Today Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) was released!
Congratulations Debian!
Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) Released!
Saturday, Feb 5th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments
Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet
“Nothing but the web”? The Cr-48.
Thursday, Feb 3rd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments
Today I went downstairs to pick up an Amazon package which had arrived, and to my surprise there were two packages waiting for me.
The second package, to my shock and delight, turned out to be a Cr-48 from the Cr-48 Pilot Program for Google’s ChromeOS.
Now before you ask, no, I’m not installing Ubuntu on it or doing other crazy rooting. I’m pretty excited about ChromeOS and the potential for the consumer market. Will people find a laptop which is barely more than a web browser sufficient? Could I? So it’s ChromeOS all the way for me.
From the pilot program site:
It’s ready when you are, booting in about 10 seconds and resuming from sleep instantly. There’s built-in Wi-Fi and 3G, so you can stay connected everywhere, and a webcam for video chat. The vibrant 12-inch LCD display, full-size keyboard and oversized touchpad let you enjoy the web comfortably. And at just 3.8 pounds with over eight hours of active usage and a week of standby time, it’s easy to take along for the ride.
What did we leave out? Spinning disks, caps-lock key, function keys, and lap burns.
The Cr-48 is available exclusively to participants in the Pilot program. Learn more
More information can be found here: http://www.google.com/chromeos/
I opened it up, hopped on the wifi and went through their great “Get Started with your Chrome notebook” introduction. Then I turned it off and switched it into Developer Mode.
Once I had that I was able to boot into that mode (it deleted all my preferences though, so I needed to put in the wifi key again and create a new user account) and load up a terminal. Now I had the ability to ssh out to my server and to see the filesystem. Now I’m sure plenty of people have posted this information online already, but since I collected it for a couple of friends who asked, I’ve posted a bunch of stats here.
So, first impressions? It’s very nice to hold. As the description says it’s light and isn’t hot. The simplicity is very appealing. It has a VGA out, one USB port, headphone jack and an SD card slot. The SD card slot is particularly appealing for me because I can pop the one out of my camera, put it in here, and hop to a terminal to upload the photos to my server. Not sure how “normal” people would handle photos though, upload directly from their cellphone to some online storage and bypass their computer completely? The images in this blog post were uploaded from my Nexus One directly but I will want to take some pictures with a regular camera. The laptop is fast and I was able to run full screen with youtube and pbs.org videos without a hitch (although my first attempt at hulu failed, the sound sounded like a bunch of tin cans knocking about, oddly it seems to work now though…). The “always online” thing that they make so simple is pretty clever, the introduction proclaims that you can enable 3G via Verizon and get 100M free per month with sign up (they require a credit card to sign up), after which you can pay for access by purchasing a plan starting at $9.99/mo. I don’t care for the printing situation, you need a Windows machine to serve the printer for that (which I don’t have), but they say support for Mac and Linux are coming soon.
But what about privacy? What if I don’t want all my data in the cloud? If these are concerns of yours, you should stick to your current desktop. Personally I gave up privacy for simplicity long ago, my home address has been public for years and now my cell phone number is too. I adore Google Latitude and have location reporting turned on in Twitter on my phone. My princessleia.com email has been handled by Google since 2007. Whenever Facebook comes up with a new privacy invading policy I double-check my profile to make sure I’m still sharing as much as possible. I live a pretty public life by choice, but obviously not everyone is comfortable with that.
Do I think the common human will be able to use a laptop like this? I think the iPad is already looking in this direction. A lot of people use webmail already, if they haven’t given it up entirely for communication on Facebook exclusively. In the past when I’ve worked on computers for acquaintances, local data was rarely a concern when doing a reinstall. Their computer use was primarily for communicating and playing online games. There certainly are a lot of people who play installed games on their system and require other software, so obviously a laptop like this won’t work for them. It’s actually the same crowd that I typically wouldn’t recommend Linux to (need that 3D accelerated Windows game that will never play in WINE and the custom work VPN software for Windows? You’ll have to stick with Windows).
And do I think I will be able to use a laptop like this? I’ve only started using it tonight, but I have to say I’m optimistic, especially if they came out with one that was netbook-sized. I am puzzled that they are pushing ChromeOS and Android though. They strike me as shockingly similar and targeting the same market, slap a keyboard on any decent Android tablet device and you’re pretty close to a Cr-48. It’ll be very interesting to see how this all shakes out. I wrote this blog entry on the Cr-48 and I have to say that the keyboard is nice to type on. Oh, and I don’t miss the caps-lock key.
