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We bought a 3D TV!

Thursday, Aug 12th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The title of this blog post is true, but the deeper truth is that we had no intention of jumping on the 3D fad-wagon. When we settled on a range of TVs based on quality reviews on CNET the ones that we were looking at just happened to also have 3D. So we have a TV does 3D, yeah, you can laugh now, but the stunning 2D is what this TV is really about!

We ended up with the PN58C8000 58″ 3D Plasma HDTV which was on sale at a local Video Only store. We saw it first on Saturday and grabbed a Zipcar to buy it and pick it up on Sunday.

This is the first new TV I’ve ever owned, and certainly the largest, I never thought I’d have one this big! For now we’ve mounted it on the wall mount that was here at the condo when MJ moved in, but we’re looking into the slimmer picture frame mounts to get it closer to the wall. The 3D part of it is cute but kinda gimmicky, especially since the $100+ glasses are specific to the TV brand and there are only a half dozen 3D movies on the market. As a promo, the TV came with a starter kit that includes two pairs of glasses and a Monsters vs. Aliens Blu-Ray in 3D, but the store was out of starter kits and we need to pick it up when they have it in stock.

As far as bundled apps, we’ve already started enjoying Netflix, Hulu Plus and Pandora. I knew when we bought it that it would not support samba or nfs shares and figured we’d need some kind of system hooked up to the tv to handle it. Then I discovered Media Tomb, “an open source (GPL) UPnP MediaServer with a nice web user interface, it allows you to stream your digital media through your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices” – guess what our TV is? UPnP compatible! So by firing up Media Tomb, adding a few tweaks from a super helpful ubuntuforums.org thread and cataloging the directories I wanted I was able to get my music and movies playing on our TV! Very cool! Cable? Broadcast television? Not bothering with either one really. We do have a Blu-Ray player and Wii to set up though.

Before going TV shopping on Saturday we headed up to Crissy Field to take some photos of an XO for some photos for the OLPC SF Community Summit 2010 in October. Unfortunately it’s summer in San Francisco and apparently that means that it’s chilly and foggy every day.

Not that I’m complaining about the weather aside from it making my pictures all look gloomy, the sun does tend to come out a bit most afternoons, and I quite enjoy the cool weather (certainly am not sad about missing the 100+ Philly weather that struck this year, sorry guys!). Plus, locals tell me that the area gets warmer in September and October so there are warmer days ahead. But after a few months of lovely weather through the winter and spring I am starting to understand why people outside of SF complain that the city is cold and foggy – 20 minutes outside of the city and it’s warm and sunny.

Tuesday MJ and I headed down to AT&T Park for a game, Giants v Cubs. It turns out that I really quite enjoy going to the stadium for baseball games.

The Cubs won 8-6, and with 4 runs in the 1st by the Cubs and 2 in the bottom of the 9th by the Giants it made for quite an exciting game, especially at the end.

This weekend MJ has a friend coming in town to visit, and my todo list must have become sentient and started adding things to itself (certainly I didn’t agree to do all this!?). Looks like I’ll be pretty busy for the next couple weeks.

Filed under: life

Storage, Rogue, Touristing

Friday, Aug 6th, 2010 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

We bought a couple of in-building storage units a few months back, got them primed in May and did the painting in June and some final touch-ups in July. But eventually we were ready to move everything from our rental storage unit down the street to the ones we have here!

Last weekend we rented a truck and did the move. The main challenge of this move was finding a truck that would fit in the garage while also being large enough to fit the wardrobes we were moving, the answer ended up being a Ford F-450 stake truck, coming in just under 7 feet tall.


Rented storage unit – EMPTY!


One of the two big owned storage unit – FULL! The other one is quite full too.

Sunday evening we went out to celebrate the completion of the storage migration by heading down to the San Francisco Rogue Ales Public House. It also turned out to be the first day of Shark Week, and Rogue was up for celebrating.

