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Italian Market, Rodin and Art Museums

Friday, Jan 29th, 2010 by pleia2 | 5 Comments

As I’ve mentioned in some other posts, I’ve been trying to hit the major tourist destinations in the Philly area before my move. Last weekend the Rodin Museum was at the top of my list, but then when I popped into the #plug channel waltman suggested I check out the Italian Market in south Philly. So I did!

I had been to Pat’s and Geno’s before, went for the first time a little over a year ago with MJ, but we didn’t actually venture down 9th street to the market.

I was given a list by waltman: “cheese — dibruno’s, claudio’s. bread — sarcones, Anthony’s has good coffee” and I followed it! Picked up some delicious cheeses and pepperoni from DiBruno Bros, where I saw this great sign out front:

The bread from Sarcone’s Bakery was delicious with said cheese, and the coffee from Anthony’s was great on that chilly day while I walked down the street shopping for some fruits and vegetables. On Monday evening I even made pizza from my Italian Market ingredients!

I then met up with my friend Mike who came out from New Jersey for lunch at Potbelly Sandwich Shop on City Ave. Then it was off to the museum!

What actually prompted my visit was learning that one of ten casts of The Thinker in the US was there, and I wanted to see it.

Voila! It turns out there is one in San Francisco too, so I’ll have to visit it once I’m out there! We then ventured into the museum itself, past an empty fountain (the courtyard probably looks much nicer in the summer!) and then past The Gates of Hell.


Rodin Museum entrance, photo by Mike Edwards

I have to be honest, while Rodin certainly made a lot of beautiful pieces, my favorites are the ones which are most life like. Much of the abstract or “rough” pieces he did held no interest for me.


Saint John the Baptist Preaching base, photo by Mike Edwards

I will say though that for some reason I was completely captivated by his piece, The Hand of God, I might have to pick up a miniature cast of it at some point.

Since the museum ended up being a small one and we had the rest of the afternoon in front of us we then wandered up the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to spend a bit of time at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.


View of Ben Franklin Parkway from steps of the Art Muesum, photo by Mike Edwards

I had seen about 2/3rds of the museum, this trip I ended up wandering around the second floor through the European Art 1500-1850 section. There is a lot of literal and religious art (both Christian and Roman) in this period and it’s some of my favorite. But since this is sculpture day, the following are two of my favorite pieces in that wing of the museum.


Bust of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Jean-Antoine Houdon, French, photo by Mike Edwards


The Birth of Venus, c. 1799, Heinrich Keller, Swiss, photo by Mike Edwards

We ended up staying until the museum closed at 5 and I headed home before it starting raining too much.

Tomorrow I’m planning on going to Adventure Aquarium in Camden, which I’ve never been to. Then heading over to Old City Philly to find some early dinner. Hooray Philadelphia adventures!

Just over 2 more weeks until the move, my apartment is full of boxes.

Filed under: philadelphia

Ubuntu Community Learning Project Update

Friday, Jan 29th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Monday the 11th The Ubuntu Community Learning Project (UCLP) held a meeting to review our progress through and since the holidays.

The UCLP is attempting to make professional education course materials, because we believe that education is one of the biggest barriers to getting new users and increasing existing users abilities.

We are working to develop course material in 5 different segments, How to Use, Maintain, Develop, Spread and Teach Ubuntu. This material is structured in the form of classes that can be taught in real life classrooms, on IRC and/or via our Moodle site.

The team decided upon the licensing (CC:BY-SA) and to formally use AsciiDoc for core material (for rationale, see Martin Owens’ blog post: Document Formats for Learning Materials) and Nigel Babu has been working hard with the team to develop documentation for this. We now have a documented Course Layout for in-classroom classes and Charles Profitt has been working on the Moodle side for online learning.

So many avenues to explore! How do you contribute? First, Join the Team by swinging by to have a talk to us in #ubuntu-learning or engage us on the Ubuntu Community Learning Project mailing list (you’re also welcome to email me directly at lyz@ubuntu.com, please do!). We currently have people writing courses in .odt, on the wiki, in bzr using AsciiDoc and in Moodle, so there are a number of ways to get involved now. We also need folks who are interestied in doing peer review of the classes. Other tasks are outlined here.

Ready to write? Here’s the quick FAQ I tossed together based on the most popular questions that come up in channel.

  1. How do I select/sign up for a topic to write about?

    2. See Course Assignment

  2. What is the layout I should follow?

    3. See Course Layout

  3. Where do I submit what I’ve written, what is the development workflow?

    4. See Course Development

We’re still in the process of completing full documentation for our asciidoc+bzr procedure for contributions (I’m in the middle of writing my first class!) so if you have any questions, please ask us.

