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Christmas at the Zoo and Oakland Museum Pixar Exhibit

Monday, Dec 27th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Thanks to holidays both MJ and I had Friday off from work. We took a leisurely start to the day and headed over to the Metreon to grab some lunch to enjoy overlooking Yerba Buena Gardens. For a park that is just a block from where we live we don’t go nearly enough. We came home to a package from my friend Dan, which was a delightful gift of hot chocolate mix and assorted goodies, including pink (peppermint) marshmallows! Thanks again Dan!

I was also treated earlier in the week to a gift from my friend Alex, an R2D2 USB hub, pictured here on my desk with my Squeeze stuffed toy, Android toy, and with my Nexus One plugged into it. Droid with Droid! Thanks Alex! It ended up being quite the useful gift since I’m always swapping around my USB devices.

And in the spirit of things, I also launched a contest on wallaceandgromit.net to raffle off a couple of Wallace and Gromit calendars I received from a publisher in the UK last week, awesome!

We spent much of the rest of the day Friday relaxing and catching up on some TV episodes, dinner ended up being leftover spinach lasagna I had made the previous day.

Saturday was Christmas, but neither of us actually celebrate the holiday, so we made plans at one of the few places in town open that day, the zoo!. They had a series of special holiday themed feedings throughout the day for their “Winter Goes Wild” event which runs for a couple weeks surrounding Christmas.

We hopped on MUNI and arrived at the zoo shortly before 1PM, just in time for the tiger holiday feeding! They put boxes and toys in the tiger cages and gave the tigers the opportunity to “open” their presents and get their treats.

Tiger opening presents video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C82TQcQaWXk

Another tiger opening presents video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65d2Ft6AXrI

After the tigers, we headed to the Lemur cafe for some lunch. It was drizzling out prior to lunch, but while we were eating it turned into a downpour. They ended up cancelling the 2PM lemur feeding and we went to find some indoor exhibits. On our way to the rainforest indoor exhibit we walked through the soggy Austrailian part of the zoo where we got to see Koori, the 25th animal in the Zoo’s 25 animals of Christmas event, she was sleeping.

We also walked past the kangaroos, who were very bouncy and I ended up taking a very short video which, while quite poor, does give an indication of how rainy it was: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7vc-8Sqv7E

The polar bears didn’t seem to be particularly enjoying the weather either.

At 3PM they did the otter feeding, which consisted of a keeper coming out with a few bags of snow and sprinkling their food on and in it so they could enjoy digging it out. I uploaded a short video of the very excited otters here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYQ2sKgVQtE

3:30 was the penguin feeding, and thankfully a break from the rain.

The zoo closed at 4 so we headed out around there and caught the MUNI home. We enjoyed a wonderful dinner at Fang, a Chinese restaurant just down the block from where we live.

Sunday we jumped on BART and headed across the bay to FINALLY see the Oakland Museum’s Pixar: 25 Years of Animation exhibit.

This exhibit is an expansion upon the Pixar: 20 years of animation which started touring in 2005. The expansion must have been quite large, since they had a significant amount of work added to the exhibit to encompass the movies released in the past 5 years, including Toy Story 3 and UP! (two of my favorites to date). I’ve been meaning to see the exhibit since I first heard about it but kept finding my weekends filled up (or tickets sold out when I actually went to the museum in October!). I am very glad we finally made it out to see it, the exhibit was amazing. It closes on January 9th, so if you’re in the bay area and want to see it, hurry! We wrapped up our day out with a late lunch at Pacific Coast Brewing Co where I was able to enjoy their Holiday XXII Imperial Blue ale and a glass of their root beer.

I uploaded some more photos from the long weekend here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157625559744573/

This week is another short work week. Thursday night I’m planning to head down to Palo Alto for an Ubuntu Hour. I’ll be spending Friday at one of the local Partimus-sponsored schools working to upgrade the systems from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04. New Years night itself? No plans yet. We should probably do something about that.

Filed under: animals, life

Ubuntu-California.org Launched!

Tuesday, Dec 21st, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working with James Tatum to launch a website for Ubuntu California at ubuntu-california.org. This is a project which has been discussed several times over the years: Does the team need a site? What would it contain? Where would it be hosted? Who would be responsible for it?

