“I’m going to Disney World!”

Monday, Oct 24th, 2011 by pleia2 | 9 Comments

I am a Disney animated features fangirl. My bedroom growing up was full of Disney toys (ok, Star Wars too), every Christmas my parents would get me the latest Disney VHS and accompanying lithograph and watch from the Disney Store. In those days before the web, I once sent a letter to Disney asking for a full list of all their full-length animated features to make sure I’d seen them all and they were happy to oblige! My best friend and I would save up to go to opening showings of the latest animate feature in the theater. I did a book report on An American Original : Walt Disney. I used to draw a lot and many were Disney characters. Even in High School my binders and folders were covered with Disney characters and stickers, like this (actual folder I still have!). It’s amazing that I survived High School being such a massive dork, in retrospect it’s pretty obvious why I wasn’t popular :)

This is the background for understanding exactly what it means when I say this:

17 years ago, when I was in 8th grade, I went to Disney World for the first and only time. It should have been a dream come true, but instead I got horribly sick due to the heat.

I went to one attraction, Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress. I spent the rest of the day getting intimately familiar with the toilets of the Disney World First Aid office and trying to figure out what “MK” meant on all the pillows (yeah, Magic Kingdom, some days I’m smarter than others). We ended up having to spend the night in a cheap motel in Orlando because I was too sick to risk the ride back to my Aunt’s place in Clearwater. The next day we went to Epcot, where Spaceship Earth (the big ball thing) and the 3D theater were both closed for repairs during the off-season. I was still a bit queasy and hot, so the day wasn’t all that enjoyable.

It was probably the most expensive family vacation we ever took and by far the most disappointing for me. I’ve been upset about it ever since, the question of “Have you been to Disney World?” is met with this story.

But this week…

“I’m going to Disney World!”

It probably goes without saying that I’m massively excited.

We’re taking a redeye on Wednesday night to put us on the ground in Orlando shortly after 9AM on Thursday after a connection in Charlotte. The plan is to spend about 4 days between Magical Kingdom, Epcot and Animal Kingdom. On Sunday MJ is flying home and I’m staying in Orlando for the Ubuntu Developer Summit (the actual reason for this Orlando trip). I’m coming back home late on November 5th.

Now let’s hope I don’t get sick! :)

Filed under: life, travel

Northern California Ubuntu Hours and SF Release Dinner!

Friday, Oct 21st, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I was in Philadelphia for the actual release day of Ubuntu 11.10 so I went to the Pennsylvania team’s release party (congrats again on your reapproval!).

In San Francisco I ended up postponing the regular monthly Ubuntu Hour a week and we held an Ubuntu Hour and then an 11.10 release dinner on Wednesday the 19th. Fortunately that was also the day that we received our CDs so we had CDs for our release party.

I arrived at 6PM and met up with Michelle Mastin who had brought along an ExoPC running Ubuntu 11.10, which Oneiric the Ocelot got to play with:

We were soon joined by Laura, who had been invited out by a friend at NoiseBridge, our friendly neighborhood hackerspace. Then Greg Grossmeier showed up, a recent transplant to San Francisco from Michigan. I’ve worked with Greg on several things over the years, including the Americas Ubuntu membership Board so it was a pleasure to finally meet in person.

We wrapped up at the coffee shop and met up with other Noisebridgers on the short walk over to Thirsty Bear Brewing Company for our 11.10 Release Dinner.

Much fun was had and the ocelot made some new friends.

We ended up with a total of 10 people coming out for the dinner and left shortly after 9PM.

Thursday night was the Ubuntu Hour in Mountain View. I took the 6:14 Caltrain down so I arrived shortly after 7 to an already lively group.

By the end of the night we had 12 people enjoying warm drinks and discussions about Ubuntu. When someone asked about new features in 11.10 I did a mini-presentation based on the one I did in Philadelphia last week.

The night turned from great to exceptional with the arrival of Reynaldo and Linda Gil and Belinda Lopez. Reynaldo first contacted me about two weeks ago about what the Ubuntu California team could offer in terms of networking and support for some work with Edubuntu he was starting in San Jose with a focus on the Latino community. I quickly informed him about the in-school efforts of Partimus in San Francisco and we arranged to meet at the Ubuntu Hour. It was great to meet up and the Hour was a really great opportunity to introduce him to several players in the Ubuntu community near San Jose. Belinda has a background in education and happened to in town for the FLOSS Documentation Summit at Google this week so I invited her out to the Hour and to meet with us about educational opportunities. After the Hour, Reynaldo, Linda, Belinda and myself had dinner and a lot of really inspiring conversation at a nearby Italian place, a perfect way to wrap up the evening.