How do you take advantage of the materials we’ve created thus far? Martin Owens has already written several sysadmin classes:

Currently being developed and reviewed:

  • Using Launchpad by Duane Hinnen
  • Contributing to UCLP with Bazaar and AsciiDoc by Nigel Babu

You are also welcome to visit our Moodle site, where Charles Profitt has imported some courses and we’re actively developing others. And if you’re an educator, be sure to check out Charles Profitt’s Ubuntu Educators Ning Network.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu User Day Success!

Saturday, Jan 23rd, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Ubuntu User Day

We just wrapped up our first Ubuntu User Day! Now, whose idea was it to have our first Ubuntu User Day last 15 hours? What a day! A 1 hour introduction, plus 13 instructors teaching 14 classes in #ubuntu-classroom!

Thanks to our awesome crew for making this long day fun one, and for doing such a fantastic job of tag-teaming it so that we all could take breaks throughout the day.

Thanks to all our instructors for putting so much time into each of their presentations. And a special thanks to duanedesign who filled in when one of our presenters fell ill, and starcraftman who ended up doing a second session to fill in for a presenter who couldn’t get online.

And thanks to everyone who attended these sessions, we have nothing without an audience! Thanks for your fantastic questions! And thanks for the feedback we received on our survey.

In case you missed it, logs and outlines (for sessions that had them) for the whole day have been posted on the wiki here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UserDays/Logs/January2010

Ubuntu User Day en Espanol

Prefer Spanish? Diego Turcios reports the smashing success of the Spanish User Day today as well! Logs for those sessions are on their wiki:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DiaDelUsuarioUbuntu/LogsEnero2010

Now it’s time for me to get some rest :)

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Philly Zoo and more move preparations

Saturday, Jan 23rd, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last weekend my mother was visiting. We ended up spending much of the visit just relaxing, went out to dinner a couple of times, I introduced her to Firefly and she ended up borrowing Tru Calling after she started watching it while I was working on Monday.

We did end up heading down to the city on Saturday though, to go to the Philadelphia Zoo! I’d been there twice before since moving to the Philly area, the first time with MJ and Bae and the second time back in 2008 for the Brew at the Zoo.

Kitties!

They finally had gotten rid of the last of the elephants, I miss them! The San Francisco Zoo also retired the last of their elephants a couple years ago due to similar problems – too small of a living environment and no budget to build a new one. But the new Big Cat Falls is a fun exhibit.

Giraffe!

Penguins!

After the zoo we headed up to City Ave to grab some dinner at Chipotle. She flew home on Tuesday afternoon, after which I broke out the moving boxes and started packing up more things.

In addition to packing I’ve had to do a reanalysis of my network in an effort to cut the number of systems I’m running down from 5 to… less. I ended up retiring my Sparc Ultra10 last night, it had been functioning as a firewall and backup server. My Xen server is now my firewall, and I no longer have a system hooked up to my TV, which is fine for the last three weeks I’m here in PA. So I’ll be bringing out my old laptop, my netbook and my xen server/firewall. My desktop? That’s being replaced by pieces for a system I’m having shipped to MJ’s, we worked this week to pick out the parts from newegg and order it with a cute white and pink flowers case! It will be a significant improvement from my current system, 2G of RAM really hasn’t been cutting it when I start playing with VirtualBox and a lot of high resolution photo editing. I still have a lot of things to do before the move, but I’ve gone ahead and got most of my service cancellations set up, been calling around to figure out other things I need to do. It’s going to be a busy three weeks.

Tomorrow I’m meeting up with my friend Mike to visit the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, which will cross off another museum on my “to visit before I leave Philly” list. Hooray!

Filed under: animals, family, life, philadelphia

Pink USB Cable

Saturday, Jan 23rd, 2010 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

More pink! A couple weeks ago friend of mine, knowing of my love for pink electronics and gadgets, sent me a pink USB cable.

So here’s my pink mini9 charging my pink G1, with my brand new pink (ok, the photo makes it look more purple than it is) USB cable :)

Thanks again, Fabian!

Filed under: computers, pink

The Mercer Museum

Saturday, Jan 16th, 2010 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

I’ve been trying to visit some of the local attractions I’ve missed while living here. I know as soon as I move away I’ll realize there are a hundred other things I wanted to see before I left, I’ll just have to see those when I come back for visits!