In meetings over the past couple months it became clear that the team wanted an aggregation of member blogs (planet) and was seeking to find a more consolidated way to share photos from events, so we put together a team moved forward with the site. The primary domain itself will be used as an easy address to give folks who are new to the team and serve as a portal for our other resources. We went with WordPress for this since it’s a simple CMS for our volunteers who wish to help out with content on the site and we are using the ubuntu-website light-wordpress-theme. More notes about the technical specifications of the site can be found here.

Yesterday we launched our basic site!

ubuntu-california.org

James and I are currently working on the planet and the team is going through discussions regarding our photo options (gallery2 is open source and can be installed on the Linode, but Flickr and Picasa have loco directory support). It would be great to hear what other teams have done to keep their event photos organized. In the future we’re also looking at Google App Engine options in a portion of the project led by Aaditya Bhatia if we wish to have some custom applications for the site.

The site is hosted on a Linode (donated to the community by Linode, thanks again!) which I am currently the primary sysadmin of and also hosts ubuntupennsylvania.org and ubuntu-us.org. The domain name itself graciously provided by Eric Hammond.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Review: ZaReason Strata Pro 15 Laptop

Sunday, Dec 19th, 2010 by pleia2 | 17 Comments

With the exception of my netbook, I have never owned a new laptop. In the recent past I’ve tinkered with the beloved old Pentium 2 Inspiron 7000 series laptops, of which I ended up with 3 of in varying states of disrepair, and my current laptop is a Pentium 3 Compaq Presario, which primarily runs Debian with fluxbox and I use for testing (most recently drop-kick testing of DRBD and even managed to get Ubuntu 10.04 installed on it for fun, even though it’s a bit slow). But none of this helps me when I want to give someone a spiffy Ubuntu demo at an event or for work, so when a work opportunity presented itself where I needed a demo system, I was fortunate enough to be in contact with the folks at ZaReason who were happy to loan me a review and demo version of their Strata Pro 15 with the specs I requested.

I went with all the basic specs you see on the product page, with the exception of going with a 40G SSD drive rather than the 160G standard SATA disk. It came preloaded with Ubuntu 10.10 which I used in this review.

Since I live just 20 minutes from the ZaReason Berkeley office I was able to pick up the laptop myself and have a lovely chat with Cathy Malmrose about ZaReason itself. The company has really done an amazing job of selling Linux laptops and the passion for the business of putting Linux systems in the hands of everyone shines through when you speak with her. They really strive for affordable, high quality hardware that will last and superior support to back up all their products. If you call ZaReason for support with your system you’ll be sure to talk to someone who can communicate with you on your level (new to computers, no problem! experienced? they won’t make you wait through some useless troubleshooting script), you probably will even be able to speak with the person who built your actual machine.

First Impressions

The CPU is an i3-330M which has virtualization (a must for any systems I buy now, with the exception of netbooks). The 2G of RAM has been more than sufficient and so far the 15.4″ LCD display @ 1366×768 pixels has proven to be nothing short of stunning. The size of the laptop is unusual for me, as I’m so accustom to my netbook which is less than half the size, but I am quite liking the full size keyboard – complete with a number pad, which I love already (I used to do accounting work so I’m a number pad wizard, inputing numbers via the regular number keys when doing budgeting at home is painful so I simply don’t do it on my netbook). Number pad aside, I found the keyboard layout to be easy to get used to with no unpleasant surprises and I found it to be a pleasure to type on. I’ve already made use of the hibernation, sound and image brightness keys, which all work as expected. The single button below the touchpad took some getting used to, you just press one side or the other for left or right click.

Keyboard:

Twice the size of my mini9? Yep!

While on the topic of size, the laptop is pretty slim. In a comparison it’s actually a tiny bit thicker than the thickest part of my mini9, but my boyfriend’s 15 inch Mac Book Pro certainly is slimmer (from top: mini9, macbook pro, strata pro 15):

Battery Life: Test 1, standard usage

Now, one of the questions I see raised most often during reviews is battery life, so I figured I’d do a couple tests related to that. My first test had me doing what I feel is pretty typical usage, which includes:

  • Wifi (WPA) on
  • Screen brightness all the way up
  • Always running: Standard Ubuntu Gnome desktop w/ compiz cube, terminal w/ ssh, Google Chrome
  • Put an SD card into the internal reader and copied over 50 images into ShotWell
  • Played 10 minutes of a DVD (was doing a trial to see if DVD playback worked)

Standard usage, which on this trial included: chatting on IRC over ssh, tweeting, reading blogs, writing emails in gmail, editing Google Docs, editing Ubuntu Wiki, updating a couple websites

Results: Predictably playing a DVD kills the battery life, but even with that 10 minutes of play and all the rest, I ended up with 2 hours and 45 minutes of battery life.

