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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

Pink laptop earrings

Tuesday, Nov 16th, 2010 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

Behold, pink laptop earrings!

But I can’t take credit for finding these goodies, when Melissa was visiting a couple weeks ago she picked up a pair at Claire’s at The Westfield Mall in San Francisco, when I saw them I knew I had to snag a pair for myself. I tend to describe Claire’s as “that store where all the 12 year olds get their jewelry” but for those of us who like kitsch (and for earrings that match your Ubuntu release codename, yes, those are koala earrings) it’s a wealth of fun earrings and accessories, while I was there I also picked up some more penguin earrings.

And while I’m on the subject of pink laptops, Computer Engineer Barbie (complete with her pink laptop!) has gone on pre-sale and is currently scheduled to start shipping on November 24th. I bought mine!

Filed under: pink, ubuntu planet

Oh the neons are a gleamin’ and the gamblers are a dreamin’

Friday, Nov 12th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Leaving in a few minutes for my flight to join MJ in Las Vegas!

Encore

I’ll be back late Sunday night.

Filed under: travel

California Ubuntu Hour * 5 + Debian

Tuesday, Nov 9th, 2010 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

This month the Ubuntu California team has really embraced the Ubuntu Hour, we have a whopping 5 planned across the state the next 10 days!

Tomorrow night I’ll be hosting the San Francisco one.

San Francisco Ubuntu Hour
Time & Date: Wednesday, November 10th @ 6-7PM
Location: The Roastery, 199 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco
Details: LoCo Directory: Ubuntu Hour San Francisco

And to mix things up a bit, we’ve scheduled the next Bay Area Debian meeting across the street just following.

Bay Area Debian Meeting
Time & Date: Wednesday, November 10th @ 7-9PM
Location: Henry’s Hunan Restaurant, 110 Natoma St, San Francisco
Details: Bay Area Debian meeting at Henry’s Hunan Restaurant

So please, feel free to join me in attending both!

map

Unfortunately The Roastery is still labeled by the old name on Google Maps, Cafe Trieste

For public transit and other comprehensive information about how to get there, see the Debian announcement.

At both locations look for the Ubuntu t-shirts and penguins! At Henry’s Hunan I have reservations for dinner under “Bay Area Debian”

Filed under: events, tech, ubuntu planet

November Bay Area Geeknic

Tuesday, Nov 9th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Late last week Melissa Draper spent a couple nights at our home at the tail end of her visit to San Francisco. Friday evening we headed up to Ghirardelli Square for some ice cream sundaes. Then, having finished dessert, we headed back home to meet up with MJ to go out to dinner for a nice piece of Philadelphia at Jake’s Steaks.

Saturday we spent at the latest Bay Area Geeknic!

Coming from the Northeast US, having a picnic in November is a completely foreign idea to me. The weather was warm and sunny, so perfect! In November. I am going to start missing the snow pretty soon.


Robert Wall, Melissa Draper & me, photo by Mark Terranova

More photos by Mark are up here: http://picasaweb.google.com/tuxwingsgroup/Geeknic

Mark brought along lots of delicious veggie foods:

And on other grills we made up piles of hot dogs. Mark’s penguin suit came along to the Geeknic too – and for those with flammable concerns, no, he didn’t actually grill in the penguin suit, we were doing some fun promo shots for Geeknics ;)

I’ve put more of my own photos up on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157625344546226/

We ended up with 20 or so people coming out and in all had quite a successful event!

Filed under: events, tech, ubuntu planet

In which San Francisco parties for 4 days

Saturday, Nov 6th, 2010 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

It sure was quite a week to live in San Francisco, plus we had lots of visitors!

MJ’s father and father’s partner, Susana, were in town over the weekend, so on Friday night we joined them for dinner at Chaya on the Embarcadero. Saturday we met at Ferry Building for lunch and browsing of the farmer’s market, and later that evening ended up in Noe Valley at Firefly Restaurant.