Disclaimer: I applied for this pilot program just like everyone else and am writing this just because I’m fascinated with where the internet is taking us application-wise (plus it’s Linux and a shiny new toy!), but my boyfriend does work for Google.
Linux devices
Sunday, Jan 23rd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments
Linux Journal has a “New Products” section of their magazine which frequently features (among other things like books and software) new devices that are running the Linux kernel. It’d be interesting to know if their job has gotten easier over the past couple years regarding devices. In addition to my traditional PCs running Linux, the following consumer-level devices which use the Linux kernel: Nexus One phone, B&N Nook, Samsung television and Samsung Bluray player.
The choice of the Nexus One (well, more importantly, the G1 I had prior to it) was influenced by it’s Linux-ness. For all the negative press about the Android kernel being highly modified and criticism about lack of timely upstream merging of their changes, I’m quite sure that it (and Verizon’s advertising machine) has put Linux into the hands of more people than anything else ever has. That said, as far as smart phones go I probably would have gone the same way even if it didn’t have a Linux kernel – the Android platform allows for the flexibility I want and the culture of free (both beer and freedom) in the way applications are submitted to the Market and deployed appeals to me. Even the Android branding itself is Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License, allowing everyone from individuals on Etsy to toy companies to produce Android-branded products with ease. All of this makes for a very happy me! Especially when I see MJ walk through the door with a whole case of Android toys. I’m still gushing over these things.
You could say that the purchase of the Nook was influenced by it’s Linux-ness too, but the Kindle uses a Linux kernel too.
The TV and Bluray player? We didn’t even know they ran Linux until a few weeks ago when MJ was browsing through the TV menus and stumbled upon the open source licenses.
It will be interesting to see what the coming years bring with regard to the proliferation of Linux devices and where the desktop itself goes. I have to admit that I think Chrome OS (or the like) is going to become a cheap and compelling option for a lot of people as even more services move to the cloud.
CLS West 2011
Saturday, Jan 22nd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments
If someone had told me 5 years that I’d be attending a “Community Leadership Summit” I probably would have laughed. As far as community leaders go I was a pretty reluctant one, I’m shy and an introvert, certainly not the poster child for charisma. I make my living as a Linux Sysadmin, not strictly a profession you associate with community leadership. But it turns out that for all my initial reluctance, I enjoy it and I want to be as good at helping the community as I am with deploying a new server cluster, so on the 15th I found myself at West Coast Community Leadership Summit (CLS West).
This was my first unconference and I have to admit that I had some skepticism about the format. Discomfort grew as everyone who introduced themselves to me worked as some kind of Community Manager for a living.
Luckily all this discomfort melted away as people proposed topics and the schedule quickly filled up to give us a full day of interesting sessions that I felt I could learn from and contribute to.
The first I went to was on “Lurker Activation” within communities. The discussion started out with some casual statistics about the overwhelming number of “lurkers” within any given community (defined as people who visit a community site regularly but don’t contribute by signing up and/or contributing content of any kind). Estimates were from 90-99% depending on the community. A major point brought up in the session was that getting a majority of the lurkers activated is impossible, the number will always be high, but there are a lot of things you can do to help make people more active, including:
- Making project management transparent (no more of those private conference calls with core contributors, if you do most of your communicating on IRC – have your meetings there too, in public)
- Remember that even as a community leader or manager, you are still a part of the community (top down dictators need not apply)
- Have a clear mission and stick with it
- Lower barrier to contributions as much as possible without sacrificing project/community integrity
- Get rid of site-specific registration (use openid, facebook connect, and twitter and whatever else is popular)
It was also interesting hearing from a woman who is a self-proclaimed “professional lurker” who will read (and pass along information privately to friends) but won’t sign up and won’t reply to threads. Some of the features she said were appealing where things like the ability to up/down vote something without registration and things like Netflix’s polls which simply emailed you a link which you could quickly click on a reply to and have nothing else bother you (no additional clicking, no piles of text to read, just a simple “thank you” and you have the expectation that such a simple action was helpful).