Battery Life: Test 2, DVD playback

  • Wifi (WPA) off
  • Screen brightness all the way up

I decided to go with wifi off in this test because my use case would be something like wanting to watch a movie on an airplane without power or wifi. So, did I get through a movie?

Results: Test it with Raiders of the Lost Ark, at 115 minutes. The battery lasted for 91 minutes. Spinning up of the drive, plus increased power required to handle all the DVD decoding is no doubt to blame here, playing a ripped movie would probably be far more successful. An extra battery may also be a worthy investment if you intend to do this, and ZaReason makes that pretty easy to do when you buy the laptop with an “Extra Battery” drop down on the ordering page.

Conclusions

While I love the number pad, my only major gripe with this laptop is the size. I am accustom to curling up on the couch with my tiny netbook and hacking away, which was tricky with this. I’d probably go with the 13″ if I were to buy one myself. I never quite got used to the single button for the mouse, but given the size and work I ended up being able to do on this laptop I frequently just plugged in my little USB travel mouse. The hardware itself has the solid feel of my old Compaq that I’ve found lacking in a lot of sub-$1000 laptops I’ve tried in the recent years.

So, will I buy one (well, the 13″ version) for myself? My daily computing life is spent between my super powerful desktop and my little netbook. My desktop is used for work, virtualized installs, major image manipulation with inkscape and photo editing with the gimp. My netbook works well as a “sit on the couch and IRC + internet + email + minimal hacking” machine, which is much of what I do in my off-work hours. That said, I do have a hole in my computing world which influenced borrowing this laptop in the first place – nothing to really show off Ubuntu on for customers or at Ubuntu events, nothing to burn CDs on at events, and I have to admit that it would be nice to have a second machine with virtualized hardware so my development machines were more portable. We’ll see where my needs and budget lead me.

Questions? I should have this laptop for at least another week so if you have questions or want me to take some specific pictures, ask away!

Filed under: computers, tech, ubuntu planet

Partimus on TV and fundraiser

Thursday, Dec 16th, 2010 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

I was recently brought on the board of the non-profit Partimus, which provides repurposed computers running free software (currently Ubuntu and related apps) to students and schools which need them. The organization currently has six deployments across the Bay Area.

Following a press release last month (Albert G. Stoll, Jr. | A Law Corp. partners with other businesses and Bay Area residents to support mission of Partimus) Partimus was contacted by ABC 7 San Francisco to see if we were interested in joining their “Voice Box” studio audience for an episode of 7 Live. Christian Einfeldt quickly accepted and sent out invites to several Bay Area Linux lists. Having never taken the opportunity to be part of a studio audience and excited about Partimus being mentioned on traditional media, I took the afternoon off on Monday the 13th and headed down to the TV studio to join everyone.


Front of the studio (but we entered around back)

We arrived around 2PM and were let in to the studio at 2:15. From there we were briefed about the show and eventually walked into the studio.

The studio itself was split into separate sections, the stage itself, the “Voice Box” which is also on the stage, and the other studio audience section behind the (robot!) cameras.


Voice Box seats

The show is primarily pop culture, local news and light tech. In this clip you can see Sunshine Best (world traveler, chef, and she’s an Ubuntu user!), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu Community Manager) and Beth Lynn Eicher (of Ohio LinuxFest fame) talking about increasing bridge tolls and the differences in cultural stigmas for men and women attached to showing emotion in public.

But if you check out this video of the whole show and skip to 39:45 (it can be tricky to skip, I let it load first) you can hear the promo that host Brian Copeland gave us! Or you can just read my transcription here:

“As I mentioned earlier in our Voice Box today we have the non-profit organization Partimus. Now Partimus aims to help bridge the digital divide in public schools by bringing in Linux-powered computers to schools that otherwise would not be able to afford them.

**Cheers from the audience**

And you can help! This Wednesday December the 15th they’re having their first fundraiser “Share the Joy” from 5 to 6 at the Creative Arts Charter school in San Francsico. So for more information visit their website, Partimus.org.”

After the show we were able to talk to the hosts and explore the set a little.


