I discovered Cantillon with Michael a couple years ago over at Union Jack’s Inn. Wow. I’ve since had it in bottles one other time, and last year I was able to snag it on tap during a lambic happy hour downtown at Zot.

Tonight I was up at my local place-to-buy-singles (grumble strange state laws) and hit the Cantillon take-out jackpot! They had 2 Cantillons chilled, and another case had just come in, which they opened for me while I was checking out.

Of the three, I’d only ever tried one before, the Rosé de Gambrinus. I’m very excited about the Vigneronne, which I might crack open with some fish later this week. The Bruocsella 1900 Grand Cru was the one they had just received in, I think I’ll be saving this for a special occasion.

I spent the long holiday weekend in San Francisco with MJ. So I’ll start there, for those of you not hovering over twitter MJ and I started dating this weekend :)

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We’ve been close friends for years, and in spite of the distance this progression in our relationship makes me very happy.

But on the trip itself! I started work an hour early on Thursday so I could skip out at 3PM and drive to the airport, I flew out on a non-stop 5:55PM flight arriving in SFO around 9PM. MJ was clued into into the fact that flowers and food are the direct route to my heart, he had a vase of beautiful, mostly pink, flowers for me back at his place. And the next morning? Breakfast at The Crepe House on Polk, where we split a delicious crepe entrée and an amazing fruity dessert crepe.

From there it was off to the Asian Art Museum to check out their Lords of the Samurai exhibit. The exhibit was fantastic, and after we spent some time on the 3rd floor exploring the beautiful Indian and Persian exhibits they had. From there we headed out to Yerba Buena Gardens and explored the surrounding area. The garden itself is stunning, must have a picnic there someday!

Dinner was at MJ’s favorite local sushi bar, where he knows the sushi chef and got us an amazing assortment of exciting rolls and some spicy mussels that I fell in love with, finishing off the meal with some fried green tea ice cream. Yum yum!

Saturday was the 4th of July. The day began down at the Ferry Building Marketplace where we had lunch at DELICA rf1 Japanese delicatessen (hm, a lot of Japanese on this trip). It was beautiful out and we were able to grab a spot outside where we could take in the beautiful view of the bay, watching the ferries come in. Wow, I miss the ocean so much. After lunch it was over to Ciao Bella Gelato for some gelato. Um, wow, yum! I’ve been having so much good gelato lately.

Later, we decided to head down to Pier 39 for the 4th of July festivities. The place was quite crowded by the time we got off the super crowded bus down to the pier, but not so bad to be too uncomfortable. We snagged some take-out dinner of fried calamari and shrimp and clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl at Sabella & Latorre’s on Fisherman’s Wharf.

From there we found a great spot to stand and watch the 9:30PM fireworks display, and were even able to peer across the bay and watch a bit of the Sausalito fireworks.

The fireworks wrapped up and we wandered around the wharf for a bit before heading up to to Ghirardelli Square for some yummy ice cream sundaes. From there we walked back to the apartment to pick up the car and drive over the Golden Gate to see a view of the city at night from there. Beautiful view, terribly romantic :) We didn’t get back until quite late.

Sunday morning I headed back to The Crepe House, because I really couldn’t get enough of that place, and I had arranged to meet up with, Megan Gruber, a girl I knew from High School and who recently found me on Facebook. We hadn’t really talked much in the past decade, and I think since leaving Maine she’s only the second person I’ve seen from those days (my close elementary-middle-high school friend Leslie being the other). It was fun meeting up, swapping stories about what we’ve been up to and what we’re doing now. Eventually we parted ways and headed back.

Sunday night I caught the very very sad redeye back to Philadelphia, with a layover in Las Vegas where I won $2.25 in slots ($12 in, $14.25 back - woo!), and touched down at PHL shortly after 6AM. Luckily MJ was able to snag me first class tickets on my way home (thank you!) so sleeping for much of the second leg of the trip was possible and I was able to work today. Tonight I got to have snuggly and playtime with my kitties, who my friends Jon and Crissi stopped by to check on Saturday, I sure missed them, but I’m missing MJ and San Francisco already.

Following my Saturday trip up to NYC, I spent Sunday with Stephen down at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. We spent all their open hours there, from 1-5PM, and what a great little museum! I never even knew it was there!

