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News is hard, but we’re making it easier

Sunday, Aug 14th, 2011 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Budapest in May there were several discussions about the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, the community-run newsletter for Ubuntu. As many people noticed, the newsletter went through a releaseless period from February through May due to changing obligations and life circumstances of the volunteers. By the time UDS came around two things were made very clear:

  • The process took too long (over 30 human hours per week)
  • The single Editor in Chief model was too much work for a single volunteer contributor (the people who have held this position for any length of time in the past were truly amazing)

We outlined several things that could be done to improve the workflow. Now, in August, we have completed several of these, including:

  • Provide link to “Upcoming Meetings and Events” calendar on the fridge rather than reformatting the calendar and putting into text – this has the added benefit of giving people dynamic calendar links (meeting times sometimes change with short notice!)
  • Link to monthly Team Reports page rather than including the full text (saves reformatting time)
  • Rotate jobs so we have multiple people able to do coordination and releases each week (this also fundamentally changed the role of “Editor in Chief” who had been taking on the burden of coordination AND release themselves)
  • Drop personal introduction
  • Amber Graner provided her massive Link Suggestions list to the team so we have a baseline for checking for news articles throughout the week (my RSS feeder is overflowing!)
  • Nathan Handler wrote publish-uwn-fridge.pl to automate the generation of posts that go to the fridge upon release (all scripts are available at lp:uwn)
  • Nathan Handler also took on the release role these past few weeks and wrote publish-uwn.pl which runs all the release-related scripts and dumps them in a simple directory that can be quickly reviewed and copied into each resource (mailing lists, forum, microblogs, IRC)
  • I reworked some of Nick Ali’s Python scripts for pulling Security and Updates so they now take command line arguments rather than having release and date-specific scripts
  • I also put together a list of summary writers who the acting editor can email each week (see my blog post here for responsibilities and how to get added to the list, we always need more help here)

With these changes we’ve made significant improvements to the time commitment and we haven’t really sacrificed on content, a major win for the team. The investment of time required to collect news articles and write summaries is still high and may still cause us to miss releases now and then, but this is unavoidable. As a whole the team is looking good and for the sanity of our volunteers I’m very happy that our bus factor has improved.

Great work everyone!

Still to do:

  • UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter wiki
    • Make sure workflow is properly documented
    • Confirm team contact information has been updated
    • Review instructions for how to get involved
    • General clean-up for clarity
  • Train additional releasers
  • Redefine team structure and leadership

Fortunately we should be able to work through these tasks without a whole lot of trouble these next few months now that we have freed up so much time from the release process itself.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Partimus at KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy on Sunday

Tuesday, Aug 9th, 2011 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

On Sunday I met up with fellow Partimus board members Christian Einfeldt and Grant Bowman and volunteers from Ubuntu California, San Francisco Linux Users Group and Bay Area Linux Users Group for a day of installation, triage and cable running at the KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy. KIPP is among the highest performing middle schools in the city, but like many public schools in California (and nationwide) they struggle with funding and as a result their technology budget is limited.

The job of Partimus that day was to review the available computers (all donated Pentium 4s with at least 512M of RAM) and end the day with new Ethernet cables run and 14 machines freshly installed with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS in 3 classrooms.

I met up with Christian shortly after 10AM and we got started, he blogged about the day over on the Partimus blog: Fun, Pizza & Ubuntu Linux at a public school! Christian has been working tirelessly with these schools over the summer to schedule meetings with teachers and others in the school to figure out what their needs are for the upcoming school year. Without him none of this would be possible, his talent for reaching out and years of experience volunteering at these schools serves us very well during each one of these volunteer days.

Michelle Mastin was the next to show up, she blogged about the day here: Partimus Install Day – Setting Up Ubuntu Machines for an SF School. Linux gadget guru extraordinaire Michelle came armed with Ubuntu 10.04.3 ISOs and I got to adding them to my USB stick when Michael Paoli of Bay LUG arrived and lent his laptop to the duty of burning CDs as we quickly discovered that only about 25% of the machines would boot from USB natively. Michelle and I got to work installing two machines in a social studies classroom which would be used for video editing.

Upon Grant’s arrival he worked with Michael and Christian to get the second social studies classroom going, doing the heavy lifting required to get the computers and CRT monitors that were strewn throughout the hallways into the classroom and set up. Installs were soon running on them as well, weeding out one system with a failing hard drive and Michael getting to work on the large managed switch which needed to be reset in order to function properly in the classroom setup.

