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Custom stickers!

Sunday, Jul 17th, 2011 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I love stickers. My sticker books made out of construction paper from childhood have been lost to time and moves, but I still have my giant Lisa Frank sticker holder.

It took me a long time to put a sticker on a laptop, but it finally happened with my beloved pink mini9 when my abuse of the poor netbook caused very visible scratches to form.

So, why the sticker story? Custom stickers!

Of course I knew services providing custom stickers existed, but it never really thought much about making my own until I snagged a LivingSocial deal for Vistaprint last month. Upon reviewing their offerings I was impressed by their little round stickers (“Small Sticker – Circle” in their catalog), so I ordered 5 sheets of them with the Ubuntu Women circle logo and paid a $.99 per sheet extra for the “Glossy Sticker Stock” which I figured would hold up better on laptops.

I received my first shipment on June 28th!

I immediately shipped out a sheet of stickers to Valorie Zimmerman and one to Cheri Francis for upcoming conferences they are attending. The quality of the stickers is pretty good, but I don’t know how it’ll hold up on laptops, the gloss isn’t quite what I’ve seen on the more durable stickers. Time will tell! I’ve had one on my netbook since I received them and it has been doing alright so far.

Since I was happy with the order and they had offers for some free goodies, I went ahead and ordered 3 more sheets of stickers.

And also ordered 500 business cards, 100 post cards and 25 magnets, which were all “free” in my order – just paid the fee to upload a custom image ($5 – and the image could be reused across products, so business cards and post cards had the same image). The cards will be super useful but I have to admit that the simplicity of the written logo on the magnet has really captured my enthusiasm. In all it ended up being quite a good deal, so I highly recommend taking advantage of these deals from Vistaprint when they come up.

This whole blog post is not actually a Vistaprint love fest, they aren’t the only sticker game in town! I ordered business cards from MOO several months back and received an email from them advertising a discount on stickers. So, what other project am I involved with that could use some inexpensive publicity? Partimus! So for about $10 shipped I ordered a little book of 90 stickers.

The options for stickers are certainly limited with MOO (no small round ones, for instance) and the price is a bit steep when compared to a place like Vistaprint, but the quality is top notch. I have no worries about how well these stickers will hold up. I was able to meet up with fellow Partimus volunteer Grant this week and give him a pile of them to sticker up the town with.

Filed under: tech, Uncategorized

Engagement weekend

Thursday, Jul 14th, 2011 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

As I mentioned in my last post, we spent the weekend at The Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa.

We began our weekend Saturday morning with a shared room service order of crab eggs Benedict and a plate of smoked salmon with cream cheese and a bagel – yum! From there it was down to the on site Willow Stream Spa.

MJ booked a 90 minute couples massage for late in the afternoon, so we spent the first half of our afternoon by the pool. I hadn’t had a massage in years and this was the first done for pure relaxation. Heaven! From there we enjoyed the self-guided Bathing Ritual in their bathhouse which features exfoliating showers, two hot mineral water soaking pools, herbal steam room, dry sauna, and cool down showers. By the end of all this I was ready to take a relaxation-induced nap.

For dinner on Saturday we stayed on site to have dinner at Santé Restaurant where they had the most amazing “Grown-up Macaroni and Cheese” featuring Maine lobster, black truffles and Fontina Val d’Aosta cheese. We both went with the halibut for our entree and for dessert we had one of each of their souffles, I had the blueberry which I thought would be too large but I ended up eating pretty quickly and MJ had the dark chocolate. The dinner wrapped up with further bite-size desserts which they arranged on a plate saying “Congratulations” on account of our engagement.

Sunday MJ let me make the plans. Fortunately one of the things he did on Friday before the proposal was leave his car in Sonoma after setting up the hotel room, so he the limo to the city to pick me up. We had the car all weekend! We had been to the concierge desk the night before to ask about things to do aside from tasting and he mentioned Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve. When we went back to our room I did a bit of research and decided we’d head up there, the weather was hot (in the 90s all day) but the trails promised to be easy and show us some amazing trees. The park did not disappoint!

From there we took another recommendation from the concierge and headed up to Healdsburg which they told us was popular for shopping and dining. We ended up at Bear Republic Brewing because even when we’re in wine country, I am a beer girl.