Sunday was Halloween! For lunch we all met up down at Fisherman’s Wharf for some tastey fish street food, after which we headed up toward Giardelli Square for our afternoon entertainment, but first I got to admire the gorgeous day looking out over the bay and be yet again thankful to live in such an amazing place.

MJ’s father planned for us all to go on an Electric Tour Company Segway Tour. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the tour, but given my weakness for tourist things I was positive that I wanted to go. The tour starts out with 40 or so minutes of a group of 10 people learning how to use Segways and getting ready to ride them through the streets of San Francisco. I was a bit apprehensive about this and it took some time until I was comfortable riding the thing, but they were great about making sure we were comfortable before leaving the parking lot. The thing with Segways is that the more you think about it, the worse you’ll do on them. Once you get the basics down about how to get on and off them without falling (or bruising your shins) and realize that the handles are only for steering and not to cling on to for dear life, the rest sort of comes to you.


Me, MJ, MJ’s father (Susana took the picture)


MJ and me on our Segways!

When we wrapped up the Segway tour we all headed back to our respective home and hotel. That’s when San Francisco started going a bit crazy…

October 31st was exceptional for a number of reasons:

  1. It was the night of the 4th game of the World Series. The San Francisco Giants were playing the Texas Rangers in this 4th game and at the beginning of the game the series score had 2 wins for the Giants and 1 for the Rangers, and in spite of football’s dominance in the American sports scene, we do still love our baseball.
  2. Halloween! San Francisco loves Halloween, it may even be the biggest holiday here. People dress up and have parties for days, and on Halloween itself the parties in The Castro are legendary.
  3. Melissa Draper was in town October 31st was her birthday!

I managed to plan my night such that I could be a part of all these exciting things. Once we were back home we flipped on the first part of the World Series game and I got my witch costume together. We watched until MJ left for dinner with his family and I headed over to Thirsty Bear to meet up with Melissa and some friends to celebrate her birthday with some good food and beers. It ended up working out pretty well, in spite of the game Thirsty Bear wasn’t crowded so we could secure a quiet table near the front, and we could hear the cheers of the folks who were there so keeping up with the score wasn’t a problem! The Giants won the game, resulting in a 3-1 lead in the series, and we enjoyed a lovely dessert of cinnamon churros & spanish hot chocolate.

From Thirsty Bear a few of us decided to brave the crowds of the Castro and experience just what it was like to be down there on Halloween. We met up with Mark Terranova who was dressed as a penguin and after making our way through crazy crowds along Castro Street we ended up hanging out at Toad Hall.


Random Halloween partier, Mark, Melissa and me

Castro Halloween experience under our belt, we ended up heading home shortly before midnight.

Monday! Aside from it being a typical work day, it was the 5th game of the world series. Would the Giants win and take home the title of World Champions for the first time in 56 years?

They sure did. I watched the game at home, hoping desperately in the final innings, with Giants leading, that the game would be over in time for our 8PM dinner plans with MJ’s father and I’d be able to see it finish – and I lucked out. The whole city then erupted in cheers, screams, sirens, fireworks and honking horns when the final inning ended with Giants in a 3-1 lead. Our whole streetcar trip down to the Castro for dinner at Starbelly Restaurant was accompanied by the celebratory noise. Dinner itself was nice and quiet, and I enjoyed a nice mushroom pizza, and we were able to get home before the “riot” celebrations broke out later in the evening.

Now the first major league game I went to was back in April when the Giants played the Phillies and I’ve since fallen in love with the game, going to an A’s game where I got a signed baseball and to their stadium for a tailgate party, then to another Giants game in August where they played the Cubs. I then watched several of the post season games from home as they beat the Phillies to end up in the World Series. What a ride :)

Tuesday was voting day! In San Francisco when it’s time to vote you receive a couple of 100+ booklets with voting material in them with the propositions and candidates. This was my first time voting here so I got to see all the work it takes to make an informed decision – and it sure is a lot. That night saw one of the few Republican to Democrat switches in this season (our new governor is a democrat) and although Prop 19 failed, there was a fair amount of celebrating going on around here.