As far as beers go, I started off with the Rogue Imperial IPA, which packs quite the ABV punch.

With my Brutal Reuben (Corned beef simmered in Brutal Bitter beer topped with Swiss cheese, Shakespeare Stout sauerkraut and 1000 Island dressing served on marbled rye bread) I enjoyed the Rogue 200 Meter Ale.

After dinner we headed over to Z. Cioccolato for some fudge before walking home.

Tuesday I made dinner plans with Silvia Bindelli and her fiance Claudio Criscione who were in the US traveling and decided to spend a few days in San Francisco. I met Silvia through Ubuntu Women, which she’s been a member of for several years, and most recently has joined the Ubuntu Women translator team to work on Italian translations of our wiki. We met up at Pier 39.


Silvia and me, outside of a store at Pier 39

I have to admit not being the best tour guide yet, having only been here 6 months myself, I will certainly have to keep studying tour guides and having my own local adventures. However, I did know a couple of things about traditionally San Francisco-y things, and was happy to oblige when they asked for suggestions. We ended up having dinner at Bistro Boudin at the wharf for a delightful dinner of local beers and famous sour dough bread bowl clam chowder. After dinner it was a brisk walk over to Ghirardelli Square for some ice cream sundaes. It was a real pleasure meeting both of them, and once again drove home the fantastic power of the Ubuntu community – go to any major city in the world and there will be Ubuntu community members there to greet you with a hug and a tour.

So, what’s the adventure for this weekend? We’re actually going to spend much of it at home sorting through some things post-storage-migration, but on my schedule for tomorrow or Sunday is taking an XO I borrowed from Sameer Verma on a photo shoot to try and get some neat XO-OLPC-in-San-Francisco promotional photos for an SF-OLPC Community Summit I’m helping plan in the fall. We’ll see how taking photos go, I have recently learned that summer in San Francisco means intense fog every day (they tell me it gets warm in Late August – October) which won’t be fantastic for picturesque photos of an XO with the Golden Gate, but fog is very San Francisco-y too, right?

Filed under: beer, life, san francisco

Second San Francisco Ubuntu Hour

Thursday, Jul 29th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Tuesday I hosted the second San Francisco Ubuntu Hour. We had four people in attendance (thanks for dropping by James, Grant and Michelle!).

It ended up being quite an evening for gadgets. As is typical, I brought along my mini9 and Grant showed up with his ever popular OLPC laptop.

Then Michelle showed up with a couple awesome toys! She had her HP Compaq TC1100, a tablet PC from 2005 that she has a couple of. The one she brought along was running Ubuntu 10.04 and she showed us screen rotation, how well the stylus worked and the nice docking station that goes with it. She writes a great post comparing it to an iPad on her blog: Meet Paddy-Pad, the new tablet in town.

She also brought along a Pandigital Novel, a $169 Android touchscreen device that’s sold at Bed Bath & Beyond. It was hacked back to a default Android navigation screen, the default one on the Novel being a bit slow. It’s a really cute 7″ full color device, and a default 800 x 600 resolution. I have to admit, after seeing it I was very tempted to head down to the store and pick one up for myself! But I think I’ll hold off until more of these cheap touchscreen devices start hitting the market. My planned use for it? Perfect RSS (and pdfs, and maybe even an e-book or two?) reading device.

In all, a very fun Ubuntu Hour, and I wish it could have gone longer! The coffee shop I selected for this is only open until 7, which really makes it so that our hour can’t go beyond that. There are a few other coffee shops in the area so I’ll be scouting those over the next few weeks to see if I want to alter the monthly Hour location.

What’s this Ubuntu Hour thing anyway? Check out more info over on the Ubuntu wiki, including how to plan your own (hint: it’s very, very simple!)