Sadly after charging my camera after my NYC trip, I completely forgot the battery in the charger when I went down to Philly, I spent the entire museum visit with just the camera on my g1. I’m not the biggest fan of using cellphone for cameras, but the g1 didn’t do so bad! I actually shrunk all the full-size photos in this entry a bit.

At 5 we were shooed out of the museum and drove over to the new Chipotle in University City for dinner. Earlier in the day I had twittered about being downtown and my friend DarKrow dropped me a tweet to meet up, so he joined us for dinner. After dinner he introduced us to the best gelato I’ve ever had at a chain called Capogiro Gelato. I ended up with a cone of their Tiramisu and Chocolate Banana. Following that I headed home.

This weekend I’m heading out to San Francisco for a long weekend visit with MJ. I’m flying out Thursday evening and taking a redeye home Sunday night/Monday morning. Plans? Sushi! 4th of July celebrations! Snuggles! Samurai (…in a museum)! OK, maybe won’t get to everything, but it should be a fun weekend :)

Yesterday I left home around 9AM to head over to New Jersey to meet up with my friend Mike who I was traveling up to New York City with. Plans to head up there came together when I learned my friend Wilmer of the Bitlbee project was going to be up there. Then learned via twitter that Nikkiana would also be in town! Mike was headed up for different reasons anyway so going together seemed to make sense.

The work Mike was doing in the city required use of his car, so for the only the second time in my life I got to ride a car into NYC (the last time was with my grand parents, YEARS ago, even they normally took the train). This was the first time I’d ever been through the Lincoln Tunnel, and was delighted to learn that I still had cellphone reception there, so I twittered from under a river! We parked on 7th Ave, touched base with our respective friends and then headed to Burgers & Cupcakes for lunch. On the way down 7th we saw this smashed car, yikes!

Burgers & Cupcakes was awesome. We had planned on hitting a burger joint that Mike’s friend recommended, but then learned they don’t open until 4PM. By then burgers were on our mind so Friday night we were searching for burger places to eat at. What could be better than burgers and cupcakes?

I snagged a salmon burger, which while not your typical giant-american-burger was immensely satisfying. They had a burger and milkshake special so I couldn’t help but order a chocolate shake to go along with it. And dessert? A delicious carrot cupcake.

After lunch Mike left for his engagement I had some time to kill before meeting up with Nikki and Wilmer. I wandered around 7th Ave for a bit, then got bored and headed toward 6th. To my surprise a long stretch of 6th was shut down for vendors of all sorts, and made for a lot of fun to walk through.

I met up with Nikki around 2:30 and we continued the wandering. Having known her only online until then via Ubuntu stuff it was very cool to meet up and talk in person finally. We snagged some $1 lemonades and enjoyed wandering. Around 3:30 I found Wilmer finally (grin, we were supposed to meet at 2!) and he joined us. We headed toward the Empire State Building to see about going up to the top, but the wait was a bit long so we satisfied ourselves by taking pictures of it instead. It’s a very big building.

Unfortunately Mike’s plans changed unexpectedly and caused us to have to leave the city around 4:30PM - d’oh! I think next time I’ll see about parking my car at a train station in NJ and braving the trip up myself.

In spite of the shortened trip, I am very glad I went up and was able to see people for a little while. And New York City! I quite like Manhattan, going up is always a fun adventure. Plus, now that Nikki is up there I have at least two friends in the city who I’d be comfortable calling to meet up, fun!

Today the weather is beautiful yet again! And I’m going down to Philadelphia with Stephen to go to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. I just learned it existed a few weeks ago and have been trying to find a day to go. Then I think we’ll be hitting Chipotle for dinner, yum!

I’ve discussed my use of Rune Stones infrequently in the past. A little over five years ago I wrote an atheism essay* for my website where I said:

My father (and grandfather, apparently) were interested in Runes. While I was in high school I had made my own set of runes. I saw the Rune stones for what they were, not some magical all-knowing oracle, but a method in which to focus my mind on my current place in life. A tool to relax me and organize my thoughts so I could evaluate them rationally and in perspective. This really helped me relax and be settled!

I’ve pretty much backed off from all things “spiritual”** this past year, it wasn’t fitting into my work flow, the whole divorce threw me so off-balance that I needed quite a bit more than reflecting with a pile of rocks to get my thoughts sorted. But tonight I needed some “relax and settled” and for the first time since last year I pulled out my father’s Runes*** and did a quick three stone cast (past, present, future) and the results are the subject of this blog entry.