Sameer Verma and Ryan Singer talking with host Jennifer Jolly; background: Mark Terranova talking with host Brian Copeland


Mark Terranova, me, Jono Bacon on stage in front of 7 Live backdrop, photo by Norm McAllister

Mark Terranova posted more photos here: http://zareason.posterous.com/pictures-of-partimusorg-friends-volunteers-ou

Several of us then headed up to the ZaReason up in Berkeley for a Partimus board meeting (and pizza!). The board meeting got a lot of organizational things taken care of and gave us the opportunity to tie up any loose ends before our fundraiser.

Wednesday night was our fundraiser! It was hosted at the Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco and by fortune of a quick bus ride I was able to arrive a bit early to help set up. The attendees of the fundraiser ranged from those of us involved with Partimus itself, to teachers who were there to talk about how great Ubuntu has been in their classrooms to folks from the law firm to local business people interested in finding out more about the efforts of Partimus. It was a great event, I had a lot of interesting conversations about mainstream use of Linux, how I use it at my job, and particularly how we’re able to use it for deployments by Partimus.


Catering for the event was graciously sponsored by Albert G. Stoll

Today we announced that our fundraiser had brought in $1,660! Thanks everyone!

Interested in helping out? Visit the Partimus donations page for ways to donate money or computers.

Partimus is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit in the United States, please request a donation receipt if you need it for a tax exemption.

Filed under: events, partimus, tech, ubuntu planet

Pink Android phone cozy

Wednesday, Dec 15th, 2010 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

In my last post I mentioned that I had ordered a pink and magenta case from freshonmondays’ Etsy shop.

It arrived today!

It’s really nice, and she does custom colors and makes modifications based on your model of phone. My Nexus One is happy in its new home.

Filed under: pink, tech

Since Thanksgiving I have…

Sunday, Dec 12th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Upon returning from New England, where I spent Thanksgiving, I fell victim to a horrible cold that left me feeling pretty awful for about 3 days (thank goodness I work from home, I took some naps but didn’t need to call out entirely), and had a long tail that stretched on for 10 days. It was such a relief a few days ago when I finally started to have mornings where I didn’t wake up with a runny nose and cough.

The first weekend in December began with MJ’s work holiday party at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on Friday evening. I had never been to the museum and for the party it wasn’t really set up for wandering around exhibits, but I was able to see the fascinating Mastering the Game: A History of Computer Chess exhibit and they had live demos of their Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2 (I saw its twin in London at the Science Museum a couple years ago, but didn’t see a demo then). I’ll certainly have to go back after they’ve finished renovations and can have a more complete tour.

Saturday morning I drove up to ZaReason in Berkeley to pick up a demo and review laptop. I had approached them earlier in the week to request a demo when I learned a client would be in town and was interested in an Ubuntu demo – unfortunately none of my laptops were up to the task (so, do I demo the Pentium 3 running Debian and fluxbox, or my pink-and-covered-with-pony-stickers Dell Mini9 with Ubuntu 8.04 on it? Oh dear…). They quickly put together a basic Strata Pro 15 for me with a 40G SSD and 10.10 installed. My review of the laptop will be coming once I finish up with some more battery life tests, but so far I’m quite impressed and am seriously looking at the Strata 13 (perhaps my only complaint thus far, the 15 is toooooo big!). After I picked up the laptop it was off to an uneventful dentist visit and lunch at Tad’s Steaks on Powell, which for a whim was a pleasant surprise – good food, reasonable prices and generous portions. That night MJ and I went out to see Tangled at the Century theater in the Westfield, a theater I hadn’t yet been to. Tangled was delightful, I am tempted to go see it again.

Sunday was blissfully plan free and I took advantage of the time to catch up with the mountain of email and tasks I had on my list from before Thanksgiving. Plus I was able to do some tests on the Strata 15, get my holiday cards all written and do some much-needed work around the condo. And as silly as it sounds for it to be a noteworthy thing we bought and MJ installed a new sliding trash can for under the kitchen sink. Why noteworthy? This is the only one we found with slim enough measurements and a reasonable size can (for the curious: 8 gal. Undercounter Pull-Out Can)! It’s working out really well, it’s nice to finally have a proper kitchen trash can. That evening I chaired an Ubuntu California team meeting where James Tatum and I unveiled a demo of the team website, which we’d been working on for a couple weeks. Hopefully we’ll be planning to launch it by the next meeting (December 19th).