The next session I went to was “Best Practices: Recognizing and Rewarding Community Contributors”
We were fortunate to have Randy Farmer in this session, one of the authors of Building Web Reputation Systems (you can get an idea of his book from his Google Tech Talk on the subject – I just watched it myself tonight). He helped the session start off on a good foot by defining the criteria of our discussion with three broad types of contributors: altruistic, egocentric and corporate. Different communities respond differently to different incentive systems so you really need to know your communities before seeking to apply one. It was fascinating to hear from others what their communities use and the success or failures they’ve had. One of my fellow Ubuntu California Team members was also there and we were able to talk a bit about the successes and failures thus far in the Ubuntu community with regard to reward systems (Travel sponsorships to summits and Ubuntu Membership with perks that have value in a technical community? Great! Launchpad karma? Not so much.). But perhaps the most interesting discussion for me that came out of this was the discussion regarding hiring practices. In some ways it’s encouraging to know that a company behind a community project hires from the community, but it can backfire when you over-hire (all of a sudden ALL the projects in the community are led by employees) or community members start feeling embittered and that they are entitled to jobs for doing the same work that their former peers are now being paid for.
After this session we had lunch, which was a lovely spread of Indian food – if a bit on the spicy side for some of the attendees.
It was then on to “Building and Managing Communities of Minorities” for a fascinating look at the similarities that all communities of minorities face. In addition to having other women in tech representation (including the amazing BJ Wishinsky of the Anita Borg Institute and a representative from Oracle looking for tips for the Duchess women in Java community) we had folks from online and offline ethnic communities, an accessibility community representative and a champion of LGBT communities. We quickly discussed why these communities exist, the typical life cycle (serving our core first, and often later working beyond the charter to help other, similar groups), the challenges we face (including divisions and arguments within our own communities) that are remarkably similar across minority communities. Sheryl Sandberg’s TED talk Why we have too few women leaders was also mentioned during the discussion which I finally was able to watch tonight, very good!
The last session I attended of the day was “Hi, I’m an Introverted Community Manager” and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The session ended up being a bit funny because people who were open in other sessions let shyness show through. I have to admit not getting a whole lot out of this session (introductions ran a bit long), but it was nice knowing that I’m not the only introvert who is in the position of being a community coordinator/manager/leader. Now I just need to figure out how to tell my fellow Ubuntu friends how vital the lonely “recharge” time after each day at UDS is!
The evening wrapped up with a big community gathering at a loft on Mission. The acoustics in the venue weren’t great for quiet discussion, but I managed to have some awesome discussions, including lots of excellent geek talk with one of the MAKE bloggers. And it was a delight to finally meet and chat with Marsee Henon, the manager of the User Group and Professional Associations program at O’Reilly who I’ve worked over email for the PhillyChix since 2003.
Linux kernel on my TV and Nook, earthquake, Caligula and Ubuntu-Debian meetup
Tuesday, Jan 18th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments
It’s hard to believe January is over half over already, it feels like just yesterday that MJ and I were walking home from the NYE fireworks!
Work has been busy, but I’ve learned a lot in the past couple weeks about debugging problems with multihoming in Linux and how the packets move around with IPSec. I absolutely need to brush up on my networking skills though, so I think we’ll take some time in the upcoming weekends (I’m on call next weekend, he’s on call the weekend after – lots of time at home!) to teach me more. I was also once again able to take advantage of an extra public IP address and my old laptop to do some internet-facing testing with some of the applications, which reminded me that I need to sort out the problems which remain with my current computer setup. I would really like to have a second virtualization-enabled system and a linux demo and CD-burning system to travel with. I thought about doing this all with a laptop, but while reviewing the great ZaReason laptop I realized that I have a very hard time using a big laptop. Instead I think I’ll end up replacing my firewall with something beefier, and just get an external CDRW for my netbook (thanks again to Norm for letting me know how much cheaper they’ve become!). As for demoing at events? If I don’t want to toss the latest and greatest on my netbook booting from USB should be a viable option.
While on the subject of Linux, MJ discovered that, perhaps predictably, our TV (Samsung PN58C8000) uses a Linux kernel. While looking up some model number information for the TV he noticed on one of the screens a line that said “Press Red Key to see Open Source License.”
Upon pressing the red key, you learn that there is indeed a lot of familiar software on the TV.
