UCW: Working With Other Groups In Your Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Projects and Aquarium of the Bay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MJ looking up at the sardine vortex

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

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

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

Filed under: animals, life, san francisco

My Media Consumption in 2011

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

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

Reading

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

Online content

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

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

Books

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

Magazines

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

Watching

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

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

Listening

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

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

Filed under: reflection

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!

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

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