This past week was also filled with a lot of catching up and preparing for upcoming events, the only event I went to all week was the San Francisco Ubuntu Hour on Wednesday night which we wrapped up with dinner over at Thirsty Bear Brewing Company on Howard. It was while we were enjoying dinner that I saw the adorable case that one of the attendees had for her Android phone, she bought it from the freshonmondays Etsy shop out of Oakland – and she does custom ones! I ordered mine the next day, magenta Android on a light pink case, I should have it within the next couple days. One of the things I had been meaning to catch up on is some software testing projects, both infrastructure and beta stuff (the Debian Squeeze Beta2 installer came out last week). I’ve found that for this infrastructure work I’ve been increasingly using KVM on my desktop for quick virtualized installs rather than Xen on my firewall. It makes sense as a natural progression, since Xen requires virtualization-aware kernels and my new desktop, having the virtualization bit and far more power makes a whole lot more sense for testing more vanilla installs. I’ve also been doing a fair amount of work with KVM’s failover mechanisms and storage solutions (drbd is still king for a cheap solution, but it’s not as bulletproof as I had initially thought), and obvious limitations aside I am quite liking how simple and useful libvirt is. I think my next virtual install will be some testing of Xubuntu 11.04, the awesome Xubuntu dev team is shooting for XFCE 4.8 for this release and just finished rebuilding the plugins for the new panel, exciting news!

Yesterday was another day full of catch up work, perhaps most worthy of note I finally got some of the Ubuntu Women mentoring documentation tackled. We also finally purchased health insurance for both the cats, going with Embrace Pet Insurance with a high deductible since we’re really looking to have this in case of accident or chronic illness. For dinner we headed up to North Beach for dinner at The House, which turns out to have the most exquisite creme brulee.

Today we headed up to BerkeleyLUG. Good meeting, good pizza, and Jack Deslippe was kind enough to give away some of the little Android figures, of which I now have one of (thanks again Jack!). This evening was spent with the thrilling task of grocery shopping which, admittedly, we hadn’t done properly since before I left for my Thanksgiving trip.

This week is shaping up to be a busy one. Tomorrow I am taking the afternoon off to join others in an interactive studio audience to promote Linux in schools on ABC 7 Live. We’ll see how it goes, at the very least it will be interesting to be part of a studio audience (I never have before) and to meet others who are interested in technology in education. I’ll be sure write up a full report of the experience and to take pictures as I’m able! Tuesday we’re attending the annual HOA meeting and event in the lobby of our building, Wednesday I’m leaving work early again (I am so fortunate to have an understanding boss!) to head over to the Partimus Fundraising Event at the Creative Arts Charter School. Thursday evening following the Americas Membership Board Meeting I’ll be enjoying the night in, no doubt catching up on project work which will spill into Friday. Saturday is MJ’s birthday! Not sure what we’ll do during the day, but a trip to his favorite sushi place is looking good for the evening.

Filed under: life

Computer Engineer Barbie has a penguin

Friday, Dec 10th, 2010 by pleia2 | 23 Comments

I voted for it and I was pretty excited when I heard about Computer Engineer Barbie becoming a reality. I pre-ordered mine (product page here) as soon as I could and finally received it today!

Unfortunately work tore me away from my new toy and I sat it next to my desk. Then, while doing some upgrades this afternoon, I glanced over and noticed a penguin. Yes indeed, on the left hand edge of the case Barbie has a big penguin on her shelf!

Computer Engineer Barbie has a penguin on her shelf :)

Now I’m even more excited! Hooray Tux!

Filed under: pink, tech, ubuntu planet

Thanksgiving in New England

Tuesday, Dec 7th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On the evening of Tuesday November 23rd I took a redeye flight out of San Francisco to a connection in Newark, New Jersey and then up to Manchester, New Hampshire. I didn’t encounter any security issues (just had the typical metal detector in the lane I was in) and the slight delay out of SFO didn’t impact my connection at all. Upon arrival in Manchester on Wednesday morning I picked up my rental car at the Manchester airport which, upon reflection, was the first time I’ve ever rented a car (partners I traveled with had, but I had never done it myself). My Aunt Meg’s house was an easy half hour drive from the airport and she had a room and comfy bed prepared for me to crash for a few hours. Excellent!

Wednesday night my cousins Melissa and Brad came by, Brad with his wife and two young kids to have an early Thanksgiving dinner. All the typical trimmings, and stuffing with whole cranberries in it that I must replicate in the future since I love cranberries but am not too keen on the cranberry sauce from cans. It was a really great evening, and it was great to meet Brad’s family and catch up with Melissa.