On our way up to the redwoods we had seen a sign for a The Petrified Forest and followed up with some quick searches on our phones. The place had all the trappings of a tourist trap, but once you got past the ticket counter and huge store that was out front, the trail and petrified trees were pretty cool.

By the end of the day we were tired, but our late lunch caused us not to be hungry until after 9PM. After 9PM in Sonoma causes dining options to be quite limited and we ended up at Santé again, which I’m not complaining about! Instead of dessert there we picked up a s’mores kit (which I had noticed the day before in the room service menu while ordering breakfast) from the hotel bar and headed to a fire pit at the hotel to enjoy some 11PM snacks outside. Perfect way to wrap up the evening.

Monday was the 4th of July. Fortunately, in spite of the holiday, it’s a big tourist weekend in Sonoma so most of the various wineries and shops are still open. We checked out of the hotel and headed out for some tastings.

It was another hot day and we made the decision to only do one wine tasting, and that was at Imagery Estate Winery, the sister winery to the one we got engaged at, and which features the mini Parthenon where we got engaged on all their wine labels. The staff was super friendly and we walked out with a bottle of Aleatico Rosé and Code Blue.

We spent the rest of the day visiting tastings of other sorts, including B.R. Cohn where we bought olive oil, some mustards and a chocolate syrup liquor sauce (for ice cream!). We picked up some cheeses in downtown Sonoma where they were having a big 4th of July festival and also picked up some chocolates and fudge. We also stopped at Jacuzzi Family Winery where we tasted some more of The Olive Press olive oils and picked up a bottle of garlic rosemary olive oil.

We headed home after Jacuzzi and were welcomed by the cool air of San Francisco. On the way we picked up some dinner and instead of going out for fireworks we headed up to the roof to see the highest fireworks from several fireworks shows around the city.

Filed under: life, travel

Our engagement

Thursday, Jul 14th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Our second anniversary was July 3, 2011 and MJ told me we’d be going on a trip but didn’t tell me any of the details aside from “we won’t be going on a plane” so I could pack accordingly.

On the evening of Friday, July 1st, MJ came home early and we dressed up for a nice dinner out. We left the condo around 4:30 for my first surprise — we weren’t going down to the garage where the car is usually parked, we were headed out front where a stretch limousine was waiting to whisk us away!

Our destination was still a mystery as we headed north out of the city. We watched a couple shows he had queued up on his laptop as I frequently glanced out the window to guess at a destination. Presently we passed Jack London State Historic Park and toward the entrance to Benziger Family Winery.

We had been to Benziger just over 3 years earlier on a Sonoma Valley wine tour when MJ and I had our first romantic weekend together in San Francisco. It is a beautiful winery and their wine cave is exquisite, absolutely one of the highlights of that day. A visit there was a wonderful way to celebrate our anniversary! And it was a beautiful evening for a private tour.

We were greeted by Felicia, an event coordinator for the winery, and she gave us a tour of their biodynamic garden trail and told us about the history of the winery. A jackrabbit joined us for a few minutes on our tour, but unfortunately I had left my camera in the limo. We were treated to some delicious hors d’oeuvres as the tour continued. From there we met Linda who took us on a ride up to the vineyard where their mini Parthenon stands and we had a stunning view of the estate. Our tour guide excused herself for a few minutes to make some calls and left us to enjoy the view.

Now at this point you may be thinking that I had some idea what was coming. I didn’t. The first trip we took to Sonoma was chauffeured so while a limo ride was exceptional, it wasn’t completely unheard of for a romantic get-away for us. It wasn’t until MJ offered to take my wine glass to put it down that I realized something was up and within moments he had the beautiful engagement ring out! I was so excited that I nearly cried as I answered his proposal with a “yes!”

Wow!

It was then that I saw a photographer who had been in the vineyard above us and was taking pictures! The photographer, Melissa, quickly offered congratulations and we spent the next 45 minutes or so walking through the vineyard having photos taken.

Toward the end of our outdoor walk we were greeted by another employee of the winery who gave us a bottle of their Signaterra Benziger Three Blocks 2007 (a Bordeaux Blend) and offered more congratulations.