GPL software: Linux Kernel, Busybox, Binutils, wireless_tools, xfsprogs, iptables
LGPL software: Glibc, ffmpeg, smpeg, libgphoto2, libusb, SDL, libiconv, libmms
Plus, a full copy of the GPL that you can scroll through. Very cool, you’re doing it right Samsung!
On January 7th I felt my first earthquake: Magnitude 4.1 – NORTHERN CALIFORNIA. Woo nc71506865! I was sitting at my desk and felt a bouncing like someone was stomping down the hallway, but no one was in the hallway – oh! I’m in California, maybe that was an earthquake! So I ran to the window and looked down at the street, where I quickly realized I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see, so I went back to my desk to see in #ubuntu-us-ca:
16:10 < akk> Woo, small earthquake.
And react (with a bit too much enthusiasm):
16:11 < pleia2> OMG!!
16:11 < pleia2> I FELT IT!!!
16:11 < pleia2> my first earthquake :D!!!
Then twitter was… atwitter with everyone else in the bay area talking about it too.
Then on January 11th Nova did a special on Deadliest Earthquakes which was thoroughly scary and made me wonder why we keep building our cities on major fault lines (then I remembered that California is astonishingly beautiful) and made me marvel that there isn’t more devastation when a big quake hits.
We brought Caligula and Simcoe to the vet on Saturday the 8th for a checkup. Simcoe got a clean bill of health, but the vet was concerned about Caligula’s teeth so she recommended a teeth cleaning and did a panel of blood tests to confirm that he’s healthy enough to go under anesthesia for the cleaning. Unfortunately the blood results came back with high levels of some proteins, so we decided to do a more thorough protein levels check to try and confirm that these levels were simply due to inflammation related to dental problems and rule out cancer as a possibility for those levels. Thursday the vet called me with results the, they couldn’t rule out cancer so the vet had a meeting with an oncologist Friday morning to review the results. I was pretty worried at this point, giving Caligula lots of hugs and confirming that the pet insurance we have would cover it (it will). Friday the vet called back with good news from the oncologist, the results ruled out certain types of cancer and it’s still possible that the elevated levels are due to his teeth problems. So we went ahead and scheduled a series of x-rays of his chest and abdomen for this upcoming Saturday, and planned that if those look good they’ll go ahead with the teeth cleaning the same day. Then on Saturday night he stopped eating. Caligula is a big cat and eating is one of his favorite things! When he still hadn’t touched his food come Monday morning I scheduled an appointment for that evening. He got his x-rays (look good so far, waiting on a more thorough review) and was sent home with some bland diet food, having been given anti-nausea medicine and antacid. He finally started eating again last night. We had to cancel his teeth-cleaning entirely to wait until his stomach settles down, but hopefully we’ll get that sorted in the coming weeks. Assuming all of that goes well, we’ll go for some follow-up blood tests in the coming months. What a worrying week! But things are looking positive for my big kitty.
Last Wednesday I hosted another Ubuntu Hour + Bay Area Debian Meeting. The Ubuntu Hour fizzled out on account of the coffee shop closing early, so the 4 of us who showed up just hung out on the sidewalk for 30-45 minutes. We had 7 people come out to the Debian Meeting (dinner) at Henry’s Hunan. Lots of good discussion about Debian and Ubuntu and I got to talk about some of my multi-homing adventures of earlier in the week. Photos were taken and my excitement for the upcoming release of Squeeze was captured:
(Which reminds me, they just announced today that they now have a target release date: the weekend of 5th and 6th February!)
Plus, two things of note came out of this meeting. The first was that one of the attendees mentioned that they saw my name in the The Official Ubuntu Book (5th Edition). Really? Neat! So when I got home I had to check, and it indeed was the case:
How exciting!
The second was that we had a great discussion about ebooks. I’ve been on the fence about ebook readers for a long time and when fellow Ubuntu California Team member Robert Wall picked up a Barnes and Noble Nook the other week I asked him for a review, which I got at that Debian dinner. His praise (which included discussion of how useful the Calibre ebook management software in Linux is) tipped the scale for me, on Sunday we headed down to Barnes and Noble and I got a black and white wifi Nook. I love it already, and I plan on finally finishing some of the great ebooks I have (most notably, Confessions of a Public Speaker, which is delightful but reading on a computer screen just doesn’t do it for me). I’m also the newest fan of Project Gutenberg, I will finally get to finish Moby Dick! As far as Linux compatibility goes the device is great, it mounts as standard usb device so you can simply copy files over, or use Calibre to send to the device (which it correctly sees as a Nook). And finally, I’m delighted to have another Android device – Linux kernel on my TV! Linux kernel on my ebook reader! Now I just need to buy a sturdy carrying case so I can travel with it.
