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User Days tomorrow!

Friday, Sep 23rd, 2011 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

I’ve been prepping for several weeks with Nigel Babu and this week we wrapped up the last loose ends for Ubuntu User Days tomorrow, Saturday 24th (and a couple hours into Sunday the 25th UTC)!

Ubuntu User Days

User Days is a chat-based series of classes in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions). Classes will cover everything from Unity to the command line to switching from another OS, check out the full schedule here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UserDays

There’s also a new version of Lernid available if you’re interested in trying it out. We need some more volunteers to test drive it before we start formal backports, so if you can test – please do!

In Oneiric Beta: Just install the lernid package from the Ubuntu Software Center!

In Lucid, Maverick and Natty, on the command line:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lernid-devs/lernid-releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lernid

Please report any bugs found here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/lernid (click on “Report a bug” on the top right).

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Uncle Keith, travel, office, pools and food

Thursday, Sep 22nd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I lost my Uncle Keith to cancer on Friday, September 16th (obituary). It was an expected loss and I am glad I was able to spend some time him earlier this month. We weren’t close, and any condolence should go to my aunt, his wife, I know what it’s like to watch a loved one dying from long illness and it is very painful. Since Phoenix is just a two hour flight away, MJ and I will be flying out the evening of Friday Sept 30th to be with family for his memorial service on October 1st and coming home the evening of Sunday, October 2nd.

This trip means the only weekend I will be at home in October is 22-23, which happens to be the weekend of the OLPC-SF Summit which I will probably have to skip for sanity’s sake (even though I’m still helping with website stuff). We’ve booked a working trip to Philadelphia from 8-16 (MJ is attending a conference and I’ll be working from the hotel, and will probably have a company meeting while I’m in town with all my co-workers). On the evening of October 26th we’re taking a red-eye out to Orlando for a few days of Disney World (yay! finally!) and family visits before MJ flies home and I stick around for the week of the Ubuntu Developer Summit. I’ll be flying home on November 5th. It’s like May all over again! But at least all my travel this time is domestic.

We’ve made progress in the office/den, MJ spent a lot of time looking into a solution for housing our computers, switches and things that would be large enough depth-wise for the towers, strong enough to hold 5 servers and, the hardest part, something that’s not terribly ugly (we have to live in this space too!). He ended up buying a black Sanus audio rack:

No more computers on the floor, hooray! He also purchased some permanent power strips to manage everything we had to plug in, our printer is now permanently plugged into my desktop rather than having to plug it in with a cord across the office each time I want to use it. We also took the time to do some wire management, so it’s not such a wire disaster anymore.

To take a break this past Sunday I finally had the opportunity to use the Burke Williams Day Spa gift certificate that MJ got me for Valentine’s Day. I went to the location at Westfield San Francisco Centre and it was a truly relaxing 5 hours spent. Much needed.

The spa and my trip to Phoenix earlier this month where I enjoyed my aunt’s pool did remind me how much I miss pools. Back in the suburbs of Philadelphia a $40/mo gym membership easily got you a gym with a pool, so from 2006 until I moved away in 2010 I had pretty much constant access to a place to swim. Moving into a city changed this, my basic gym membership at a place without a pool topped at around $85/mo. I was idly exploring some options the other night when I learned about the Golden Gateway Tennis & Swim Club. Not only do they have pools, they have heated outdoor pools. They also have a steam room and sauna in their fitness center, which my gym lacks (had a sauna in PA, I’ve missed that too). It’s more expensive and further away from home than my current gym but a tour on Monday evening had me pretty much sold on the place. I signed the paperwork tonight and spent 2 hours with my nook, a pool and a hot tub as I watched the sky darken with the sunset and the city light up around me. Stunning. I don’t think I joined another gym, I joined an urban oasis. I’ll get to the fitness center next time.