Christian ordered pizza and we gained 2 more volunteers, Eric and Joseph, when the nearby SF-LUG meeting let out after 1PM.

With our fresh volunteers we got to work on running cables and installing the systems in the 3rd classroom, a math class whose teacher requested six machines for their students. We wrapped this lab up, updates and a few configurations made to every system (change of theme and background, standardization of resolution, creation of an unprivileged student account, installation of flash) around 4PM, just in time for the arrival of a 3rd pizza (with 7 hungry volunteers the 2 pizzas earlier wasn’t enough!).


Volunteers!

While we were packing up we were able to meet one of the teachers who I gave my card to in case she had questions. It was a tiring day and Michelle was kind enough to give me a lift home, but a good day, as working in these schools always is!

More photos from the day available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627262380407/

And thanks to this day I was finally able to update Partimus’ page about KIPP with photos! partimus.org/ksfba.php

Filed under: computers, partimus, tech, ubuntu planet

Weekend boats!

Monday, Aug 8th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

During his commute on Friday MJ heard about the Pacific Voyagers visiting San Francisco, so on Saturday following a breakfast of waffles and blueberries we headed out to check them out. They crossed the Pacific in their small boats, you can check out their page charting the course here. Crazy.

The event was held on Treasure Island which I’d never actually been to. It was all very low-key and there was a huge line to get a ride out to the boats for a ride that we passed on, but it was really cool to see the boats and have an excuse to visit the island. Afterwards we went across the street to the Oasis Cafe for some hot sandwiches.

More photos are over on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627262285071/
We had a bunch of errands to run so from there we headed back to the city. Grocery shopping ended up being more exciting than usual as we ran into one of the co-founders of the Southern California Linux Expo who introduced himself when he saw MJ’s SCaLE shirt. We also picked up a 6 quart crock pot, which I’ve been eyeing for quite some time now in my quest to find easy, healthy meals to make. Now I just need to dig my crock pot recipe book out of storage downstairs…

Sunday I spent the whole day at a charter school with Partimus which I’ll talk about in a separate post. I got home a little after 5 in time to do some dishes and laundry before dinner.

For dinner I actually used a recipe from a USAirways Magazine. “Grilled Diver Scallops with Ginger-Marinated Watermelon” sparked our interest while reading the recipe on our recent flight to Philadelphia and the end result didn’t disappoint.

Bonus that it was easy enough for even me not to mess up!

In other news, I’ll be visiting some family in Phoenix over Labor Day weekend. I’ve been meaning to do a quick visit over there for a while and that three day weekend is a nice opportunity to do so. I’m really looking forward to it, it’s been a few years since I’ve seen my aunts and it’ll be nice to see my cousin before he moves out to Texas.

Been super busy with project work lately, still working on updating documentation over at DarkMyst and chugging away on Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter releases and trying very hard to help with automated scripts and recruitment of volunteers so I don’t burn out on the process (it’s tedious, and never-ending!). The latest Ubuntu Women leadership elections have also kicked off, I’m the only incumbent running and we’ve got some awesome potential co-leaders. I was recently granted formal membership in the Xubuntu Team after several months of working through maintenance and updates of xubuntu.org and helping coordinate the upcoming migration to WordPress (read about and give feedback on our new theme proposal here). I haven’t been getting out much on weekdays lately, but this Wednesday I’m hosting an Ubuntu Hour and Debian Dinner and next week my schedule is looking pretty packed (including a baseball game on Monday!). Also spending more time reading these past few weeks as I’m trying to catch up on my pile of magazines and have ordered some core principles sysadmin books to work toward further rounding out my informal education now that I’ve reached Intermediate level sysadmin-wise.

But tonight (it’s already 9PM! I’ve been at my desk working for 12 hours!) the plan is to settle in with some takeout and a bit of television Yay new Torchwood!

Filed under: events, food, san francisco

Ubuntu earrings – now in silver!

Thursday, Aug 4th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Back in June I wrote: Buy Ubuntu earrings and help schools using Ubuntu!

Since then there have been several requests for a silver color and Maile Urbancic of Boutique Academia responded to those requests!

The silver color Ubuntu earrings are now a reality, they are rhodium plated (rhodium is silver colored, but doesn’t tarnish like silver). You can now get your very own for $18.99, plus shipping and tax, where applicable.

