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Ubuntu 11.10 in Philadelphia

Friday, Oct 14th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

My fiancé is a network engineer who frequently has to travel for conferences, and this month I tagged along for a week to visit my old home of Philadelphia.

I decided I would attend a meeting of the Philadelphia area Linux Users Group (PLUG) North chapter on Tuesday evening. When I noticed they didn’t have a speaker a few weeks back I volunteered to give a presentation on Ubuntu 11.10.

I uploaded my slides here: ubuntu-11.10-plug.odp, ubuntu-11.10-plug.pdf

Please excuse the Unity and Gnome3 jabs, I knew all 12 of the people who attended the meeting and it was all very casual, well-taken and lead to great discussion, YMMV :)

Thursday was release day! We planned our schedule for the week so that we had Thursday free from conference stuff and could attend the Ubuntu Pennsylvania Release Party at National Mechanics in downtown Philadelphia, just blocks from our hotel.

I brought along my Ocelot stuffed toy to share in the festivities (and help mark our table as the Ubuntu one!).

We ended up with somewhere around 20 people coming out. I moved to California about a year and a half ago and there were lots of new faces from the last time I’d been to an event. It was also great to catch up with several friends who I hadn’t seen in quite some time.

One of the LoCo members was able to burn a couple CDs, a few netbooks were floating around running Oneiric off of USB sticks and we even had a couple upgrades completed. I got to meet a programmer who was looking for ways to get involved with Ubuntu, had some interesting ideas about making the desktop itself more contributor-friendly and who had already uploaded some things to spreadubuntu.org.

I’ve uploaded a few more photos from the event here:

http://gallery.ubuntupennsylvania.org/v/20111013/

Huge thanks to the new Ubuntu Pennsylvania team contact and recently approved Ubuntu Member Jim Fisher (jedijf) for organizing such a great event at such an accommodating venue.

Finally, in addition to all the release excitement, today I learned I’d been re-elected to the Community Council. Thanks again to the community for their faith in my position there, it means a lot and I feel really good about the path forward!

Filed under: LoCo, philadelphia, tech, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot!

Thursday, Oct 13th, 2011 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

The release of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot just went live!


Ocelot at the Phoenix Zoo, September 2011

I had the honor of posting the release announcement for Xubuntu.org just moments ago. I became a formal member of the Xubuntu team this cycle (on July 26th) so this release is a special one for me :)

Happy release day everyone!

Filed under: animals, tech, ubuntu planet, xubuntu

Family trip to Phoenix

Monday, Oct 3rd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This past weekend MJ and I spent the weekend in Phoenix, Arizona for my Uncle Keith’s memorial service. On Friday night we took an ~8PM flight out of San Francisco to put us on the ground in Phoenix shortly after 10. We picked up our rental car and were checked into the Scottsdale Cottonwoods Resort and Suites before midnight.

Saturday morning we met up with my Grandpa (mother’s father), his wife Jo and my Aunt Elaine for breakfast before the service. It was my first time meeting Jo and I hadn’t seen my grandfather since my grandmother’s funeral back in 2008. From there we went to the service where we were able to see my Aunt Pam (Keith was her husband) and her daughers Karyn and Shannon and their families, including my newest family member, my cousin Shannon’s four month old son Frankie.

The service itself was beauiful. As a firefighter at NASA for much of his career and then volunteer work with Phoenix-area firefighter organizations he was given a firefighter send-off. I mentioned in a previous post that my uncle and I weren’t close, but the outpouring of love from people whose lives he impacted was truly touching.

Late that afternoon we went to my Aunt Pam’s to spend time together. I got to introduce MJ to Pam’s bird Baby Bird, one of the few birds in the world that I can mostly deal with (birds are scary!). Dinner was at La Torretta, an Italian restaurant that my Uncle had enjoyed often with my Aunt. Afterwards we headed back to the hotel to relax for the evening.

Sunday morning MJ and hit the pool in the early morning, got a snack at the pool bar and shot for the noon checkout time. From there it was over to my Aunt Pam’s again for an afternoon with family. There was plenty of nagging about when MJ and I would be getting married (now that my family approved, of course), I really need to get going with plans. After some BBQ we headed down to the pool for my second dip of the day.

More photos from the trip are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627804819950/

Around 5:30PM we headed toward the Phoenix airport, returned the rental car and spent about 40 minutes in the USAir Lounge before our flight.