Finally, I’ve committed to cooking at least one proper meal at home for week and by “proper” I mean not cereal, frozen, or otherwise prepared. I still don’t care for cooking but I am interested in eating healthier and reviving old family recipes. My latest creation? Beef Stroganoff (also archived here, in case that site disappears). Tomorrow I’ll be doing a very basic crock pot chili.

Now to heat up (it’s not making night!) some dinner.

Filed under: family, food, health, life

Sysadmin logs and Ubuntu talks at ITT Tech

Wednesday, Sep 21st, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

As mentioned in my last post I kicked off the Ubuntu Women Career Days in Ubuntu Classroom bright and early (for me!) on Saturday the 17th.

Logs from that session and an outline of key points that I covered are now up on the Ubuntu Women wiki:

http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/CareerDays/LinuxSystemsAdministrator

It was a really fun experience and gave me a nice opportunity to sit down and think about all the things I enjoy about my job and it was nice to share that with others. If anyone has any follow-up questions they’re welcome to email me: lyz@ubuntu.com

Last week I was contacted by Michael Roth, a professor at ITT Tech in the Bay Area, who was looking for someone to come into his Intro to Linux class to give a quick introduction to Ubuntu “not so much the technology as much as its mission, what Ubuntu is trying to achieve” and we quickly made arrangements for me to come down to two of his evening classes this week.

On Tuesday I headed out to their Oakland campus and tonight I took the train out to the campus in Concord. Both evenings I had a great time, the first wasn’t quite as far along in the class as the others so I was given the opportunity to explain some of the basics of free software, lots of money questions and other key ideas.

My slides from the talks are available:

Thanks to Professor Roth for inviting me to his classrooms to tell his students why Ubuntu is better than the Fedora they were using in class. Just kidding. On a more serious note, it was a nice opportunity to meet a bunch of people who were interested in learning more and furthering their careers in a Linux direction.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu Women Career Days: Systems Administrator

Thursday, Sep 15th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Saturday, September 17th at 16:00 UTC (that’s 9AM my time) I’ll be kicking off Ubuntu Women Career Days by running an IRC-based session in Ubuntu Classroom about my job as a Linux Systems Administrator specializing in Debian and Ubuntu.

Date and Time: Saturday, September 17 at 16:00 UTC
Location: #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions)

I’ll cover the basics of what a generalist Linux sysadmin does and what training and experience required. I’ll then give a bit of history about how I became a sysadmin and what I do on a day to day basis. The session will wrap up with a generous Q&A session.

If you’re unable to attend I’m also offering to answer questions via email after posting the logs if there is anything you wish to ask but wasn’t covered.

Server Rack

Career Days is the brain child of Cheri Francis who was inspired by her own experiences in tech and studies which continue to show that women lack female role models and exposure to tech career opportunities.

If you’re interested in getting involved, please see the Ubuntu Women Career Days wiki page or email Cheri or myself (lyz@ubuntu.com).

These sessions are open to the whole community, you don’t need to be a woman to attend or participate.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu California at Solano Stroll 2011

Wednesday, Sep 14th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

It has become a an annual tradition, BerkeleyLUG teams up with Ubuntu California and the local non-profit Partimus to staff a booth at the Solano Stroll in Berkeley, California.

From the Stroll website:

Since 1974, The merchants, restaurants, and professionals, as well as the twin cities of Albany and Berkeley CA, have hosted the Solano Avenue Stroll, the east bay’s largest street festival! The Solano Avenue Merchants Association invites you to come and see what makes Solano Avenue such a wonderful place.

Over five hundred vendors, non-profit organizations, food booths and entertainers!

I arrived at the BART station a little after 9:30AM and was picked up by Lisa who brought me to the booth where Jack and Ian and his sister had already had most of the booth set up. We got to work getting the rest together as we began welcoming the first visitors to the booth.

Throughout the day we gave out about 50 pressed CDs and over 100 CDs burned by booth volunteers. This year we noticed an increase in folks asking for 64-bit so we’ll be sure to have more on hand next year.