Boutique Academia Ubuntu Earrings

As I mentioned in my first post about this, $6 per pair will go directly to the operating costs of the non-profit Partimus.org which puts Ubuntu-based systems in the hands of school children through projects and computer labs in schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Partimus is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit in the United States, details for how to donate directly can be found here. Please request a donation receipt if you need it for a tax exemption. Be sure to visit Partimus.org or contact me directly at lyz@partimus.org for more details about the work we do.

Filed under: partimus, tech, ubuntu planet

Fosscon video now available

Tuesday, Aug 2nd, 2011 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

For Fosscon on July 23rd Gene Riordan, my co-worker over at LinuxForce, brought along his camera and took a somewhat impromptu video of my keynote! In spite of the city noise and fans you can actually hear me and it turned out ok.

You can’t see my slides, but they’re available here and you can probably follow along:

Getting involved with FOSS – Fosscon 2011

Thanks again to everyone who braved the heat to be there, I met some really awesome people while I was there and it was great to see old friends.

Filed under: events, philadelphia, tech

Sea lions, SF Zoo March of the Penguins and Internets

Sunday, Jul 31st, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Friday evening I wrapped up work and needed some fresh air so I hopped on a street car (#1893) and headed down to visit the sea lions at Pier 39. On my way I was browsing Twitter and saw an article from The Marine Mammal Center: Rescue Efforts for Two Sea Lions Entangled in Ocean Trash Continue. It turns out I had snapped a photo of one of these sea lions when I was there a couple weeks ago (here, little guy on the right). Poor critters, I hope they get the help they need to get untangled.

The sea lions were as awesome as always and proved the perfect after work adventure. I took a street car (#1060) home too… well, most of the way home, it got stuck on Market behind Critical Mass. Ah San Francisco.

Saturday morning we woke up ridiculously early to head out to the San Francisco Zoo for their annual “March of the Penguins” where, having graduated “Fish School,” the new baby (born in May) penguins for the year waddle their way through adoring fans (and the press!) to finally join the rest of the penguin colony. I wanted to go last year but the timing didn’t work out, I was quite excited about the opportunity to go this year!

It was the awesomest thing ever. Chalk lines were drawn around the penguin island giving the penguins about 10 feet of space to waddle through, giving all of us an amazing view of the young penguins as they walked past.

They were so cute! I love penguins!

MJ took a video:

Later in the day I also got to see the five of them swimming on the far end of the pool together.

We took the opportunity while at the zoo to visit the rest of the zoo for a couple hours, and while standing near the monkeys there was an awesome view of the giraffes and the ocean behind them.

More photos from the zoo visit are up on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627322937500/

After the zoo we did some shopping and on the way home MJ suggested we take a route that would bring us up to the top of Twin Peaks. Neither of us had been all the way up there before, the view of the city was truly stunning.

Yesterday evening was spent reorganizing our network. Several weeks back we had a pretty severe Comcast outage which greatly impacted my ability to work for over a day and we decided then that we had to get a second Internet connection. We went with Webpass, which offers a 100Mbps connection to buildings which support it, of which ours is one. The 100Mbps is shared among subscribers but has still proven to be quite fast. Unfortunately due to wiring in our condo setting us up as multihomed proved to be more difficult than originally anticipated. To get around the problem MJ did some research into both Ethernet over coax and power – and we went with using both. He installed a Netgear MoCA Coax-Ethernet Adapter Kit and a Netgear Powerline Adapter Kit. The MoCA is certainly slower than native Ethernet speeds would be, but it’s still far more bandwidth than our TV will ever use so it’s a great solution. The powerline kit under performs the MoCA, but we’re running it on the same circuit so given the available Webpass speeds it’s more than sufficient. Next we need to work on the power situation in the office so we can get all our devices put where they belong and then get MJ’s servers installed and up and running.

Today is full of project work, laundry and other tidying up. Weekends should be longer.

Filed under: animals, computers, life, san francisco

Fosscon 2011

Tuesday, Jul 26th, 2011 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Before the sun came up on Friday the 22nd MJ and I were at the San Francisco airport waiting for the 6:15AM flight that would put us on the ground in Philadelphia shortly after 2:30PM that afternoon.

Upon landing we stepped off the plane and were greeted by a wall of heat. As soon as my phone had its head together I checked the weather.

Ouch. It was even hotter once we got into downtown Philadelphia, 104 with a heat index of 120.