The tour led us into the familiar wine caves that we’d been in 3 years before, which were a wonderful respite from the warm weather outside in the vineyards. At the beginning of this walk through the caves I was under the impression that we’d be having dinner elsewhere.

Our walk through the wine caves ended in a long corridor dining area which I’d never seen before. We had some more photos taken and were finally led to a little table set for two. MJ had rented out the whole winery for the evening and we’d be having dinner there right in the cave!

The dinner was catered by the girl + the fig and had the following:

* FIRST COURSE *

Mache Salad
Shaved Asparagus, Goat Cheese Crostini
Roasted Beet Vinaigrette

2009 Signaterra West Rows Chardonnay

* MAIN COURSE *

Seared Scallop
Leek & Fennel Ravioli
Saffron Lobster Cream
Crispy Leek, Tarragon

2008 Signaterra San Remo Pinot Noir

* DESSERT *

Vanilla Cheesecake
Macerated Strawberries
Strawberry Coulis
Whipped Crème Fraiche

Benziger Family Winery Muscat Canelli

(See scan of menu here)

The venue was perfect, our server, Gaia, did an amazing job throughout the evening, the food was exquisite and Linda made sure we had our fill of the choice selection of their amazing wines.

It was around 9:30 when we finished dinner and met up with the limo to take us home as I was led to believe that the “trip” was a ruse, but after a short ride we arrived at The Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa. We weren’t going directly home after all! MJ had booked us a long weekend stay at the Inn.

Not only that, but earlier in the day when I thought he was going to work, he had actually driven up to Sonoma to get the hotel room ready, complete with rose petals! The room smelled and looked beautiful when we arrived.



Photo by Lyz, CC BY-SA

What a night!

The professional photos taken can be viewed here:

http://www.mjandlyz.com/engagement.shtml#gallery

And yes, “mjandlyz.com” is a new domain, like good geeks we registered it when we got home from our engagement weekend ;)

Unless otherwise specified, all photos in this entry © Melissa Morelli Photography, used under license

Filed under: events, family, life

Fosscon is approaching!

Monday, Jul 11th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Fosscon on July 23rd in downtown Philadelphia is quickly approaching!

Fosscon

I mentioned back in May that I’d be flying out to Philly to do the keynote for Fosscon and now the speaker line-up also includes:

Deb Nicholson – Community Organizing for Free Software Activists
Mark Jason Dominus – Join my army of git zombies
Walt Mankowski – Become a Perl one-liner ninja!

And more!

Plus there will be a series of lightning talks at the end of the day and they’re planning a special session about FOSS in the Philadelphia area.

Check out the full schedule coming together at fosscon.org/speakers

For registration details (free and paid options!) see fosscon.org/attend

Hope to see you there!

Filed under: events, philadelphia, tech, ubuntu planet

Can you write article summaries for Ubuntu Weekly News?

Sunday, Jul 10th, 2011 by pleia2 | 5 Comments

Now that Ubuntu Weekly News is getting back on track we’ve identified some needs volunteer-wise.

Back in January I posted Looking for a quick way to help Ubuntu Weekly News? Where I expressed our need to collect news and non-planet.ubuntu.com blog links about Ubuntu from the past week. We still need these, so thanks for those who have been helping!

We also need article summary writers. We have a few loyal volunteers who put in effort every weekend to handle this but it would be great to have more volunteers to take the stress off of them.

Interested? Here’s how it works.

  • Volunteers throughout the week collect links and add them to our etherpad or google doc (link on UWN wiki).
  • On Saturday and Sunday we ask our volunteers in #ubuntu-news to begin writing summaries in the Google doc (we have tried other collaborative tools, but this has been the most reliable internationally).

Some folks have expressed concern about having to join #ubuntu-news all weekend to help out, so instead of requiring summary writers to be in channel I’m collecting a list of email addresses of folks the acting editor can email on weekends when we really need more summary writers.

Want to be on this list? Send me an email at lyz@ubuntu.com with your address and we’ll add you to the list! Have general questions about other ways you can help Ubuntu Weekly News? Let me know!

This list of email addresses will not be shared in public, but it will be shared among admins of the project who trade off release and publishing coordination each week. You can email me at any time to be removed from the reminder list.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Engaged!

