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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

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
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