2010
Thursday, Jan 6th, 2011 by pleia2 | 3 Comments
2010 began with New Years in Philadelphia with MJ, on his final visit before my move, and our friend Nita.
I then had my final weeks in the Philadelphia area. This final Philadelphia winter turned out to be the snowiest winter in recorded history. What a send off!
In February my apartment was converted to box land and on February 16th, MJ, the cats and I bid farewell to Philadelphia and flew to San Francisco.
My life with MJ in San Francisco these past 10 months has been amazing. Insert all the mushy stuff here :) I miss Philadelphia and certainly miss my friends, but I haven’t for a moment regretted my decision to move out here to be with him.
Conferences! Surprising to many these days, I hadn’t actually been to a tech conference until the spring of 2008. In 2010 I went to 4.
- Open Source Business Conference (San Francisco)
- Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (San Francisco)
- Ubuntu Developer Summit (Brussels, Belgium)
- OLPCSF Collaboration Summit (San Francisco)
Plus various Geeknics, LUG meetings, Ubuntu Hours and other Linux events. I’ve never been so active in a local community, and while I have to admit that it was a lot of fun, by the end of the year I was seeking to reclaim some of my free time to get back to core project work. Finding a balance is challenging when there is always so much cool stuff going on, but it’s certainly a wonderful problem to have.
Travel! I hit Silver on the USAir Dividend Miles program. While travel has always been on my list of things I wanted to do, it’s always taken a back seat to more pressing needs. This year I was exceptionally fortunate to get sponsorships and other opportunities that allowed me to travel quite widely and modestly (sponsorship to Belgium, hotel paid for in Dublin).
- February: Philadelphia to San Francisco (one way – the move!)
- May: San Francisco to Brussels
- September: San Francisco to Philadelphia
- October: San Francisco to Dublin
- November: San Francisco to Las Vegas
- November: San Francisco to New Hampshire
For a total of almost 40,000 miles. I have come to the conclusion that (in spite of crazy TSA stuff) I love to fly and I find no shame in being a tourist. Plus I’m infinitely grateful that I’m finally in a position to travel, having the monetary means (including sponsorship opportunities) and flexibility with work so I could travel outside the constraints of typical “2 weeks per year” American vacation time allotment (the conference in Brussels? I was able to use PTO, not vacation time. Philly trip? I worked from the hotel all week.). We also took advantage of a long weekend over the 4th of July to drive to Las Vegas.
When we weren’t traveling or doing local Linux things, we were playing the tourist in our own beautiful city. I love San Francisco, I fell in love when I first visited here in 2008. I love the climate, I love that it’s such a tech mecca, I love the touristy nature of it, I love the food, I love the cable cars, I love the Giants and the A’s! Loving all of this probably means I’m not nearly cool enough to be here, but I do feel at home here. And without a doubt, nothing beats being near an ocean again. The Pacific on a crisp day brings me back to when I found solace in late night walks to ocean in Maine as a teenager and I find a peace that has been elusive for years.
2010 was, without a doubt, one of the best years of my life so far. May 2011 be just as grand.
Under the sink organization
Tuesday, Jan 4th, 2011 by pleia2 | 1 Comments
I have to admit, going out and doing things all the time hasn’t left us a lot of time to get down to getting the condo done, we still have boxes around and there are a few major tasks we need to complete before we can call it “done” (as “done” as any home ever is). I’m aiming for the end of February to have the important things done, or at least scheduled, here’s hoping for a box-free March.
Over the holidays we did get one thing tackled: under the sink organization. The Container Store launched their 30% off elfa sale and we took advantage of it.
First we tackled under the bathroom sink. We went with the Cabinet-Sized elfa Drawer frames with baskets, a narrow and an extra narrow 4-runner fit perfectly under the sink. I wish I had a before picture, but it looked something like this: #$#%^$#^%. I could never find anything!
Then it was sorting out under the sink. We actually did the trash can a few weeks back, and as I mentioned then we went with the 8 gal. Undercounter Pull-Out Can. We also needed something for the recycling, so during the elfa sale we also picked up and extra narrow Cabinet-Sized elfa Mesh Easy Glider. The top of the runner easily comes off with the basket, making it super easy to take out the recycling. Win!