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Hour

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

How to Ask Smart Questions by Martin Owens

Saturday, Jul 24th, 2010 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

While I wouldn’t say that direct user support is one of my more substantial contributions to the Ubuntu community, I do contribute some in #xubuntu, #ubuntu-beginners and various not-strictly-support channels like some LoCo channels and #ubuntu-women. Doing user support on IRC is one of those things that makes me feel more connected with the community and requires essentially no commitment (you can start and stop at any time!) and I don’t mind parking my IRC client in a channel and glancing at it from time to time until I see a question I can answer and then take 5-10 minutes out of my day from to get someone on the right track.

As anyone who has done user support on IRC will tell you, there is some skill involved with asking good/smart/efficient questions (though I tend to shy away from the former two, since they imply that there are bad/stupid questions, which I’d argue don’t exist when someone is honestly asking for help). As such, I have seen dozens of guides over the years on the subject.

The community portion of help.ubuntu.com has:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GettingAnswers

Which links to the famous, if verbose and sometimes terse, How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

While these guides are helpful (especially the latter for it’s in depth analysis of the subject), neither of them are the kind of thing I want to pass along to my impatient little sister when I’m trying to give her a quick rundown of how to get help in a way that will get her the quality answers she’s looking for quickly and take some of the investigation burden off the volunteers who are working to help her.

Now, thanks to the tireless work of Martin Owens, a friendly, charming and to-the-point guide exists! He blogged about it on Friday but I figured it was worth taking a more in depth look at and to display all the images in a single blog entry in case there were folks who felt less inclined to download the fantastic PDF – maybe this will convince them it’s worth it, or inspire someone to spruce up the Ubuntu Community GettingAnswers wiki page with some of his slides?

The following are licensed under the CC-BY-SA license by Martin Owens, and these images below are taken from revision 6 of the document, released on July 24, 2010.

Check out his blog entry from Friday here: DoctorMO.org: Asking Smart Questions and for the latest version, use the Direct Download link.

So, without further ado, the images from the pdf:

Thanks again Martin for writing such a great guide that’s such a pleasure to read!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Xubuntu Artwork

Tuesday, Jul 20th, 2010 by pleia2 | 12 Comments

Some love Gnome, others love KDE, for me it’s XFCE all the way. When I jumped on the Ubuntu bandwagon several years ago it was only natural that I’d use Xubuntu.

Isn’t it lovely?

Now, I am completely useless when it comes to artwork[0], so I will once again stand on the shoulders of artistic giants here in this post, and appeal to those who are artistically inclined to lend a hand!

First off, during Ubuntu Developer Week last week Charlie Kravetz (charlie-tca) and Radomir Dopieralski (TheSheep) led a session on “How to help with Xubuntu” (logs). One of the things that Radomir mentioned was “Blogging about xubuntu, and generally all kinds of publicity are great” – which inspired me to put an Xubuntu logo on my blog, but the first challenge was finding the SVG of that lovely logo. I ended up snipping it from the Lucid Artwork brainstorm SVG.

From there I worked with Charlie to get the Maverick Artwork updated, so if you’re looking for a lovely image for your blog or article, you can now head there for these great new logos!



Download Xubuntu In Circle Logo SVG


Download Xubuntu Branding with Logo SVG

But wait, there’s more! The Xubuntu team didn’t just need the logos, they still need art for wallpapers, GDM logins, GTK themes, Icons, bootupscreens! Charlie went ahead and submitted a request to DeviantArt earlier:

Xubuntu needs your help with artwork

Shy about the process? You can also join #xubuntu-devel on irc.freenode.net for a chat or contact me directly (lyz@ubuntu.com) with your work and we’ll get your submissions where they need to go.

As useless with artwork as I am? The Xubuntu team is a very small one and is always looking for help with development, testing and many other tasks, so I highly recommend reading the logs of the “How to Help with Xubuntu” session that I mentioned above and checking out the “Contribute” portion of the menu over on the Xubuntu Wiki page.