Tuesday, Jul 5th, 2011 by pleia2 | 9 Comments

On Friday evening MJ proposed and I said yes!

I was completely surprised up until the moment he asked. The whole proposal was quite an amazing undertaking, complete with a limo, a professional photographer, a winery rented out for the evening and private catering for our dinner in a wine cave. The evening ended with another surprise: a long, luxurious weekend stay at The Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa.

Once we have the copyright released photos from the photographer I’ll write a more complete post about the whole beautiful evening. The ring also deserves its own post, MJ picked out the diamonds and had it custom made, and yes, those are three pink diamonds.

Filed under: events, life, pink, travel

LoCo Directory: Now with default team time zones!

Thursday, Jun 30th, 2011 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

While we were all at UDS in Budapest last month there was a great session about the LoCo Directory. Toward the end of the session I piped up to ask about time zones.

Time zones have always been a tricky problem for the directory, since some teams cover multiple time zones the first solution to this problem was to set a time zone per venue the team created. This worked well until when they added the Meetings functionality there was no “venue” to speak of so no time zone could be set. This meant that all “Meeting” events showed up in UTC time, which for a team like mine in California meant that not only would it not be our local time, our 7PM meetings would appear to be happening on the next day if you didn’t look carefully to notice that it was UTC. This made them very difficult for us to use, so we never did.

To solve this the team ended up creating a “Default Timezone” section to the administrative interface for the team.

Now when you create a Meeting it will default to “Team Default” but you’re also able to select any time zone. Awesome! Huge thanks to Michael Hall (mhall119) for making this a reality!

Now I may have headlined with time zones, but that’s not the only big change with the 0.3.4 release of the LoCo Directory.

When you’re logged in there is now have a “My Teams” link at the top of the directory that you can click on to quickly access upcoming events and meetings, pictures and links for your team.

Thanks to Ronnie for making this happen!

The next great change is courtesy of Chris Johnston (cjohnston). Having an event on IRC that isn’t a meeting? You can now select an “Event Channel” as a location for a virtual event that takes place in your IRC channel.

Thanks Chris!

Finally we have a contribution from Martin Owens (doctormo) which puts all venues you have used in the past at the top of list of venues to select so you don’t need to scroll through dozens of venues from all over the world to find that same venue you used for a release party last year.

Thanks Martin!

The LoCo Directory has to be one of my favorite web projects the community is working on right now, they’re a friendly team who are responsive to bug reports and always willing to help new contributors to get started.

So have questions? Comments? Bugs? Want to help out?

Check out the project launchpad page here: https://launchpad.net/loco-directory

Review status of and submit bugs here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/loco-directory

Talk to them on the Community-Web-Projects mailing list here: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/community-web-projects

Or drop by #ubuntu-website on chat.freenode.net to chat to them on IRC.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Blind pinnipeds, conservation and other things

Tuesday, Jun 28th, 2011 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

I had a very productive, if mellow, week last week. Inspired by setting up my new desk, Tuesday evening I hopped on Caltrain and met MJ for a trip to Ikea to look at some office furniture. We didn’t find anything particularly inspiring but it did help us refine our search some and we ended up ordering a bookcase system that we’ll be able to put the computers on. Wednesday evening I headed out to Noisebridge for their Linux night where I had a great chat with some of the attendees and meet up with another Partimus board member to get a signature for some banking documents.

On Saturday we got up bright and early to drop off Caligula at the vet for his abdominal ultrasound to try to track down the source of his mild hyperglobulinemia. While he was at the vet we headed across the bay to Emeryville to visit West Elm and EQ3 for more furniture browsing. We didn’t come home with anything but have some pretty good plans now. We picked up Caligula a little after 4PM. The good news is that they didn’t find anything that would be causing the high protein levels, no tumors or blockages, all his organs look good! We got a referral to a specialist at a nearby hospital if we want to look further for the cause. The vet seemed to imply that the major, common causes of this symptom have been ruled out so it’s up to us whether we want to put him through more vet visits and tests or if we just want to bring him back in a few months to see if the levels have dropped on their own.