From Suburban station in downtown Philadelphia we dragged our bags through the heat and up to Le Meridien, located near Love Park and City Hall. Thankfully the room had the AC turned up and we spent the next 3 hours basking in the air conditioning and attempting a marginal recovery from the lack of sleep the night before. Around 7:30PM we caught the subway over to BaseKamp to meet up with Fosscon conference organizers Jon and Crissi. BaseKamp was hot. I knew the venue lacked air conditioning but that evening we really got a taste of what that would mean for the conference the next day! It’s a good thing I can tolerate heat better than I could when I was younger. We closed up the space for the night and headed out to dinner at Jones Restaurant just across the street.

Saturday morning we woke up bright and early for the conference and arrived at BaseKamp at 9AM. That gave us an hour before my keynote to grab some breakfast there at the conference (pastries and bagels graciously provided by the super bread man Jim Fisher!) and say hello to a bunch of my friends from Philly who came out to the conference. It was an awesome start to the day.

Except for the heat.

It was hot.

It was really, really, seriously, wicked hot.

But the rooms had fans and there was lots of water so we managed. The conference organizers did their best to keep things moving smoothly through the unfortunate timing of this heat wave and to make sure the attendees were doing ok, moving around fans as needed and running out for several gallons of fresh water when the supply started getting low.

My keynote, “Make a Difference for Millions: Getting Involved with FOSS” began shortly after 10AM. In spite of the heat I was able to deliver my talk and the audience laughed when they were supposed to laugh and I had a pile of really great questions to answer at the end (didn’t have time to answer all of them!).

Keynote Photo 2

Keynote Photo 3

EDIT: Slides available for download (PDF) here and on slideshare.

Huge thanks to anyone reading this who was in the audience, it was an awesome experience for me and you all were troopers in the heat! After the talk I got to meet and talk to some really interesting people including a couple of folks from Coders 4 Africa and a fellow who wanted to hear some of the benefits of releasing software as free and open source rather than as closed-source shareware.

The conference had a few local sponsors, including the company I work for, LinuxForce and my favorite VPS hosting company Linode (I finally got a t-shirt! And stickers!). Also a huge thanks to O’Reilly, Jon asked me less than 2 weeks prior to the conference whether I could think of anyone else to help sponsor the conference and Marsee Henon of the User Group program really came through on short notice with books and B1G1 ebook vouchers for attendees.

I attended Chris Nehren’s talk on Perl next, and then it was off to lunch. MJ and I ended up at Cosi with Mackenzie Morgan, Walt Mankowski, Deb Nicholson and Mo Morsi.

After lunch it was off to Mark Jason Dominus‘ “Join my army of git zombies!” talk (details and slides here). I’ve used git on a couple of projects but admittedly never bothered to look at the internals at all and understand how the IDs work so it was interesting learning about that, and as always he’s a great speaker.

From there it was upstairs to Mackenzie Morgan’s “Ubuntu Development Processes” talk. I’m pretty familiar with the process, so most interesting to me were the plans for the future, including the proposed archive reorg and attempt to push for adoption of handling the archive via bzr.

I then attended Walt Mankowski’s “Become a Perl one-liner ninja!” talk. I have actually seen this talk a couple of times over the years as he’s given it at PLUG a few times. It was a good one to see again though, gave me a nice refresher of some of the cool Perl command line flags I’d forgotten.

The final talk of the day I attended was the “Introduction to the Parrot Virtual Machine and Parrot Project” by James Keenan. I didn’t have anything but a vague idea of what parrot was when I walked in so the introduction was nice, even if I don’t have a place for it in my work.

Around 5PM the conference wrapped up with a final raffle and some closing statements by conference organizer Jonathan Simpson. It was a testament to their dedication that after all the planning and exhaustion from setup and running the conference in the extreme heat that Jon and Crissi were still joking and laughing at the closing.

For dinner several of us walked down to Olde City, passing Independence Hall and this great sign, a testament to the heat.

After a couple of false starts (one restaurant with power outage, another with insufficient air conditioning) we ended up at Revolution House at 2nd and Market and enjoyed highly effective air conditioning and a really nice meal.

Sunday we checked out of our hotel around noon and met up with our friend Nita for lunch at Devil’s Alley Bar and Grill. The three of us then spent the rest of the day at The Franklin Institute, seeing Cars 2 in the Franklin Theater and then spending an hour in their new Mummies of the World exhibit, which like past exhibits I’ve been to at TFI was really great.

Around 6PM we headed toward the airport, making a quick stop at Rita’s for some waterice goodness before our departure.

More photos from the conference and the trip are available over on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627281235442/

Short trip to Philly, but a fun one! We’re hoping to visit again in the fall, but we’ll see how our schedules work out.