[0] However, I will say that a short demo by Martin Owens of Inkscape at UDS really changed how I manipulate images. Count me in with the vector graphics crowd, Inkscape has come a long way and I’m now in love with the scalability of SVGs and how easy they are to manipulate these days once you spend a few minutes getting the hang of Inkscape.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet, xubuntu

La Trappe Cafe

Friday, Jul 16th, 2010 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

While I was down at Noisebridge for their weekly Linux Discussion meeting this week I met another local sysadmin who ended up having some great tips as far as beer in the city. That night I took advantage of one of his tips and MJ and I hopped on a bus down to La Trappe Cafe.

In case I haven’t mentioned it enough in the past, I love Belgian beer, it was my first love as far as beer is concerned. In Philadelphia I loved Monk’s Cafe, adored Eulogy Belgian Tavern, still have dreams about the cheesesteak I had at The Abbaye and was quite disappointed when I learned that ZoT closed down (their frites were a-ma-zing!). And getting to go to Brussels and spend two fantastic evenings at Delirium Cafe? Heaven.

But San Francisco? Where are the Belgian beers? A Belgian cafe? Indeed!

First up was tap beers! They have 19 taps and had the Gentse Tripel on tap which I’d never tried before, so I started there. It was quite sweet and strong, a nice a nice example of a Belgian Tripel. I also had a few sips of the St Louis Premium Peche, which is quite sweet compared to the lambics I tend to enjoy, but the peach was enough to take some of the sweet edge off and make it drinkable for me.

We enjoyed a nice cheese plate, going with a soft french cheese and a nice old gouda, yum!

I then hit the bottle list, which has over 400 beers, and selected the Ichtegem’s Grand Cru. It’s a lovely Flemish red, I’ll probably order more of these in the future!

And the food? What’s a good Belgian beer without some mussels and frites! Well… it’s still a good Belgian beer, but it’s just not the same. Plus I was pretty disappointed at running out of time in Brussels and never getting my mussels and frites there, so it had been a while.

I went with the mussels with the “Creamy Pastis” described as Tomato, leek and fennel in a light pastis cream sauce, which was quite good. And they make their own mayonnaise for the frites! So I got the ketchup (boring, I know!) and a delicious garlic mayonnaise, but I also quite enjoyed the wasabi mayo that MJ got with his frites.

I also have to check out Monk’s Kettle and City Beer Store which were also mentioned at the meeting on Wednesday.

Filed under: beer, san francisco

Viva Las Vegas!

Monday, Jul 12th, 2010 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

So, in Vegas we Saw Penn & Teller, got pink M&Ms, saw lots of animals, but how did we get there? Where did we stay? Where did we eat? Did we gamble?

As I mentioned in a previous post, the trip was over a 4 day weekend to celebrate our Anniversary on the 3rd (oh, and the 4th of July was around then too). We’d been talking about a trip for a month or so, changing our mind whether to go all the way to Vegas or to go somewhere closer like Monterey. It wasn’t actually until the Thursday night just prior to the weekend that we actually decided to go! We decided to drive, 9.5 hours down toward southern California and through the Mojave. We booked our hotel rooms at THE Hotel at Mandalay Bay (I wanted pools, and we’d heard Mandalay Bay has the best, plus a beach!). VIP tickets for Penn & Teller were also booked and we spent the evening pouring over more options for things to do while we were there.

Friday night we packed! Then took a 4 hour nap before hopping on the road a little after 5AM. The drive down was actually quite fun. Stopped at a roadside farm, Murray Family Farms to pick up some fruit for part of the journey, and passed a fair number of windmills.

Taking route 5 down we saw a lot of orchards, and I’d never driven through the Mojave before, it was quite the adventure. The ride was long, but eventually we were driving into Vegas and could see our hotel!

Upon arrival we parked, did some exploring, checked into our very nice corner suite room. The view from the room was great too, got to see the Luxor and part of the strip from one window, and could look down at the pool across the property from the other.

After checking in we enjoyed dinner and some drinks at an obligatory buffet which had the to-be-expected unlimited crab legs and other fine offerings. Now, the gambling? Vegas hotels seem to be set up so that you have to walk through or around the casino to get to anything, so we had seen it throughout the evening but I was pretty exhausted after dinner.