Sunday was the San Francisco Pride parade which I caught about a half hour of around 10:30AM. It’s always quite the event for the city but I’ve had other plans during the weekend two years in a row! Perhaps next year I’ll make better plans to enjoy more of the awesome festivities.

After that I hopped on MUNI to meet up with Jessica Ledbetter and James Tatum at the Beach Chalet for brunch. From there we all headed over to the San Francisco Zoo!

In spite of going to the zoo pretty often, the frequent changes (special exhibits! new exhibits! baby animals!) make going every other month a treat. This visit did not disappoint.

One of my favorite animals at the zoo (of which there are many) is Orkney, the 42 year old grey seal that has been living at the zoo since 1970 when he was just a year old. He’s “mostly blind” and was my first blind pinniped of the day – and it was the first time I’d ever seen him outside of his pool!

I also swung by to see the baby anteater, who has grown to be quite large but still rides around on the back of its mother. For once I got to see them outside!

It was then over to the obligatory 3:30 penguin feeding (feeding video, waddling video). Then it was over to the zoo’s newest exhibit for Henry and Silent Knight! These were my second and third blind pinnipeds of the day. Henry is a 2 year old sea lion who was found starving on a beach, they don’t believe he was born blind but don’t know the cause (Henry’s rescue story sign) and Silent Knight is an adult sea lion who was rescued after a gunshot wound to the head which left him permanently blind (Silent Knight’s rescue story sign). I’ve been tracking the story of these two guys since MJ sent me a link about Silent Knight several months back when he was recovering at The Marine Mammal Center, and I was really excited to learn that they’d have a permanent home at my favorite zoo! I was very happy to finally see them, lounging in the sun in their new home. Did I mention the sun? It was a gorgeous day, a bit too nice – I ended up with a sunburn on my face, oops!

We also visited their new Tarantulas: Alive and Up Close exhibit which will be open through Labor Day. They had over a dozen tarantulas on display, very cool.

More zoo photos from Sunday in a flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157626939167459/

Yesterday evening I took the opportunity of tickets from my boss to attend a Long Now seminar on Conservation in the Real World by Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy. It’s pretty obvious that I love animals and nature, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve grown increasingly unimpressed with the more extreme environmentalists for their severe lack of compassion to their fellow humans. Kareiva’s talk really spoke to this concern, and expanded upon how we can preserve and protect nature while making reasonable concessions for the human element. The Nature Conservancy now has programs where they work with corporations to make an positive environmental difference, works with agriculturists to satisfy the food needs of a growing population while managing the environmental impact (People and Conservation details here) and now hosts programs where urban youth, largely minorities, are exposed to a work program where they are exposed to nature and help with projects across the country (details about the LEAF program here). The Nature Conservancy rocks. A summary of the talk by host Stewart Brand here.

On my walk home I took pictures of cable and street cars and was reminded by the whole evening how much I love San Francisco.

Finally, I finished reading Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun recently, as one of my several books I bought as epub/pdf from O’Reilly but never read until I had my Nook. One of the things he mentions in it is to get some kind of presentation remote. I’d never really thought much about this, perfectly happy to hide behind the lectern during my talks, but his reasons were good ones (no fiddling with keyboards and mice/accidentally hitting the wrong button, and roaming during a talk can be good if you don’t have to run back to your computer every time you want to change a slide). I asked on Twitter for a good remote that works with Ubuntu took the advice of Rick H of Lococast who said he had a Keyspan by Tripp Lite PR-EZ1 Easy Presenter Presentation Remote Wireless w/ Laser and loves it. I bought it that day and it arrived last week, I finally got around to testing it the other day. The result? I love it too. All I did was plug it in to the USB port of my mini9 and every button worked flawlessly out of the box. I am very pleased. Looking forward to practicing my Fosscon keynote with it!

The rest of my week is shaping up to be another project-full one, which is great because my todo list remains long and I need the time to catch up. MJ and I are celebrating our second anniversary this weekend by running off to an undisclosed location through Monday. Well, it’s undisclosed to me, he knows where we are going, all I know is that we’re not taking a plane to get there. Hooray for surprise romantic weekend getaways! I’m so excited!