One of the things on my list was the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, and I was finally able to make it out there this past weekend with my friend Stephen. In spite of the lack of heating in the museum on that chilly day, it wasn’t a disappointment!

The building itself is quite exceptional from the outside. It becomes even more so when you learn that the entire thing was made from concrete. Even the window frames are concrete! According to the museum, this was done for 2 reasons: so the building wouldn’t burn down and to help prevent robbery. And according to wikipedia: “Locals mocked his choice of building materials, but on completion of the museum, he lit a bonfire on its roof to prove that it was fireproof.”

Inside, the place is packed from floor the ceiling. Every wall and railing has a boat, carriage, apple press… you name it, hanging from it. The ceiling, 5 stories up, has chairs, tables and cradles hanging down, seemingly precariously.

Many of the items really were “normal life from America pre-1900s” but there were some more amusing pieces, like the “Vampire Killing Kit” pictured above, which the museum believes to be of contemporary origins made to look old for the benefit (or deception?) of vampire lore collectors.

You know, I feel quite silly for not realizing the “tortoise shell” design that a lot of plastic combs and hair clips was not just a design – it was because these same things used to be made from tortoise shells. I think it’s because I never could have imagined that such things could be made from the shells, amazing. Also pictured above are some tools for clock-making, as I was trying to figure out what “geeky” pursuits people got into, and if I wasn’t a woman what profession I’d be most likely be inclined to follow – clock-making seemed sufficiently fascinating.

Much of what occupied my mind as we walked through the museum was “wow, how would I have survived in the days of churning butter, washing clothes by hand, curing meat and preserving fruits, making my own clothes…?” With a dash of “no wonder we’re fat now!” as we take so many tasks for granted that were such a chore 150 years ago – laundry day today means quite a different thing than laundry day back then.

Another thing that had me preoccupied was the feeling that Henry Mercer was pretty eccentric, to say the least. He cataloged and wrote categorization rules for thousands of items, and while it may be fascinating today (perhaps a testament to his future-thinking), I can’t imagine what people of his day thought of him for collecting all of these items, some of which were still contemporary in his day, and building a whole museum around his collection. According to the museum many of the displays are the same as when he assembled them upon building of the museum.

Toward the end of the visit, on the 6th floor, you start finding strange stairways and halls which frequently end abruptly or go into staff-only sections of the museum. This is where it really gets interesting (and chilly, the 6th floor was freezing!). In one of the rooms there was an old horse-drawn hearse, in another gallows – complete with trap door, which you might miss if you don’t stop to take a look since you walk *under* it as you walk through the oddly-shaped room. Another room is full of wood and coal burning stoves, and opens into a maze of stairways and hallways which goes into a room full of front plates used on these stoves, pictured above.


Lyz outside on the 6th floor of the museum (photo by Stephen)

We spent about 2 hours at the museum, and in spite of the previously mentioned chilly weather the only floors of the museum which were very cold were the 5th and 6th, with a coat on the rest of the museum was quite tolerable, I’m glad they keep it open in the winter in spite of the chill. For dinner we hopped on 202 and headed down to East Norriton for indian dinner at Bombay High – yum!

What is my next Philly adventure? I’ve been before, but with weather today in the comfortable 40s I’m taking my mother out to the Philadelphia Zoo. But first… some coffee.

Filed under: life, philadelphia

Ubuntu User Day on January 23rd

Friday, Jan 15th, 2010 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Ubuntu User Day

Yesterday Chris Johnston announced the upcoming Ubuntu User Day.

From the announcement (emphasis is mine):

The Ubuntu User Days Team would like to announce the first Ubuntu User Day, on January 23, 2010. This will be a very informative one day session geared towards beginner and intermediate Ubuntu users, as well as people who are interested in using Ubuntu. We have 14 classes covering topics ranging from installing Ubuntu, finding help, equivalent programs, using IRC, getting involved in the Ubuntu Community and more. We have enlisted the help of many talented people to lead these classes throughout the day.

These classes will be taught in #ubuntu-classroom with questions being asked in #ubuntu-classroom-chat on irc.freenode.net. Please visit http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UserDays for a complete class list and schedule of classes.

There is also a Spanish version of Ubuntu User Days being offered on January, 23, 2010. Please visit Día Del Usuario Ubuntu at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DiaDelUsuarioUbuntu for more information on the Spanish Ubuntu User Day!

