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Ubuntu California at Solano Stroll 2011

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

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

From the Stroll website:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labor Day Weekend in Phoenix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I also rode a camel!

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

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

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

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

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

Filed under: animals, family, travel

Week, zoo and a news reader

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

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

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

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

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

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

I also picked up my first San Francisco Zoo key!

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

And some videos!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed under: animals, life

Ubuntu California at Picn*x 20 and Android cookies

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

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

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

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

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

Cookie recipe:

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

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

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

Blend well.

Chill 2 to 3 hours.

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

Bake at 350F degrees for 10 minutes.

Frosting:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed under: events, LoCo, tech, ubuntu planet

Snakes, Lizards and Bison

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

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

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


Monitor


Boa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed under: animals, san francisco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Filed under: computers, life

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
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