We must have spoke with hundreds of people throughout the day, many of whom had heard of Ubuntu (it is Berkeley, afterall) but weren’t sure what it was and where happy to learn that they could try a LiveCD for free. We even had one person who approached us and responded “Yes, since you gave me a CD last year!” when we asked him if he was familiar with Linux or Ubuntu. We wrapped up the booth when the stroll closed at 6PM.

I think the most inspiring part about the day was seeing the diversity of people who are users of Ubuntu and having the opportunity to try and attract them to contributing. Coming to a general community event like this one really is quite a different experience than the technical venues that teams tend to target, not the least of which being that we were the only software related booth at the festival.

More photos from the event can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627650086116/

Filed under: berkeley, events, LoCo, partimus, tech, ubuntu planet

Labor Day Weekend in Phoenix

Thursday, Sep 8th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

For Labor Day weekend I flew to Phoenix, Arizona to visit my Aunts Pam and Elaine. Unfortunately MJ couldn’t come along due to work obligations, but it was otherwise fortuitous timing as my cousin Chet, Elaine’s son, was about to launch his military career by heading out to Army boot camp on Tuesday. I was also able to visit with my uncle Keith, Pam’s husband, who is struggling with terminal cancer before he gets too ill.

I took a flight out on Friday night and my cousin picked me up at the airport shortly after 11PM. Due to my uncle’s illness we decided that I should stay with Elaine and it ended up working out really well.

Saturday morning I had breakfast at Tryst Cafe where I met up with Sandi and BJ, friends who I knew from Philadelphia but who had moved to Phoenix several years prior. We’ve kept in touch online but as always it was great catching up in person, and the breakfast was great.

Cactuses are cool, but the weather was not. It was peaking over 110F every day I was there, much hotter than is typical for Labor Day weekend. Turns out I had arrived at the tail end of one of their hottest summers on record. Lucky me, just like visiting Philly in July when the heat index was 120F!

That afternoon we spent looking for a cool way to pass the time and ended up at the theater to see Apollo 18. After, we swung by the grocery store to pick up some dinner and bring it over to my Aunt Pam’s. She has a small yorkie terrier and a sun conure, and as animals always do with people who are afriad of them the sun conure decided I was her best friend all weekend. I still don’t like birds and even on Monday after her sitting on me a lot I was still a little nervious, but she wasn’t all that bad. After dinner my aunts and I headed over to a local hotel bar where we enjoyed drinks, chips and great conversation.

Sunday morning Elaine and I got up early to grab some breakfast at my beloved Dunkin’ Donuts (there aren’t any in California!) and then head over to the Phoenix Zoo before it got too hot out.

It was still quite hot, already close to 90F when we arrived shortly after 9AM, but it was a wonderful zoo visit in spite of the heat.

I was able to see an ocelot! Important not only because it’s a beautiful cat, but the animal in the release codename for the 11.10 Ubuntu release (Oneiric Ocelot).

I also rode a camel!

Around noon I headed over to my Aunt Pam’s to do some shopping, as we had decided the night before to make a couple of my father’s recipes. That night we’d have his potato salad and some burgers we picked up at Whole Foods. The plan for Monday night was to make his Sauerbraten. I’ve made the potato salad before but I’d never attempted the sauerbraten because “I don’t really cook” – a comment that followed me the whole weekend. My aunts had me make the tomato and balsamic salad and even gave me a turn with the meat grinder as we were making some burgers for Sunday evening dinner. Me, grinding meat! Crazy. It was a great dinner though. In the late evening we headed out to the pool for a relaxing dip once the sun had gone down.

I spent Monday morning with my Aunt Elaine and cousin Chet. After breakfast we headed over to Pam’s to help set up a hospital bed in the living room for my Uncle Keith. I spent the afternoon there, and even took a couple hours to relax by the pool with my Nook (in a ziplock bag!). I even managed to stay out of the sun and avoid getting burned.