As is typical when I need to do a cast, I was in a receptive mood this evening and reading it was simple and accurate (I believe readings should always be simple and accurate when you’re feeling receptive, any stone in any position will probably coincide with something going on in your life if you pause to think about it). In this case it was even quite hopeful. Deep down I am quite hopeful about my future, as tough as things have been and sometimes continue to be. And as much as the “sitting around thinking” self-reflection and talking with friends has helped me get through the very difficult time I’ve had these past couple years, I think it’s time for me to reach back and tap back into some of the “spiritual” tools I’ve lost touch with. They help me focus my self-reflection more, and now that I feel I’m starting to be at a stable spot in my life (much less grabbing at anything to hold on) I think cultivating such focus could be helpful again.

I am glad I reached for that bag of Runes tonight :)

* While I am still technically an atheist, these days I instead refer to myself as a secular humanist. This is primarily because I am not defined by my lack of faith in God, I am defined by the philosophy outlined in secular humanist doctrine.

** So since I’m a secular humanist, I don’t believe in the supernatural and using the term “spirituality” is often misplaced for me. But I am not sure what else to call these things that other people believe are spiritual tools (like Rune stones) but which I use for self-reflection under the assumption that there is nothing spiritual about it and the random chance of something like rune stones just has me focus my thoughts on specific elements of my life that can be applied to the cast.

*** My father’s Runes? Why not the ones I made in high school? I still have the ones I made, but an unfortunate accident caused several of them to crack. Making a new set of Runes for myself may be in my immediate future. Does anyone know of a kind of material that can be shaped (or etched) and fired (well, baked) at home that would be pretty decent and durable? I no longer have access to a free kiln like in high school (even something for pay… I wouldn’t even know where to begin!). I’m willing to consider materials that aren’t clay, one of my four sets of Runes are made out of glass.

It took a week and a half, but my white G1 finally has a lovely pink case. I wasn’t a huge fan of the white G1 itself, but it certainly was the way to go with the pink case :)

More pictures here: http://princessleia.com/images/pinkg1/

Well, it happened again. In spite of saying I’d blog more regularly - I haven’t! I haven’t actually been a hermit every day, either.

Going back all the way to the beginning of the month, when my friend MJ was in town we headed down to Philadelphia to see Star Trek at The Franklin Institute Omnimax. So it wasn’t optimized for the hugemongous Omnimax screen so it ended up looking a bit warped, and I’m glad I’d seen it prior to seeing it there so I didn’t miss anything, but it was quite a fun experience. And while mentioning MJ, I was quite pleased with myself to have gotten him in touch with the Ubuntu Ireland team while he was in Dublin so he could snag a couple pints with them. What an awesome team to extend such a welcome to a visiting American… or do the Irish simply use any excuse to have a pint? :) I will have to make it out to Dublin one of these days to see for myself, I’m jealous of everyone involved in said pint night.

Blinker is fixed again! Getting the mechanism in the door for the window ended up costing me a bit over $200 (ouch) but it’s nice to not be holding up the window with masking tape anymore, a week and a half of that was more than enough for me. Inspection on the car is due next month, I’m really hoping it’ll pass without too much trouble and that nothing else goes wrong with it for a while.

I’m in love with my G1. I was glued to it for the trip down to the Southeast Linuxfest last weekend so we had hours and hours to bond. Since I’ve never had a smartphone before just about everything is novel. Linux kernel on my phone? Squee! Maps on my phone? Glee! Traffic too? Beautiful screen? Yeah! Awesome interface! And the best? An excellent ssh client so I can hop onto IRC from anywhere. Oh, and when I’m on call at work I can easily forward calls to it and tunnel into work servers to check email. Oh, and it’s a phone too! Not a bad one, for that matter. Tomorrow I think I’ll skip down to King of Prussia to get a screen protector, and see if any of the shops down there have pink G1 covers before I start looking online. The only complaint about the phone is the backlit keyboard. On the black version of the phone it’s not much of an issue, I bet, but the white one has a grey keyboard which is a bit unfortunate in medium light: without backlight I can see keys fine, with backlight I can barely see them! But I figure as phone complaints go, this is pretty mild.