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

UCW: Working With Other Groups In Your Community

Friday, Jul 22nd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Wednesday for Ubuntu Community Week, a week long series of sessions in IRC (Internet Relay Chat), I did a presentation titled “Working With Other Groups In Your Community” where I explored some of the projects that LoCo (Local Community) teams I’m involved with have worked on over the years.

I was inspired to do this talk primarily because I frequently encounter folks who are afraid to do LoCo events in their area because they don’t want to be seen as competing or replacing some long-established Linux User Group (LUG) in their area. I wanted to highlight the fact that LoCos and LUGs can easily co-exist and that LoCos can help the existing LUGs in a lot of ways.

I highlighted just some ways LoCos I’ve worked with have helped LUGs I was a part of:

  • You can providing presenters specializing in Ubuntu-related topics for meetings and events
  • Your LoCo team may bring new members into the LUG: a lot of newcomers to Linux find Ubuntu LoCos before they even know what LUGs are
  • You may be providing a supply of Ubuntu CDs to their attendees (whether they be burned or pressed ones that approved teams get)
  • Often times you can offer their members a more diverse set of planned events to attend beyond the standard LUG meetings, many LUGs in my area ask me to cross post our Ubuntu events to their mailing lists!

But there are groups beyond LUGs, so I talked about getting involved with other tech groups, hackerspaces, computer recycling programs, adult learning centers, universities and public school programs. Larry Cafiero mentioned the Farmer’s Markets that FeltonLUG has a table at and that gave me the perfect opportunity to mention Charlene Tessier’s presentation earlier in the week, Marketing Ubuntu at Your Local Farmer’s Market and to mention other local festivals that LoCo teams I’m familiar with have been involved with.

Full logs from my presentation can be found here: http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/07/20/%23ubuntu-classroom.html#t19:00

I answered a few questions during the presentation but if you were unable to attend and have questions about anything I covered I’d be happy to answer them here in comments or via email (you can reach me at lyz@ubuntu.com).

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Projects and Aquarium of the Bay

Monday, Jul 18th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Have I mentioned lately how nice it is to have a proper task manager? I didn’t realize how much I’d value my history of completed items or how much time I’d save until now. It’s really transforming how I allocate my time and I’m able to do a much better job of figuring out how much actual time I use to complete things and how much time I have for new tasks since my brain is so bad at tracking these things realistically (I can’t actually work 8 hours at my full time job and spend 4+ hours on volunteer project work every day, my brain gets tired!).

A lot of free time last week was spent with MJ and I getting our engagement photos sorted and the mjandlyz.com site launched so we could send photos to friends and family. I got the basics up and found Highslide JS which we are using for the gallery, it worked out pretty well and MJ tossed in some javascript code of his own while configuring it. The process took a while (it felt like years, I was so excited to share all the pictures!) but it was fun working on a project together and I’m really happy with the final result.

Been doing a lot of Ubuntu stuff lately, as usual. For Ubuntu Classroom and Ubuntu Women I’ve been inundated with tasks as a bunch of stuff decided to happen at once. DarkMyst.org recently changed changed the IRCd and Services package over to one that’s much better security-wise and has active development, so I’ve also spent a bunch of time helping with updating documentation and responding to support requests (and there is still more to do!). MJ spent much of this past weekend working through some of our home network and television configuration things, including the task of planning how to integrate our new WebPass internet connection into our network given the spacing of the outlets and plans to get the TV wire and peripherals configuration completed. We also headed out to Berkeley for BerkeleyLUG on Sunday the 10th and I think we found the last bit of free-standing shelving that we want in the office. There is a lot of home stuff to do still, but we’re making progress and that feels good.

This past Saturday we met up with one of MJ’s friends he knew back in Pennsylvania who was in town for an event. We met up with her and her boyfriend at Pier 39, it was a nice lunch and gave me an awesome opportunity to add to my SF street and cable cars set on Flickr and visit the sea lions!

We also took the opportunity to finally visit the Aquarium of the Bay there at Pier 39. I was slightly worried that it would be a bit of a tourist trap (since so much down near Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf is!) but it actually ended up being quite a nice little aquarium and with my San Francisco Zoo Family membership we were able to get in for half the regular price.

The Aquarium focuses on species native to the San Francisco Bay and they’re involved with a number of conservation and rescue organizations in the bay area (including The Marine Mammal Center!). Downstairs is their main exhibit, two huge tanks that you walk through in a tube to see all kinds of local fish and sharks.