Sunday was the 4th of July. We picked up tickets for their fireworks and Mystic Roots concert and then enjoyed a very nice meal at Border Grill, outside with a view of the pool area. After lunch, covered in super strong sunblock, we hit the pool. The wave pool with beach was pretty novel, but it was so crowded – and in spite of the “don’t reserve chairs” rule posted everywhere, people do and so it was impossible to find a place to relax at the beach itself. Instead we headed up to one of the other pools where there was a DJ playing and a cover charge, which was slightly disappointing, but once inside I was happy we did it – 21+, not crowded, good music, good drinks that we could enjoy while chilling in the pool and all around quite the relaxing pool experience that I was looking for. Just writing about it makes me want to go back, it’s cloudy today in San Francisco!

An early dinner Sunday night was a really great Rodizio-style meal Rum Jungle. I’d never been to one, and service started off pretty slow, but as the crowd picked up more meats started coming around and they even started taking requests for which ones we had enjoyed the most and wanted more of. The lamb was amazing.

rum jungle meat

The fireworks on the beach were a lot of fun, even if the recorded music they played during it was a bit much. I was a bit unsure about it, but I really ended up enjoying the Mystic Roots concert that followed the fireworks. After the fireworks we hit the casino floor! We also snagged a late night snack at Raffles …and after some playing I went to bed $40 down, hah! Side note here: I’m a total sucker for the shiny, the blinking lights and the noises of slot machines while on vacation, so that’s where I spent my gambling weekend in spite of the terrible odds. MJ is now teaching me how to play casino Black Jack though, including etiquette!

Monday was the day we spent seeing the animals, getting pink M&Ms and seeing Penn & Teller, but we also had time for some other eating and gambling. Lunch was at BLT Burger at the Mirage before we went to see the Siegfried & Roy animals. I enjoyed a very good blue cheese burger, some sweet potato fries and we ordered a couple milkshakes which included liquor – yummy! After seeing the lions at the MGM I swung by M&Ms World and then met up with MJ at New York, New York for some gaming. I won the $40 I lost the night before! After that we headed to the Penn & Teller show. After that we grabbed some late night food at Pyramid Cafe at The Luxor. I wasn’t the biggest fan of gambling there compared to New York New York and Mandalay Bay, but the atmosphere was fun. Might even consider staying there some time.

Tuesday! We checked out at 11AM and had to drive home, but we put that off until the late afternoon and instead spent time at the Shark Reef Aquarium and then headed over at New York New York for a bit more gaming. Before the games we walked through the cute little “downtown” that they had constructed there at NY NY and I was able to have a lovely slice of Sirrico’s Pizza – real New York style pizza for the first time in months, I enjoyed every bite. I also rode The Roller Coaster, which was a blast!

Alas, the fun times in Vegas had to end, and after enjoying a couple “free” beers at the slots and ending up about $80 down (oops, Vegas owes me!) it was time to head home.

I put more photos up over on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157624308301333/

We’ll have to go back soon! I signed up for a few mailing lists which will email cheap weekend deals that I can take advantage of on weekends so we can skip off on more spontaneous trips.

Filed under: travel

Bay Area Geeknic 2.5: Tailgate party!

Sunday, Jul 11th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This morning I hopped on BART and headed over to the Oakland Coliseum for Geeknic 2.5.

Why 2.5? We wanted to have a Geeknic this month, but Mark is traveling the rest of this month, most people were unavailable last weekend due to the holiday, yesterday was a busy day for folks too, today was an A’s game… When would we have it? Where? …how about a tailgate Geeknic at the A’s stadium before the game? Half geeknic, half baseball game!

Oh, and I didn’t take a picture, but perhaps in homage to the final world cup game today, I saw a whole family with (and using!) vuvuzelas.