That evening Elaine, Pam and I enjoyed my father’s Sauerbraten. So many memories came back with the first mouthful, I’ll definitely need to make it at home some time. With the sauerbraten we also had mashed potatoes and due to a great purchasing mistake, Sweet and Sour Red Cabbage. Earlier in the day Pam had me run out to the store to get some red cabbage and without thinking about it I picked up a full head of fresh red cabbage. My aunt, who makes yogurt, pickles and mayonnaise from scratch, had intended for me to pick up some prepared cabbage, oops! So I found the Sweet and Sour Red Cabbage recipe online and we were all delightfully surprised at how amazing it turned out. I ate a lot at that dinner.

My flight out of Phoenix was shortly after 10PM Monday night, and I was treated by a First Class upgrade – my first upgrade on my own (usually when I get upgraded it’s because I’m traveling with MJ and he’s got higher frequent flyer status than I do)! I was back home in cool San Francisco shortly after midnight and MJ was at the airport to greet me.

Amazing weekend, and with Phoenix being so close I hope I can make it out more often. We’ll have to see what our Thanksgiving plans look like…

Filed under: animals, family, travel

Week, zoo and a news reader

Friday, Sep 2nd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’m sitting in the San Francisco airport, my flight to Phoenix is delayed by a half hour so I’m taking the extra time to chill in the United lounge that I have access to for another month through my lounge pass.

So, this past week! MJ was out of town on a work trip from Sunday night through Wednesday night. In spite of being on the west coast, I still work for a company on the east coast and hurricane Irene caused my on call Saturday evening and Sunday to be hectic rather than the relaxing stuck-at-home on call weekends I’m used to. Clean up from the storm in the form of rescuing a couple servers that didn’t quite survive the power issues and thinking of creative ways to handle internet outages for our multi-homed clients lasted much of the week. On Tuesday my boss let me take the afternoon off so I’d have a break and I took the opportunity to hop on MUNI and visit the zoo.

I checked the latest SF Zoo news before leaving home so I’d know what to check out and was delighted to learn about the pair of South AMerican coatis they have in the Childrens’ Zoo:

“No, it’s not a raccoon, but if you guessed that, you’re close! It’s a South American coati, and a set of sisters have just become our newest Childrens’ Zoo residents. Pictured here, one of our coatis is enjoying a welcome gift of enrichment treats.

“Also known as brown-nosed coatis or ringtailed coatis, they are related to raccoons and are found in forests in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Venezuela, Peru, Guyana and Surinam. Unlike raccoons, they tend to be most active during the day with females and juveniles living together in groups. In the wild they have been observed self-grooming as well as grooming each other with tree resin that is thought to help prevent parasites. Without the resin available, our coatis dutifully rub down their tails with rosemary. Come meet our South American coatis, Maggie and Rosie, and see their adorable faces at the coati exhibit in the Children’s Zoo.”

I also picked up my first San Francisco Zoo key!

More photos from my afternoon are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627558572518/

And some videos!

Coati: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giEB1p9FjNg

Silent Knight the sea lion swimming around his home: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxhDlj1DgKw

I checked in at work when I got home to tidy up some things and spent the rest of the evening relaxing with some games (my Wii is hooked up again!) and my pile of books and magazines.

I recently installed News RSS Ticker on my desktop in an attempt to keep up with news better. I got it nicely tuned to work with my XFCE desktop, screenshot in use on my desktop. So far it has worked much better than past attempts to stay updated with news (which included watching news shows and adding more RSS feeds to my reader, both of which failed miserably and quickly).

Wednesday night was super busy. As soon as I finished work I was helping run a software testing session for Lernid and even managed to drag in some additional testers at last minute. When that wrapped up I went to Noisebridge to meet up with my friend Grant at a little send-off event before he heads off to spend 3 months in Nairobi, Kenya to be a their technical lead for the Dreamfish program there, more details are over on his site: grantbow.com. I picked up a burrito on my way home and picked MJ up at the airport around 11PM.