Wednesday was the Giants-win-the-World-Series parade! It took place on Montgomery and Market Streets, so I was able to somewhat see it on Market from our roof:

And I headed downstairs to mingle with the crowd for a few minutes before heading back to work:

The event ended up at city hall where thousands gathered for speeches and collective celebration (this time far more peaceful!). When I went out to lunch there was confetti all over the streets, the bars were overflowing and people everywhere where decked out in the orange and black of the Giants. What a day!

Thursday the city seemed back to normal aside from some “Let’s go Giants” chants now and then. Melissa (whose birthday I mentioned above) was our second visitor of the week, arriving at our place on Thursday afternoon and was here for our Geeknic today, which I’ll post photos of in a later post. Now off to the airport and to wish her well on her way back home!

Filed under: family, san francisco

It’s official, over 5% of Ubuntu Members are women!

Tuesday, Nov 2nd, 2010 by pleia2 | 27 Comments

5%

Today I’m delighted to announce that it’s official:

There are currently 625 Ubuntu Members and at least 32 of them are women, which means over 5% of Ubuntu Members are women!

We hate turning people into numbers, but late last year it was decided by the Ubuntu Women Project that we’d start tracking metrics of the percentage of women who are Ubuntu Members. This tracking was launched by Alan Bell and bases criteria of gender upon: self-identification, use of public resources (wiki pages, public blogs), and our own public knowledge from meeting each other at UDS and other conferences (there very well may even be more women working in our midst who have not chosen to disclose their gender in public).

Why is 5% important? Back in 2006 the oft-cited FLOSSPOLS declared that only about 1.5% of FLOSS community members were female. A poll in the Ubuntu forums community around the same time came back with a number of 2.4%. We have since launched Ubuntu Women and worked hard to support and encourage women who come to us to become more involved with the the project, and then to make that step to Membership when they were ready. It’s exciting to see the numbers improve over the years, and I hope that the Ubuntu Women Project can continue to make a difference moving forward, eventually driving itself to obsolescence.

Ubuntu Women

Of course Ubuntu Women didn’t help all 5% of these women. In my past few years of involvement I’ve been seeing more women becoming involved with the community on their own, and today there is a large number women who work on Ubuntu who have never been involved with Ubuntu Women at all. It’s exciting to watch Ubuntu become a more inclusive community and to see the passion and support of new people joining from existing community members overcome (or negate) many of the barriers that may have been problems in the past.

Interested in the project? If you want to help out or are interested yourself, head over to ubuntu-women.org to learn more.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

One Laptop per Child SF Community Summit 2010: Wrap-up

Monday, Nov 1st, 2010 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I’m happy to report that the OLPCSF Community Summit 2010 on Oct 22-24th was an outstanding success! We had an excellent team of volunteers whose skills in a variety of different areas really came together under Sameer Verma’s lead and the attendees of the summit itself brought energy to the event that was palpable.

On the evening of Friday the 22nd we hosted our opening reception and opened the registration table (where we gave out t-shirts and other goodies). We were treated to hors d’oeuvres, wine, beer and juice brought by volunteer June Kleider and her family. A local puppeteer was brought in for some entertainment and several OLPC-related groups had tables set up to show off their groups and hardware projects. Well into the evening the Dean of the SFSU Business College, Nancy Hayes, welcomed us and Carol Ruth Silver thanked the volunteers and presented Sameer with a proclamation from the Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom. proclaiming October 23, 2010 One Laptop per Child Day in San Francisco.


