a great couple of days, gave out over 400 Ubuntu CDs (thanks to Canonical for shipping us the a conference pack and pressed CDs for the conference!).

As for other talks at the conference, I ended up going to one about the current state of OpenStack by Jesse Andrews (might load up the DevStack version that is easily installable on Ubuntu 11.10). I tried to go to Alison Chaiken’s Automotive: the Next Frontier for Mobile Linux but by the time I wrapped things up at the booth for the evening the room she was presenting in was already spilling over into the hallway. Sunday I went the Selena Deckelmann’s great keynote about how to “plan for the worst, minimize risk and recover gracefully from failure” before heading to a quick little Ubuntu Women meetup. I also went to Cat Allman’s Fundraising 101 (or “Free as in Freedom So Who Pays for the Beer?”) talk, where I picked up some great tips for handling money for non-profits. After packing up the Ubuntu booth I wrapped up my weekend at SCALE by going to the Ceph distributed storage system talk by Sage Weil, Ceph is very cool stuff.

In all? Awesome weekend! Kudos to the SCALE folks for pulling off another amazing conference!

More photos from Ubucon and SCALE here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629015857079/

Filed under: events, LoCo, tech, travel, ubuntu planet
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