Thursday evening MJ and I got to spend our only evening together this week, and as soon as I finished up work today I headed toward the airport.

And now I should pack up my things and head back down to my gate. Here’s hoping the delay isn’t any longer than anticipated and I can be on my way soon! Really looking forward to seeing my family, it’s been too long since I’ve seen them.

Filed under: animals, life

Ubuntu California at Picn*x 20 and Android cookies

Sunday, Aug 28th, 2011 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

This past week I worked with Jack Deslippe to get everything together for the 20th Linux Anniversary Linux Picn*x in Sunnyvale, California.

Saturday morning we were ready for the picnic! We arrived around 11AM and got the table set up:

It was the inaugural use of the Approved Team Gifts from Canonical (Ubuntu banner and tablecloth) and my new Ocelot stuffed animal. I’m also really glad we went with the flowers again, I was able to pick these orange and purple ones from a flower stand 2 blocks from where I live, win!

Several of us who were working the table are also Android fans, so when my fiance got me an Android cookie cutter last month I knew I’d be using it to make cookies at the picnic, even if it was an Ubuntu booth, it was a Linux picnic!

Cookie recipe:

  • 1 cup butter or margarine (two sticks)
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 3 cups flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder

Mix together butter and sugar, and beat until light and fluffy.

Beat in eggs and vanilla, add flour, salt and baking powder.

Blend well.

Chill 2 to 3 hours.

Roll out balls of dough into sheets 1/8 inches thick, cut with [Android!] cookie cutters.

Bake at 350F degrees for 10 minutes.

Frosting:

  • 1/2 cup soft butter (1 stick)
  • 1 1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla
  • food coloring

Mix butter, confectioner’s sugar, and vanilla together until creamy.

Mix in a couple of drops of [green!] food coloring

These recipes made about two dozen Android cookies, I doubled the recipe to get the four dozen I brought to the picnic.

There were also tables for SVPerl, Fedora, Haiku, the local Ham radio club and others. The weather was beautiful, I met some really interesting people and had some great sysadminy conversations and we gave out about 25 Ubuntu CDs to new, interested users.

More photos from the picnic are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627409699667/

What’s next? The California Team is busy these next few weeks!

I’ll be at the Solano Stroll and have an Ubuntu Hour in San Francisco scheduled for Wednesday, September 14th.

Filed under: events, LoCo, tech, ubuntu planet

Snakes, Lizards and Bison

Friday, Aug 26th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

MJ’s friend Matti spent the week here with us. She arrived last Friday and on Saturday the three of us piled into the car and headed toward Golden Gate Park. We started with lunch at The Beach Chalet. We then heading over to The California Academy of Sciences, where I have a membership but it runs out at the end of the month and I wanted to visit the Snakes and Lizards exhibit before it closed.

The Snakes and Lizards exhibit was great, and unlike the Extreme Mammals exhibit last year featured a dozens of live animals!


Monitor


Boa

We also spent a little time in the aquarium and lamented our failure to visit the planetarium while we had a membership. I love planetariums but the timing never quite worked out for us. Before leaving we spent a few minutes visiting the penguins and Claude, the white alligator.

It was then off to see the bison of San Francisco! I didn’t know there were any bison living in San Francisco (there aren’t any in the zoo) and I learned of their existence via a sad article last month: Golden Gate Park Bison Euthanized (sadly they are all getting old and they lost another just a couple weeks later and are now down to just three bison in the paddock, fortunately there are plans to bring in more, younger bison). Once I knew about them I had to visit!

The bison are awesome. We got really fortunate with our timing after the Academy of Sciences closed, we got a pretty good view of all three of the bison as it seems like they were going away for the evening (or for dinner?).