More photos from both events are available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627938849996/

Thanks to everyone who helped make it happen!

Filed under: events, LoCo, san francisco, tech, ubuntu planet

Visit to Philadelphia

Thursday, Oct 20th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I took a sleepless redeye on Friday the 7th to get into Philadelphia at 6:30AM on Saturday the 8th. I had quite the public transit adventure as I took a shuttle bus from the airport, since the airport line train was unavailable due to work being done. From there I took a train two stops to our hotel where I dropped off my bag, picked up a quick breakfast and hopped on another regional train to meet MJ. We spent the evening with more of the family, breaking their Yom Kippur fast with bagels, lox and other delicious foods. From there it was back down to Philly to check into our hotel for the week.

Sunday was the first day of MJ’s conference so I met up with Nita for a couple hours and had lunch in Olde City (cheesesteak, yummy!) and on her way out of the city she was able to drop me off at the Philadelphia Zoo where I met up with Jon, Crissi and the boys. As always the zoo trip was a fun one, and I was delighted to learn that they had their Xtinkshun experience still going on, so we were treated to Muppets throughout the zoo! We also got to see their new jaguar cub (which I learned about on ZooBorns).

Sunday night I met up with MJ and we went to a conference social on the 43rd floor of the Comcast building in Philadelphia, where I enjoyed a Comcastini, a mashed potato bar and stunning views of the city.

View from Comcast building, PSFS is our hotel

This was a working trip for me too, so I was working 9-5 each day of the week from the hotel. Unfortunately the hotel internet speeds left much to be desired on the weekend and evenings, but I was able to get work done during the day. It was probably my most productive work trip yet, we really planned my workload well to compensate for hotel internet and I was able to knock out some important asynchronous project work.

Monday evening MJ took me out with some fellow conference-goers. As mentioned in my last post Tuesday and Thursday were Ubuntu nights. Wednesday was a conference dinner event at the Franklin Institute which was a beautiful night. Not only did they have a great catered dinner with an open bar, they opened the institute exhibits to the attendees (including the special Mummies exhibit, which we saw in July), offered several Planetarium shows and even gave free rides on the Sky Bike.

Thursday during the day I was able to meet up with my boss and some co-workers for a company meeting and Friday MJ wrapped up the conference and I finished up my work week. We ended up without plans for the first time since arriving in Philly and took the opportunity to head over to dinner together at The Continental near the entrance to Penn’s Landing.

Saturday we spent with Nita, we were able to grab lunch MJ’s favorite pizzeria and headed back down to the city for a haunted house and then dinner at a “typical south Philly diner” that offered all the diner stuff I miss now that I’m living in dinerless San Francisco. Sunday we met up with some of MJ’s old friends and grabbed some lunch at Revolution House before walking down to South Street for some Rita’s for dessert. I ate far too much during this trip, I managed to get to the hotel gym once (was too busy otherwise!) but was looking forward to being home and getting back on my typical diet that consists of fewer bagels, cheesesteaks and cannolis – as delicious as they are I always overdo it when I come to Philly.

Lots more photos from the trip are up on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627865240312/

We had a 6PM flight out of Philly which actually put us on the ground in San Francisco at a reasonable time.

Filed under: philadelphia, travel

Ubuntu 11.10 in Philadelphia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed under: LoCo, philadelphia, tech, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot!

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

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

Ocelot at the Phoenix Zoo, September 2011

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

Happy release day everyone!

Filed under: animals, tech, ubuntu planet, xubuntu

Family trip to Phoenix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed under: family, travel

3 decades

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

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

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

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

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

Mirabelle Plum Soufflet

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

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

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

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

Filed under: life

Applying for Ubuntu Community Council?

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

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

What is the Community Council anyway?

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

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

What are the responsibilities of the Community Council?

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

What are the requirements to be on the Community Council?

The announcement outlines:

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

What is the time commitment?

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

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

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

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

User Days tomorrow!

Friday, Sep 23rd, 2011 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

I’ve been prepping for several weeks with Nigel Babu and this week we wrapped up the last loose ends for Ubuntu User Days tomorrow, Saturday 24th (and a couple hours into Sunday the 25th UTC)!

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

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