Photo by Mike Lee

More of Mike’s photos from the event are here: OLPC SF Community Summit 2010 Slideshow

And Mark Terranova got this great photo of Alex Kleider and me (thanks Mark!):


Photo by Mark Terranova

More of Mark’s photos can be found on Picasa here: OLPC

Being new to OLPC the whole event was very eye-opening for me, but a few things really stood out.

The first was Bruce Baikie’s presentation on alternative power sources. It turns out that while I certainly know that there are many parts of the world that “don’t have power” I’ve never actually thought much about the options they have for moving forward with building an infrastructure for power. Additionally, his talk made me realize that while in the first world nations we have centralized power grids. a decentralized utility may actually be a better way to move forward with some of these places, especially the ones which are more remote.

In his talk, he first started out discussing why alternative power sources were important (which touched upon lack of centralization I mentioned above, plus typical discussion about dependence upon non-renewable resources). He then moved into talking about some of the most viable options:

  • Solar cells
  • Micro-Hydroelectric (power from streams and hilltops)
  • Wind Turbines
  • Biogas from Animal Farms

Now of course when we talk about power at an OLPC event, the focus is going to be bringing enough power in to power the XO laptops. Following Bruce’s presentation the folks from XO Dock, who create a low-cost docking and charging solution that provides the One Laptop per Child “XO” laptops with safe storage and reliable power distribution.

The XO Dock group seeks to address this problem:

This is a room with power at a school with XOs, as you can see the laptops are being charged by daisy-chained power strips from just a couple of power outlets in the room. XO Dock group had a demo of their device which is built out of popular PVC piping (so, cheap, easy to find, and resistant to a lot of different conditions). As the weekend progressed we saw other solutions to this power problem too, several of which created in the field as the need arose.

I was also very interested to learn about the work being done on the XO School Server (XS). Sameer has been working with a student to do a variety of tests on hardware to see what will best run the server (standard x86 machines, XOs, etc), and this photo shows one of their experiments – an external drive glued to the back of an XO:

Aside from simple backups and the extra infrastructure capabilities that the XS provides, it was really interesting to see how people were making us of Moodle, and how they’ve integrated it in the XO.

In general I was inspired to hear that there are a number of large educational establishments using Moodle, including SFSU (our venue) itself. It’s certainly something I’ll need to look into more in the coming months for Ubuntu-related course material.

See, don’t worry Ubuntu friends! I haven’t abandoned you for Fedora-based OLPC work, but being part of this summit certainly drove home some of the things I knew about the flexibility and power of Linux and open source. It also introduced me to people who feel the same way about open education that I do about open source, and it was fascinating to see how much overlap there was in our goals and how open education on open source technology really is a match made in heaven. With both, now not only can students and teachers learn material, they can manipulate their whole learning environments to meet their specific needs and push the boundaries of what they can and have access to learn.

Awesome event, I hope we do it again next year! For more photos from the summit, check out the event wiki: Community_Summit_2010#Photography_Album_.26_Film.21

Finally, in what are some fascinating coincidences:

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

First Mountain View Ubuntu Hour

Friday, Oct 22nd, 2010 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

On Thursday evening I attended the first Mountain View Ubuntu Hour, where we had 13 attendees! This ended up being a bit of a combination Ubuntu Hour and release party for the folks in Mountain View, and I brought along a few of Ubuntu and Kubuntu 10.10 CDs for attendees.

Thanks to nUboon2Age of Ubuntu California for planning it. In spite of the long commute I hope to attend more in the future! We’re looking at planning a few throughout the Bay area per month, Mountain View joining the regular San Francisco Hours, and perhaps adding one down in San Jose.

This month is pretty busy for the team. In addition to several release parties, there are two more big events coming up for the team in the coming week:

Unfortunately due to my OLPCSF Summit commitments I’m not able to attend the booth at the East Bay Maker Faire, but I will try very hard to catch a train early enough to head down to Yahoo! for the “Lighting the Maverick LAMP” event, it should be a lot of fun.

Filed under: events, tech, ubuntu planet
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