I admit heading home before the game since I’ve got a lot of grown up stuff at home to do today. But the geeknic itself was fun! I uploaded a few more pictures here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157624347826137/

Filed under: events

Animals in Vegas (aside from the humans)

Saturday, Jul 10th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I asked a friend of mine for some advice regarding “stuff to see in Vegas” and among her recommendations was to check out the MGM Tigers, along with a mention of tigers at the Mirage. Animals in Vegas? Cool! So I went searching for what other kinds of animals could be found in Vegas and learned that there were also dolphins and a couple aquariums!

On Monday our first stop was Mirage where there is Siegfried & Roy’s Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat. First on the tour was the dolphins!

One of the great things about these exhibits is that despite it being in Las Vegas, there wasn’t any kind of cheap dolphin show – instead it really is a dolphin habitat which is used for research, the animals don’t do tricks or shows. We did manage to catch one of the handlers while he was feeding and doing some health checks on them, so we were able to ask questions and hear them do their cute dolphin noises.

Then it was on to see the big cats! Of course there were a few white tigers…

And a tiger who quite enjoyed a short bathe in the 100+ Vegas summer weather.

Both of these exhibits were completely outdoors and probably took an hour to thoroughly walk through, take pictures, read signs… It was hot, but the shade at the exhibit where the big cats are was a lifesaver. In all, very enjoyable! There is also a separate Aquarium at Mirage but we decided against visiting that aquarium on this visit.

We took the Las Vegas Monorail to get to Mirage, and the Mandalay-Excalibur Tram to get around that day, and as part of that journey we walked through the MGM Grand, where there was a Lion Habitat!

Tuesday morning it was off to the Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay!

The only fish that held still so I could take a picture:

A very cool octopus that I also got a very cool video of as it decided to wander across the tank (usually when I see them they’re sleeping!):

And the aquarium also had a Komoto Dragon!

But the real big exhibit of this aquarium was the huge shark tank that included fish, sea turtles and lots of sharks. Photos didn’t really come out, but I did take a nice video which got quite the sampling of the critters in the exhibit in less than a minute!

We took the audio tour when we went through the aquarium, so it took about an hour or so, including the stopping for pictures and petting the rays. The aquarium does start outdoors, but then you go down and inside the main aquarium part where it’s not too hot.

In addition to the short octopus and the shark tank videos above, I also took a couple others:

Rays at Mandalay Bay
Jellyfish at Mandalay Bay

So, now that I’ve seen all the animals in Vegas, what will I do next time? It’s tempting to stay at the Mirage and see the kitties and dolphins again…

Filed under: animals, travel

New Ubuntu Women Logo

Friday, Jul 9th, 2010 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

One of our Maverick goals was to redesign our team logo to work with the new Ubuntu Brand. We enlisted the talents of Troy Sobotka (who came up with our great former logo) to come up with a simple, clean idea which we can use on the upcoming redesign of ubuntu-women.org and as our logo moving forward.

Last month Troy delivered the following really slick promo samples for the new logo for the team to discuss:


This week I had the pleasure of announcing the availability of these new logos in all their SVG glory over on his bzr branch for the project.

In addition to the deliverable logos, Troy included a very impressive Standards Manual to, as taken from the Standards Manual itself, “know how to apply a wordmark or logo combination can do so effectively, consistently, and without an added worry of design issues.”

All of the following images have a transparent background in the SVG, I used aubergine as the background of the white logos so they’d acutally show up on my blog ;)

First, just the Venus Circle of Friends logo:


Source: ubuntu-women-cof.svg

And then the full logo, in multiple colors!


Source: ubuntu-women-slate.svg


Source: ubuntu-women-black.svg


Source: ubuntu-women-white.svg


Source: ubuntu-women-orange.svg

Huge thanks to Troy for doing such an extraordinary job on the new logo. Also thanks to Amber and vish who have been coordinating the discussions of the logo with Troy.

Ubuntu Women Community Identity by Troy James Sobotka is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet
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