Our flight home was uneventful, but the train ride was. Not far from Colma station on BART a man jumped in front of our train and was killed. Sitting in the back of the train we didn’t know what happened, or that anything was wrong (BART stops for a few minutes at a time on the tracks often for “no reason”) until the very upset conductor told us that someone had been hit. It took almost an hour for a rescue train to come and after several plans didn’t quite work out, they evacuated us (and all our luggage!) across the tracks in the tunnel and over to the other train, I captured part of the move with my camera and uploaded it here: http://youtu.be/XhNBCRggdYg. The rescue train took us to the Daly City stop where everyone was interviewed by the Daly City police before finally boarding trains home. It was almost 2AM by the time we got home. This morning I found this article, the details have been kept pretty vague. The whole experience was surreal and sad, my heart goes out to the friends and family of person who lost their life last night, suicide is a terrible way to lose someone.

This week is a very busy one for us. I’m taking MJ to the airport Wednesday morning to fly out to Philly, and I’m joining him by taking a redeye Friday night. Until then my todo list is huge and includes prepping an Ubuntu talk that I’m giving in Philly next week.

Filed under: family, travel

3 decades

Friday, Sep 30th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Born in Atlanta, Georgia at 12:35 Eastern on September 29th 1981, I am now over 30 years old.

I had a nice birthday. I wasn’t able to take the afternoon off as I have in years past since I have a lot of travel coming up and we’re very busy right now. As soon as I finished work we popped in Logan’s Run for the obligatory “I just turned 30” watching. Afterwards MJ took me out to a spectacular three-course dinner at Fleur De Lys, just beyond Union Square:

Chilled Dungeness Crab Salad: With shavings of young vegetables, lobster infused vinaigrette and lobster fodant with caviar

Seared Filet Mignon with a Lobster Truffled Mac & Cheese “En Brioche”: Accented with a red wine, shallot, thyme bordelaise sauce

Mirabelle Plum Soufflet

The dinner and dessert was then accented by a special birthday dessert platter (photo below) and another plate of treats — phew! Yum! We also added the house selection of wine pairings, which ended up being a great decision.

Decade birthdays are always big ones, but I have to admit that this decade birthday sorta snuck up on me. The first inkling that there would be life changes because of it came when I went to sign up for the fitness & pool club I recently joined and didn’t qualify for their “under 30” young professionals rates (drat!). I’ve had vague feelings of “aren’t I supposed to have kids by now?” and age 30 is kinda the deadline for when some of the major psychological problems that run in my family should have manifested if I were to get any of them (woo, I’m FREE!). There is also the family story on my mother’s side that while we all always look younger than our age (certainly true of me), 30 is the age when your body revolts against you and you suddenly have to pay much more attention to diet and put more effort into exercise to stay healthy — this is probably true, but I’m ready for it!

Thanks to everyone who sent good birthday wishes, the explosion of social media these days has made sure that my birthday is not forgotten …not that I allow people to forget, I’ve always been a very “HI IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!” type :)

I’m posting this from the airport in San Francisco, in a little bit we’ll be hopping on a plane to Phoenix to spend the weekend with my family.

Filed under: life

Applying for Ubuntu Community Council?

Monday, Sep 26th, 2011 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

On September 15th I sent out the call for nominations to the Community Council. Since then I’ve received questions from several folks in the community about the requirements, duties, responsibilities and time commitment of members of the Community Council. I figured it would be worthwhile to share some of these questions.

What is the Community Council anyway?

Taken from the ubuntu.com governance page: The social structures and community processes of Ubuntu are supervised by the Ubuntu Community Council.

The Community Council and the Technical Board are the two major governing bodies of the Ubuntu project.

What are the responsibilities of the Community Council?

The Community Council is responsible for any changes to documents like the Code of Conduct, are the highest level of arbitration for community disputes, making sure the other boards within the project are properly staffed and running and doing what it can to make sure the Ubuntu community in general is healthy.

What are the requirements to be on the Community Council?

The announcement outlines:

  • has been an Ubuntu member for a while
  • is dedicated to the project
  • is well-respected and known for balanced views and good leadership
  • has a good overview over various aspects of the project
  • is organised and has some organisation talent

What is the time commitment?

The Community Council has two meetings per month (see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CommunityCouncilAgenda) which members are expected to make as often as they can. We also have 1-2 hour conference calls from time to time. Much of our work is done on the mailing list which may have 5-20 threads per month that require input from council members. Frequently work items come from these threads, whether it be review and improvement of community documents, dispute resolution or review and restaffing of the other boards within the project. It’s hard to put a number on time, it really depends on the threads (some require more discussion and input than others, some months are busier) and your own workflow.

Nominations close on Thursday, September 29th[0] and people are welcome to email myself (lyz@ubuntu.com) or the Community Council directly (community-council@lists.ubuntu.com) if they have any questions.

[0] Which also happens to be my 30th birthday, woohoo!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

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
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