More photos of CAS and the bison available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627480483118/

On Sunday I spent the day working on projects and running errands around the neighborhood. I also swung by GameStop to pick up the 3DS Zelda game and some used Wii games. This led to me probably spending far too much time this week playing video games, but I think my brain is happy for the break. I also fixed the lingering issues with my Squeeze upgrade on my firewall/second desktop, the good news is that I can finally use my nice nvidia graphics card again (Xen and nvidia didn’t get along in Lenny). The bad news is that the on board Intel card is now unhappy with the Xen hypervisor so I can’t run xorg with the Intel card while running Xen, boo. Nagios is running fine now and my initial fears about instability of synergy turned out to be not much of a problem (it does crash from time to time, but not nearly as often or as annoyingly as I had feared, pretty sure it’s related to this bug).

I played the tourist a bit more this past week, on Tuesday evening I took a cable car down to The Buena Vista Cafe to meet up with MJ and Matti for dinner and then over to Ghirardelli Square for dessert.

Tonight I made about 4 dozen Android cookies and got everything together for the Ubuntu table for Picn*x 20 down in Sunnyvale tomorrow. I’m also on call with work this weekend, which should be interesting with the hurricane heading toward Philadelphia. Here’s hoping the storm doesn’t hit too hard.

And now, sleep so I’m all rested and ready for the picnic tomorrow!

Filed under: animals, san francisco

Projects, 3DS, Netflix, email, OLPCSF, baseball and other misc

Saturday, Aug 20th, 2011 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

Back on the 10th I hosted an Ubuntu Hour and Debian dinner. For the first time we had more people at the Debian dinner than at the Ubuntu hour, with 5 people coming out to the Ubuntu Hour and 8 to the dinner. It was nice to get to catch up with some people and always nice to meet new ones. I got talking to Michael Paoli about speaker coordination for Bay Area Linux Users Group (BALUG) and got myself added to the speaker coordinator list (I guess a year and a half away from PLUG was enough rest from speaker coordination!).

I’ve finalized details for my trip to Phoenix over Labor Day weekend. I’ll be staying with one of my aunts and they’ll be picking me up at the airport when I get in late Friday night. Saturday morning I’ll be visiting a friend (or two!) who I knew back in Philly but has since moved to Phoenix. The rest of the weekend? Pools! Food! Catching up!

I blogged about Boutique Academia now carrying silver-colored Ubuntu earrings back on the 4th and quickly ordered my pair. This time I couldn’t resist some more goodies from the shop, I also picked up the Binary SUDO and Android OS necklaces. They’re really nice, I should keep BA in mind for gifts.

I also picked up a blue (they don’t come in pink) Nintendo 3DS last week. A friend had recommended it but the high price ($250) was off-putting so I was waiting for the price drop, but it turns out a few stores where dropping their price early, nice! So far it’s pretty much been a drop in replacement for the DS Lite that I got in 2006, which can’t get on our wifi network (only does open and WEP, we use WPA of course) and the bottom right of the touchpad was going bad. The 3D stuff is pretty cool though and I’m delighted by the built in augmented reality (AR) games.

In other media news, ChromeOS now supports Netflix streaming! As soon as I heard the news I updated my CR-48 and sure enough it works fine. I’m hoping this change will make it to the Chrome browser some time soon so it works with traditional Linux distros, but at this point having it work on my tv (also linux), phone (linux!), chromebook (linux!) and even my new Nintendo 3DS is plenty for me to get my Netflix streaming fix.

On the projects side of things I’ve caught up with a lot of things and am now working to refine processes, both for new contributors and to make sure we have our resources under control. One of the problems I’ve seen with a few of the projects I work on is poor response time to emails that come in interested in the project. This is almost always due to multiple volunteers having access to a shared email account but no one making a commitment to regularly check it. I had a few ideas for handling this (forwarding everything to myself, loading up a separate browser where I keep all logged in with webmail, load up some mutt instances with different .muttrc files) and I settled upon an unusual solution for me: I’m using Thunderbird. A couple groups use gmail and multi-account login is a bit clunky, forwarding everything to myself means I still need to log in to reply so everyone else sees replies, and truth be told I wouldn’t actually be able to handle checking several mutt instances in a timely manner. Thunderbird has simple multi-account support, gives me notifications of incoming emails and with imap allows me to keep the webmail side of things synced up when I send replies. I still use gmail via the web and mutt for myself. Also on my home network we finally replaced the 40G drive in my second desktop with a 500G drive which I’ll finally be able to store some backups on. I also upgraded to Squeeze last night, which didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped, synergyc keeps crashing, Nagios wants to break out of our old config management system, I’m having some weird network issues, and I need to look into the new Xen configuration for Squeeze. Fun times. At least xorg and fluxbox loaded up fine!