The classes will begin at 12:00 UTC and end at 3:00AM (Sun) UTC

The birth of this event was at a Community Roundtable session at the Ubuntu Developers Summit back in November in a moment where the remote participation really shined. As soon as the idea came up there Chris Johnston and Penelope Stowe volunteered to help via their remote participation in IRC, and within a few minutes I had an email drafted for the Beginners Team to seek collaboration. As the project grew we enlisted the help of Mark Cox, leader of the North Carolina LoCo Team and Nigel Babu who recruited the help of several Indian LoCo Team members to present for the day and then worked with Nathan Handler to get the Lernid schedule submitted.

It’s been a real delight to work on this project with all these fantastic folks and to see all these teams come together for our first Ubuntu User Day. So join us on Saturday, January 23rd to share with us the fruits of our labors!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

New Leader for the Ubuntu Women Project

Friday, Jan 15th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This morning I had the pleasure of announcing the appointment of the new leader of the Ubuntu Women project as selected by the Community Council.

Congratulations to Amber Graner for being selected for this role!

The leadership nominations process for this first formal project leader was outlined here. We were fortunate to have three fantastic candidates for this role, all of whom had an overwhelming amount of support from the community. I’m very excited by the thoughtful visions and goals for the project all three of them outlined on their wiki pages (available here: Amber Graner, Melissa Draper and Penelope Stowe) and it is my hope that they can all be incorporated into our vision for the future. A big thank you to everyone who has been involved in this process.

Most of all, I’m energized and excited for this new era of the project. Congratulations to the Ubuntu Women Project for taking this next step! It’s an exciting time for the project with such an active surge of contributors and a strong drive for more support and positive visibility within the greater Ubuntu Community.

Amber will be holding this position for the next 6 months to help guide us through our Lucid Cycle RoadMap and we will work to establish a formal voting team for the project. After 6 months the leadership position will be re-evaluated and with the voting team in place the team we will work toward a formal election as we determine the best leadership structure for the team moving forward.

Finally, appointment of a team leader is an unusual request for a team to make to the Community Council, but as a team we found ourselves in the unique position of being a four+ year old team that never had a formal leader and having largely been organically grown with no formal “membership ranks” or process for voting for a leader. A huge thanks to my fellow Community Council members for their consideration and support during this process.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

NYE and since

Monday, Jan 11th, 2010 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

I had a fantastic time with MJ while he was visiting over New Years.

To celebrate we met up with some friends in Old City Philadelphia for dinner at Triumph Brewing. I had been to their location in New Hope never been to the one in Philadelphia, and I have to say I prefer their Philadelphia location. Beer-wise I went with the Triumph John Bull Pale Ale which was quite good.

After dinner it was off to Penn’s Landing for the countdown. It was chilly and drizzly out but fun anyway, great company.


MJ and Lyz on NYE at Penn’s Landing

While he was visiting we also went to see Sherlock Holmes, which was fun but forgettable. I think part of this has to do with my preference for Basil Rathbone and Peter Cushing as Holmes and as lovely as Robert Downey Jr. is I don’t think I could get over that.

In the week since the visit I’ve been busy catching up on things from the holidays, managed to accomplish the Herculean feat of getting my inbox below 20 emails (from a peak of near 200 before the holidays) and I have a whole pile of Ubuntu related meetings in the coming weeks. Last Wednesday I attended Mark Jason Dominus’ PLUG Central talk on “10 useful tools and how I wrote them” which was enjoyable as his talks always are (slides here). Tomorrow I’ll be heading down to PLUG North for PostgreSQL Replication Solutions presented by Bruce Momjian which I’m really looking forward to.

Speaking of speaking, based on a blog post by Rikki Kite I picked up the pdf version of Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun and have been reading it and 40 pages in I’m still captivated. Spending this past year exploring the world of public speaking has been quite the eye-opener for me and I have to say that I’m quite pleased to have decided to get into public speaking, something you couldn’t have paid me any amount of money to do just a year ago. Books like this help a lot, knowing that it’s natural to be nervous when you speak and mistakes are things to be anticipated and handled rather than avoided.

My mother is coming to visit on Friday and we’ll be spending the weekend exploring Philly! I had my sister visit in the spring of ’09 but in all my years of living down here I’ve never had my mother visit so I’m looking forward to having her stay here for a few days. Moving stuff is coming along, but I’m trying to avoid packing too much until after my mother’s visit, I don’t mind living with piles of boxes but I’d rather not do it while I have company :)

Filed under: life

2009 was…

Saturday, Jan 2nd, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Full of freedom, adventure, travel, love, success, independence and fun.

Sprinkled with just a bit of heartbreak, loss, failure and confusion.

In all, the good far weighed out the unfortunate, it was a good year. Looking forward to 2010 being even better!

Filed under: life
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