Filed under: animals, life

Since Edmonton

Monday, Jun 20th, 2011 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

Aside from big things I’ve written about these past three weeks, I’ve been pretty occupied otherwise too. Upon leaving Edmonton on the night of Memorial day I thought I was suffering from allergies, but the following days proved that I had a pretty miserable cold which lasted through the week and rendered me relatively unproductive. The following Tuesday, suffering from the less miserable end of the cold, I woke up with no voice, the first time I’ve been stricken with laryngitis in my life! Wednesday I hosted that Ubuntu Hour and Debian dinner, and I met up with some friends Friday evening but effectively my cold lingered through the weekend. I managed to get out to the dentist for our appointments and we had lunch out at Ferry Building on Saturday (and pick up some goodies for later), but it wasn’t until last week that I was really back to feeling like myself.

Having a cold for a couple weeks meant I wasn’t adventuring quite so much which meant I could chip away at my todo list as I felt up to it and when I didn’t I crashed in a pile of blankets and kitties on the couch and watched TV. This led me to finally watching several episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and now that I’m halfway through the season I’m terribly disappointed that the show never made it past that solitary season.

I did a lot of sysadminy work at home these past few weeks. Not only did I make sure all my remote servers were ready for IPv6, I finally upgraded my primary VPS (a Linode in Dallas) to Debian Squeeze, upgraded the HE.net VPS from MJ to Squeeze and re-installed my Ramhost VPS with Debian (it had been running Ubuntu, but Ramhost has much better support for Debian). I also took the down time to upgrade my desktop, which I’ll now admit to everyone was still running Ubuntu Lucid. For all my meerkat love I was only ever running it on my desktop for about 30 minutes as I was passing through on my upgrade to Natty. I still have a server out there running Maverick, which I’d really rather see on an LTS, but that’s a project for another day (and perhaps another year, bringing it to 12.04 is probably optimal).

The most important of these changes ended up being the re-installation of the Ramhost I use for miscellaneous Ubuntu work and give Ubuntu friends shell accounts on. The re-installation let me move forward on a couple of projects that I’d been waiting on re-installation for since I didn’t want to have to migrate them. The first is the staging site for the new Xubuntu.org, which we’re planning to move to WordPress. Our web developer and designer has been busy these past couple weeks making his flat image file proposed theme into a beautiful WordPress theme. The second project was getting a test MoinMoin wiki install running so I could get the web developers in Ubuntu Women access to a platform where they could help with the bugs I’ve filed against the new theme before we make it live later this cycle for wiki.ubuntu-women.org. The final major project was the Ubuntu Classroom bots that I’ve been running on that server – they are irssi + perl scripts and built with Ubuntu in mind, so the move to Debian and my reluctance to install anything from CPAN for them was a big change. Fortunately it only took about an hour to get a proper list together for everything that is required. We’re also now running them with updated OO Perl code so there are some bugs to work out, but we’re making progress.

Last weekend I was finally able to get the Partimus blog set up and a couple of basic posts pushed out, including one about the Ubuntu earring fundraiser. I also worked with Nathan Handler to get issue 220 of the Ubuntu Weekly News (UWN) out the door. There was a lot of discussion about UWN at the Ubuntu Developer Summit last month, but unfortunately the retiring editor was injured on her way back from the summit and has been largely unavailable. The main take-away from the discussions is that it needs to be easier to create – the first time Nathan and I tackled this back in January it took about 36 man hours to complete, which is insane. The weekend we worked on issue 220 I’d estimate that we got it under 20 but it was still quite a task. So we’re eagerly looking for shortcuts, simplifications and ways to make it easier for people to contribute to tasks that don’t require a major investment of time or commitment level.

We took Caligula to the vet recently for a follow-up visit to get another blood test done. The assumption had been the abnormal protein levels we saw during his blood test back in January were caused by dental disease and they would clear up after the dental cleaning and work was done. Unfortunately this latest blood test proved that assumption to be wrong and we need to take him back this weekend for an abdominal ultrasound to see if they can find anything wrong which may be causing this. Poor guy, I am trying not to worry too much.