One of the projects I’m currently helping with is moving olpcsf.org over to Drupal, which I hope to mostly finish tomorrow. I’ve been involved with their website stuff since last year and while Drupal isn’t really my forte I’m quickly learning how to make my way around it and I have to say that while still confusing (options hidden in weird places, Drupal terminology to learn), Drupal 7’s UI improvements make the workflow considerably more tolerable than it was in the past.

I was tasked with completing the migration last Saturday when I attended the monthly OLPCSF meeting over at San Francisco State University on Market. It was a fun meeting, Sameer made lemon (and orange, and lime) batteries and showed some experiments that could be done with the OLPC’s Measure activity and then incorporated the programming activity Scratch into the battery fun. There was also a presentation from Aaron Strick about an OLPC deployment in Kenya that he spent his summer at, he maintained a blog about the experience here: http://olpcinbura.blogspot.com/. At the meeting a few of us Partimus folks also sat down with Sameer to discuss some opportunities for volunteers from SFSU to help out with the schools (Christian blogged about the opportunity on the Partimus blog: Possible collaboration with SFSU students).

After the OLPCSF meeting MJ and I spent the rest of the day running errands and other things. Since we were in the area we had lunch in Japantown and then drove past Golden Gate park and down to the ocean. Have I mentioned lately how much I love living near the ocean again? Sunday I made chili from a friend’s recipe in my brand new crock pot! Lack of a crock pot meant I hadn’t made it in a few years, the end result met expectations, yum.

On Monday evening I headed out to an Oakland A’s game, only to have my travel interrupted by protesters. The stations were closed for over an hour but it certainly was an eventful wait (protesters, cops, BART messing with commuters by only opening certain entrances and announcing to the world that the stations were fully open).


BART Protesters and annoyed commuters at Montgomery station (side note: good thing I coincidentally finally saw V for Vendetta the weekend prior to this! Ah, the masks! I get it!)

Fortunately the delay only caused me to miss half of the first inning.

In spite of another loss for the A’s, it was a fun night out with my friend Mark and it’s always nice to get out to a ball game.

The rest of the week was somewhat disappointing. I was bitten with an unproductivity bug which caused everything I touched to either be a dead end or failure, weeks like this are never fun. We finally had someone in to fix the ceiling fan in our bathroom, only to learn once the drywall had dried that part of the job needed to be redone. Had to deal with Shutterfly shipping incomplete orders of engagement photos to family without letting us know until the photos had already shipped (very sleazy) AND being unable to tell us which ones did ship (or even confirm that they shipped our photos at all). Their customer service was completely useless, refund policies ridiculous and we ended up having to contact our credit card companies to handle it, which they did. Not using Shutterfly again. Friday I learned that I should stop expecting my September issue of Linux Journal to arrive, because it never will. They’ve gone completely digital without warning their subscribers, and now their publication is pretty much useless to me (there are dozens of more timely, higher quality articles I can read online, I subscribe to magazines for the paper I can read on beaches, long flights and train rides without worrying about batteries). How disappointing. Last night to cheer myself up following the disappointing week I finally saw the last Harry Potter movie over at the Metreon in 3D and IMAX! On my way home I stopped by a new sushi place that ended up being really nice.

I’m going to enjoy this weekend. We have a friend visiting and are planning on heading over to the California Academy of Sciences in a bit for their Snakes and Lizards exhibit.

Filed under: computers, life
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