Thanksgiving! After saying goodbye to Brad’s family in the morning, Aunt Meg, Melissa and I headed over to the retirement community where my grandmother lives to enjoy their large catered dinner, and enjoy we did! I was able to spend some time catching up with my grandmother before and after dinner. We also spent some time watching the first half of a movie my grandmother recommends, Days of Heaven – it’s now in my NetFlix queue so I can watch the rest.

On Friday I drove up to Maine to finally see my mother’s new house and to spend dinner with her, her boyfriend and my little sister Annette. The drive up took a little over 3 hours and I was fretting all week that the weather wouldn’t turn out well. I was pleasantly surprised when the forecasted poor weather cleared out early and I found almost my whole drive up not only free from precipitation, but quite beautiful. On the drive up I also took some time to take some photos, including Pedro O’Hara’s American Mexican Irish Cuisine (just, what?), snow (this satisfied my snow quota for the year) and a Moose Hill Rd sign (it was so very Maine). I also got to meet my mother’s pets, which currently consist of a giant macaw (ugh, birds), a tiny tortoise and several cats, one of whom is a fluffy Simcoe.

Unfortunately the seafood restaurant we ended up at for dinner was out of broiled lobster – oh no! My trip to Maine was without my beloved lobster! That disappointment aside, it was a nice dinner and it was nice to see everyone.

Since it was Black Friday I had decided early on to skip my pilgrimage to the L.L. Bean flagship store in Freeport, until I remembered that it’s famously the only thing in Maine open 24/7. Besides I didn’t get lobster, I couldn’t skip the trip to L.L. Bean too, it would insult my Mainerness! I haven’t yet completely traded “wicked” for “hella” after all. Fortunately, 9:30PM on Black Friday at L.L. Bean was, while certainly more busy than a typical 9:30PM, parking wasn’t hard to find and it wasn’t busy enough to be uncomfortable. I was able to browse and buy a couple things (even if I completely forgot to pick up a new flannel shirt). The drive back to New Hampshire was eventless (no moose!) and I was able to get back before 2AM.

Saturday I drove down to Massachusetts to meet up with Mike Rushton, Martin Owens and Paul Tagliamonte, all of whom I’ve known for multiple years via my work with Ubuntu but had only ever actually met Martin in person previously. We had lunch at a local place and then headed back to Mike’s place to see his sysadmin heaven computer room (monitors and computers everywhere!). Mike’s wife arrived shortly after we did and surprised us with giant Ubuntu cookies she had made specifically for us from the bakery she works at – wow! There were no leftovers.

When I got back to my Aunt Meg’s early in the evening I quickly changed and headed back out the door to meet up with my Aunt Elaine, cousin Erica and her 1 year old daughter and my Grandmother at my Grandmother’s again for dinner. It had been 5 years since I’d seen my Aunt Elaine or cousin Erica, and of course I had never seen her beautiful little daughter. The evening was spent with more catching up with all the news of each others lives and then we all headed out shortly after 8PM.

I spent the rest of the evening chatting with my Aunt Meg and packing my little suitcase (in which my stuff + new acquisitions barely fit!). I have to say that it was one of the most heavily slanted reward to stress ratio visit with family I’ve ever experienced, the only stress I encountered was my typical shyness and worries about things not working out. All the visits with family members were short but rewarding and my Aunt Meg was a gracious host who made me feel perfectly at home in her home (unusual for me, but it was clean and safe, she had fresh healthy snacks and I had plenty of guilt-free alone time and schedule flexibility).

Sunday morning I headed off to Manchester for a 1PM flight. Breezed through security (no line! no scanners! cheerful TSA agents!) and took advantage of the airport’s free wifi to catch up on some emails and tasks. Manchester is my favorite airport. Unfortunately I got stuck in Newark with a 5 hour delay after our plane broke and they had to find a replacement. I finally got back to San Francisco shortly before midnight, where MJ picked me up and we went out for some very late, but much needed, dinner. I’m fortunate that I have a boss was sympathetic to my “I will be starting late, I didn’t get home until 2AM” excuse the next morning!

Filed under: family, travel

Would you like a holiday card?

Saturday, Nov 27th, 2010 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Every year I try to send out a big batch of wintertime holiday cards to friends and acquaintances online. Reading this? That means you! Even if you’re outside the United States!