Today we received the replacement for the light/fan combo for the bathroom, which we hope to get installed in the next couple weeks. Tonight we’re heading down to Ikea to look at some stand-alone under desk drawer options. Tomorrow morning we’re having an upholstery guy come out to take a look at one of our chairs. Woohoo progress!
Filed under: life
Looking for a quick way to help Ubuntu Weekly News?
Monday, Jan 3rd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments
The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter has been in a state of flux since the Editor in Chief had to step down. I worked with Nathan Handler over the weekend to get Issue 218 out the door today covering much of December and it gave me a taste of how challenging and time-consuming the task was (and made me hugely thankful that the former Editor so thoroughly documented it all). It also made me realize that it could be more succinctly divided up into small sections that volunteers can take – we just need to do a better job of documenting that so we can give pieces out easily when volunteers come along.
But until that documentation is complete, what can you do today? You may not have noticed, but we had to drop the “In The Press” and “In The Blogosphere” sections for this latest issue because those weren’t so easy to read back for the past month and find. Here’s where you come in.
See a great or interesting blog post (outside of Ubuntu Planet) or news article about Ubuntu?
Add it here: http://pad.ubuntu-uk.org/UWN-Ideas
You may also drop by #ubuntu-news on irc.freenode.net and give us links, or send an email to our mailing list at ubuntu-news-team@lists.ubuntu.com (emails from non-subscribed addresses are moderated, but we check the moderation queue regularly) or send an email to editor.ubuntu.news@gmail.com
Feeling even more energetic? Include a blurb about the article that we can use in the UWN!
Thanks everyone!
Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet
Ubuntu Hour, Ubuntu upgrades at CACS with Partimus
Saturday, Jan 1st, 2011 by pleia2 | 4 Comments
On Thursday I wrapped up work and MJ and I headed down to Palo Alto for an Ubuntu Hour at Antonio’s Nut House.
It ended up being a great venue for the meeting, we got a booth right near the door, it was relatively quiet, the food was good and we had plenty of space for our attendees (8 of us in total, but we had room to expand should we have had more). I had the opportunity to finally meet Jessica Ledbetter, who has recently joined several projects in the Ubuntu community that we work on together. It was also worth noting that of the attendees, half of us were women, and among those ranks we had a sysadmin and two programmers.
Friday I had the day off from work, so I got up bright and early to meet up with Christian Einfeldt and James Howard of Partimus at the Creative Arts Charter School on Turk Street here in San Francisco.
The plan for the day was to complete the installation of Ubuntu 10.04 on the 31 lab computers which were running 8.04. James had the PXE server which hosts the installation isos for the lab systems prepped (including the required ldap and nfs configurations), and had made the appropriate changes in gconf so the files in the home directories on the NFS share would not cause problems between gnome versions.
Our first step was to boot up all the machines in the lab to confirm they were all working and then grab a replacement for the one machine which wasn’t booting properly. From there we brought them all down and then booted them off the network to launch the installers in batches of 4.
Installers running:
While the installers ran Christian had a couple of folks come by who had an Ubuntu system at home which was failing. It turned out to be the harddrive but the system itself was quite old so Christian had a new system prepped for them. I was able to use DSL (available via PXE from James’ server) to get the drive mounted on the old machine, and luckily was able to salvage the user data.
I also took the time there to use the tools above to salvage another computer from the storage closet and get it prepped with Lucid to be a drop in replacement should any other systems fail. It was then that I realized that I need to rebuild my travel toolkit… until I remembered that I already did, I just need to remember to bring it with me! My friend, and fellow old hardware salvager, Jim Fisher also had some suggestions for a couple of cheap kits that will do the job and be even easier to manage, including this 27-Piece PC Tool Kit w/Pliers, Screwdrivers, Nylon Zipper Case.
I ended up heading out around 3PM after the Lucid upgrades were complete. One of the things James implemented during the upgrade was switching from Firefox to Chromium as the default browser for the lab systems at the request of one of the teachers. He’s also going to be seeing about getting more RAM (most of the machines have 512M, they’d like to increase that to 1G) and 10 or so graphics cards to use in some of the spare systems which need new cards from one of the local hardware recycling groups.
In all, a very productive day!
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.