So I’ve been busy, but a major helper through all of this is my new favorite task manager: Taskwarrior. Nathan Haines recommended it to me a couple weeks ago, it’s an amazing CLI-based program that I now can’t live without. The interface is pretty straight-forward for simple management with “task add” “task done” but is highly extendable and has options that makes us CLI geeks squee with excitement, it’s very obvious that the authors are also CLI geeks. I have to admit that over the years my attempts to find a software task management have not gone well. I’ve tried all kinds of things from branded task management software to more creative solutions like using a wiki for task tracking. I always came back to inbox + scraps of paper. This simple method works remarkably well as someone who works from home but it left me out in the cold when it came to the ability to easily look back and see what I completed in a week – inbox items were filed into one of my 100+ mail directories and scraps of paper had items crossed out and were thrown away. With Taskwarrior a simple “task completed” gives me a full listing of everything completed. Awesome.

After my cold ended I was able to get back to adventuring! Last week I made plans to go to an Oakland A’s game on Wednesday evening with my friend Mark who got us some awesome seats for the game on Wednesday night.

Elmo threw out a ceremonial first pitch.

And we got to watch the A’s win 2-1!

More photos from the game here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157626852251195/

Eager to finally get some of my outside home todo list items taken care of I met up with the founder of Partimus on Saturday morning to get some banking handled for the organization. It went pretty smoothly, I’m meeting up with the executive director this evening to get his signature on some documents. After the bank I rushed back to SF to drop off a laptop to a visiting Wikimedia employee and then swung by the store to pick up some chips on my way out to the Walnut Creek Geeknic.

As always the geeknic was a lot of fun! Got to spend a lot of time with folks I don’t get nearly enough face time with normally and for an event planned with such little fanfare we had a great turnout (probably over 20) and Mark did a great job making sure all our food was cooked and everyone was doing alright and feeling welcome.

More photos from the geeknic here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157626874010053/

After the geeknic I spent some time reviewing a Python script we use for grabbing the list of updates that we list in each Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. The previous scripts were functional but required manual editing of multiple scripts each month, which felt a bit excessive. Once I had a plan for the behavior I wanted MJ helped me narrow down the proper built in module to use and walked me through the Python way to do the task and a lot of style considerations. I soon joined other PyLadies with a commit to an open source project on Saturday.

Sunday morning I spent some time working to make sure we could get issue 221 of the Ubuntu Weekly News prepped for release by today. Unfortunately the recent Ubuntu wiki upgrade didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked and effectively left me unable to edit the wiki until today. We did preparatory work in Google docs and I snuck in time today during lunch to put the last bit of polish on it before release.

Sunday afternoon I started the massive task of cleaning my office. The office, a den in our condo, is pretty much the last place in our condo to have boxes. As such it has an almost magical tendency to collect dust that resists cleaning, so the only way to clean it is to take everything out and wipe it all down. By the time I had everything out of the office (including all the computers and cable modem powered off and unplugged!) it dawned on me that it would be a good time to put together my new desk and push forward on plans to finish up the space.

Hooray new desk! MJ also found some great shelving that we can put computers on for next to my desk. When I say it that way it’s much less dorky than “I have a computer rack in my office” right? I still need to find some drawers for under my desk, we went out last night to look at some options but nothing we saw sparked our interest. We’ll have another look at the offerings from Ikea and probably do some more browsing online. For now my old desk is sitting behind me piled with boxes and still containing all my desk things in its drawers.

This week I’m mostly staying in to work through some more project work, will probably head out for Linux Discussion night at Noisebridge on Wednesday though.

elizabeth@coruscant:~$ task 2 done
Completed 2 ‘since edmonton post’
Marked 1 task as done

Filed under: computers, life

Here we go! wiki.ubuntu.com upgrade at 23:00 UTC

Thursday, Jun 16th, 2011 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

Over the past few months I’ve written a couple of posts regarding the status of the review and testing process to finally upgrade the contributing and team coordination resource wiki.ubuntu.com.

Today Canonical Sysadmin Brad Marshall sent out this update:

At 16th June 2011, at 2300 UTC for an estimated 1 hour wiki.ubuntu.com will be in read only mode for an upgrade to a later version of Moin. If you see any issues with the wiki after this point, please email rt at ubuntu.com with the details of the problem, including as much info as possible.

So here we go!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet
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