Drop me an email with your address if you’d like one: lyz@princessleia.com (Please put “Holiday Card” in the subject so I can filter it appropriately).

Typical disclaimer: No, I’m not a Christian even though I do tend to celebrate a secular “Christmas” with pretty lights, and the cards will non-religious in theme (just like last year, they’ll probably be pink, or have penguins, or both).

Filed under: Uncategorized

Vegas Jaunt

Monday, Nov 22nd, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The Friday before last I was able to take off from work a couple hours early so I could run down to the airport and catch a 5PM flight from San Francisco to Las Vegas to meet MJ. The first hurdle was the notorious body scanners, which SFO has and I avoided. Half the lanes in that particular security point were still using the standard metal detectors so I went through one of those lanes. I doubt I’ll have as much luck with I fly tomorrow night though. Security conquered, it was off to my plane. In spite of usually flying with Star Alliance, MJ and I decided to book our flights on Virgin America since the miles were negligible, price was acceptable and we wanted to check out their new, sparkley planes. I have to admit that I was impressed, their planes really were new, they had nice leather seats and their entertainment systems were first rate – plus they use Linux, and I got to have a peek at it at the end of my flight when the systems rebooted and the penguiny bootup screen showed it’s very Linux interior.

Upon arrival I grabbed a taxi down to our hotel, the Encore, where MJ met me outside the lobby. The hotel was gorgeous and MJ surprised me with 51st floor room that had a stunning view of the strip. Bags deposited and breath caught, we headed downstairs to have a tapas-style dinner at one of the downstairs restaurants before heading out to the strip. The last time we were in Vegas I didn’t get a chance to see the fountains at Bellagio, so we made that our first real stop. From there it was to see the chocolate fountain! On our walk back we saw the last show of the night of the fountains caught a video. So pretty! We wrapped up the evening with a stop at BLT Burger at The Mirage, where I discovered on my first trip to Vegas they serve amazing spiked milkshakes.


Bellagio Fountains from the strip


Bellagio Chocolate Fountain

Saturday I had planned to check out the pools, but in spite of the desert location, it actually can get quite cool in Las Vegas – in fact, it was cooler in Las Vegas all weekend than it was in San Francisco. Swimming was out, so we started off our day at the acclaimed champagne brunch buffet at Wynn (the hotel which Encore is an encore to). The food was excellent and the desserts amazing – they even sparkled! I ate way too much.

I spent much of the rest of the afternoon at Siegfried & Roy’s Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat. We visited this last time we were in Vegas, but MJ noticed a sign outside the Mirage declaring that they now had a couple baby white tiger cubs! They didn’t disappoint. The dolphins were a treat (video) and at the far end of the big cats exhibit they had a whole pen reserved just for the two baby tigers. With them was a trainer who played with them and was eager to answer questions that people had. Getting good photos of them was hard, but I did get a couple of short videos, Baby white tigers in Vegas 1, Baby white tigers in Vegas 2.

Saturday evening was spent on another trip to the Bellagio, MJ treated us to my very first Cirque Du Soleil show, O. The show was a real delight, amazing acrobatics, the whole stage turning from a stage to a pool and back again dozens of times during the show. After the show we headed over to Treasure Island to round off the evening with some games in their casino.

Sunday morning we ordered room service and ordered the most decadent thing on the menu, lobster eggs benedict. And enjoyed it along with our view of the strip, yum!

We had to check out by noon, but our flight wasn’t until the evening, so we left the Encore and headed down the strip to New York New York, probably our favorite venue to play at on the strip. I grabbed some delicious New York pizza for lunch and we parted ways. I went over to the Luxor to finally see the Bodies: The Exhibition. I really enjoyed the Exhibition once I got over the gross factor, probably the most fascinating (read: grossest for me) being a human spine, I picked up a spine pen in their gift shop to remember my revulsion. The rest of the afternoon was spent between New York New York and MGM Grand playing slots (I came out ahead this time!) and visiting the MGM Grand lions.

Our flight home was at 8:45 MST, which got us back home by 11:30 PST. Awesome little weekend jaunt, we’ll have to do it again sometime soon! But I was happy that this past weekend was one spent around town getting errands done and doing much needed chores at home.

Tonight’s plan: Pack for trip to New Hampshire tomorrow night and finish up a thousand little loose ends project-wise, since I don’t know how much internet access I’ll have in NH.

Filed under: animals, travel
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