MJ looking up at the sardine vortex

More photos from Saturday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627217058044/

It’s probably one of my favorite attractions down there now, I’ll be renewing my zoo membership this year so I’ll have to be sure to visit again.

This week… I’ve got some major work projects I’m pushing forward on and I’m preparing for my Fosscon keynote in Philadelphia on Saturday and sorting visiting friends plans for the rest of the weekend. Over the weekend we got a VGA cable hooked up to the TV so I can rehearse my talk on a big screen, woohoo! Making rehearsing fun makes all the difference.

Filed under: animals, life, san francisco

My Media Consumption in 2011

Sunday, Jul 17th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

In the past year I’ve significantly changed how I handle the media I consume in my life.

Reading

Hello changes! I’ve made more changes with what and how I read than any other media.

Online content

I’ve started using my RSS reader to its full potential, beyond just individual blogs and news sites, I now subscribe to multiple tech planets, livejournal (rather than using the /friends page) and other content including comics (xkcd, sinfest, Garfield), podcasts and flickr photo feed. I spend more time reading feeds these days but the benefit of being that much more in touch with various aspects of things I’m involved with (friends, open source, local content) has made the investment of time worth it and I have whole folders I can just “mark as read” if I don’t have the time. If it’s an online publication and not in my RSS reader, I’m probably not reading it.

Beyond RSS I’m obviously reading all kinds of other stuff all day, from social media to traditional emails. On the social media end I’m currently using Seesmic’s web interface to watch Twitter and Facebook updates, but I don’t read everything, selecting just a few close friends to follow diligently. It would be nice if Google+ had an API instead of having to watch the feeds in a browser or Android app, so for now I keep it up in a browser tab and glance at it when I have the time and inclination. Email is a challenge, I read everything that comes into my Inbox almost immediately and messages from a select number of mailing lists, but the vast majority are included in a once a week (or more likely, twice a month) browse through to review interesting things and then ignoring the rest. This is actually working out pretty well, and the regular clean out of the less important lists means I’m at least giving myself the opportunity to be exposed to the information even if I don’t have time to always take advantage of it.

Books

This year I left behind paper books. I love paper books and for a long time I rationalized having so many because I’d re-read them, loan them to friends and that I simply liked the feel of paper books. It turns out that I don’t read books for fun as much as I used to so the thought of spending time re-reading most books seems silly now. Loaning books, how often did I really do that? Not often. Feel of the book? It’s a nice luxury but it’s just that. The arguments against paper books kept piling up, particularly as I started traveling more. How many books should I bring for this trip and how much weight and space do they take up? What if my luggage gets wet? Where will I put all these books in our 800 sq ft condo? I bought a Nook in January and haven’t looked back at paper books except for technical reference (generally I still find sitting a physical book on my desk and being able to flip through it much better for my workflow than navigating a PDF or ebook). I have to admit I do mourn my massive wall of books that are now downstairs in storage, but it’s simply not practical anymore.

Magazines

I now subscribe to more magazines. Wait, what? With all this technology what am I doing with a larger pile of magazines? I never had much of an opinion about magazines until I moved most of my life to digital and realized that there are lots of things to love about magazines. Articles are relatively short, they are highly portable, cheap and don’t require power (stolen or lost while on sketchy subway? No big deal), they are disposable and date sensitive (damaged on the beach? No big deal). I subscribed to 2 more magazines this year (National Geographic and Bay Nature), bringing my subscription total to 5 (Linux Journal, Communications of the ACM, Discover) and I regularly buy individual issues while traveling.

Watching

When I moved here we didn’t have a TV, everything we watched was through our computers. We bought a television last summer and it shipped with Netflix and Hulu support. Now since we can always just hook up a computer to it and feed it whatever we want, apps weren’t much of a consideration when buying the television, but we now almost exclusively these apps for our television watching needs and all we use a computer for is for MediaTomb to serve music and movies via UPnP over the network.

With the launch of Android apps for Netflix and Hulu for my Nexus One I can now watch on the go or from the comfort of my bed. Pretty cool.

Listening

This is actually the one place where there haven’t been any changes. There are now several services which you take advantage of varying degrees of “have access to your own stuff and listen from anywhere” but I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon. I still just use my little mp3 player and load up podcasts and mood-reflecting music. This is partially due to the circumstances under which I listen to portable music are largely offline: at the gym (no signal in there), on the subway, on planes.

It would be interesting to hear how others handle their media these days, I’m sure I could make improvements.

Filed under: reflection
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