I did a talk on Contributing to Open Source Projects at PLUG North this month which I think went quite well. A huge thanks to MJ and David A. Harding for offering fantastic review of my slides prior to the presentation, their input and content additions really put the polish I needed into the presentation. I finally got around to uploading my slides here (they are actually somewhat useful if you check out Note view in Impress). Which reminds me, I hadn’t written a presentation in a long time, the last time I did I used S5. I was geared up to use that again until I read Emma Jane’s OpenOffice.org: an outline for preparing your slides, with the guidance from that post I had a very pleasant Impress experience, and I suspect I’ll be using it in the future. The only snafu? My desktop is running Ubuntu 9.04 with OpenOffice.org 3, while my mini9 that I did the presentation on is still running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS with OpenOffice.org 2.4, the version difference caused my pretty pink bullet points to disappear on 8.04, which I had to scramble to fix prior to heading out to the meeting.

I finally picked up a Wii Fit a couple weeks ago. It’s actually been quite fun so far. Plus I’m riding my bike some and being pretty good about eating better (the Southeast Linuxfest weekend being a gigantic exception, wahoo southern food!). I’m really looking forward to when the pool here at the apartment complex opens, it’s almost July, what are they waiting for? I’d love to be able to skip down to the pool for a little while each nice day for a swim. Love swimming.

What else… okay, so I did spend pretty much this entire week hermited in my apartment with my cats. Except for today, when I had lunch with Stephen. Oh how I adore the swiss and mushroom burgers at Stoudt’s, and wrapping up the afternoon with a brownie and coffee ice cream sundae at The Udder Choice in Ephrata was awesome. Plus it was very nice to get out and get my mind off a recent break up that’s had me down.

Now I’m going to try and get some sleep and hope this miserable, humid weather goes away soon.

This past weekend I rode down to the Southeast Linuxfest in Clemson South Carolina. I tagged along with Freenode reps Jonathan Simpson and Crissi, plus Andrew from the Pennsylvania Ubuntu LoCo team. I was able to take Friday off from work for the drive down to Charlotte, NC where we were staying, the drive down was long (ended up being about 12 hours) but Jonathan and Crissi had a powerstrip in the car so our laptops and cellphones could stay charged for the drive! Wahoo, G1 with IRC for the whole ride down! Plus they kept us somewhat occupied with lively discussion and proof-reading some of the freenode materials that would be available for the crowds.

Saturday morning we got up bright and early to head down to the Linuxfest in Clemson. On the way down there was a giant peach:

But other than that the drive down was uneventful. We arrived around 10AM and got the Freenode booth set up.

As for me, I met up with several people I’d only known online until then, caught up with some other Ubuntu people I’d met various places, and at 11 I skipped over to Amber Graner’s “Why not You?” session where we talked about talking to people about F/OSS involvement, which was a great session and I was finally able to meet Beth Lynn Eicher who I’d only vaguely known until then through her involvement with WPLUG, and Jimmy Harris, a Florida LoCo team member who I’ve worked with on the Ubuntu USTeams project (so Jimmy, going to mentor for us? Pleeeease? :)). The only talk I ended up going to all day was Pete Graner’s Ubuntu Kernel talk after lunch, which was a very interesting and informative talk, after which I headed over to Amber’s second session of the day on Ubuntu LoCo teams. Again it was a great discussion with a lot of valuable insight to team planning offered by Jimmy, Amber, Mackenzie Morgan and others.

I’d say more, but Mackenzie and Amber have both written great entries that cover much of what I wanted to say. Most notably is something Mackenzie pointed out - the percentage of women attending! I don’t know how many actually were there percentage-wise, but there were noticeably more than other Linux events than I’ve attended, it was very encouraging. But here are their posts:

Mackenzie Morgan: Southeast Linuxfest Post
Amber Graner: My First Linux Fest: SELF (Southeast Linux Fest)

The much of the rest of the event I spent talking with people informally, which is when I bumped into Ian Geiser, a Philadelphia local who I’d for some reason lost touch with and hadn’t seen in how long? Over 5 years? He was speaking on KDE at the fest and tending the KDE booth! I’ve hopefully successfully convinced him to come out to PLUG meetings again …or at least do some social stuff!

After the event wrapped up we headed over to Rock Hoppers Restaurant & Bar for the SELF after party! Ian was nice enough to give Andrew and me a ride over there while Jonathan and Crissi parted ways with us and headed out to dinner. We sort of just chilled out in the back and had dinner and chatted for a couple hours until it was time to skip off for the evening (fairly early, but we did have to get back to Charlotte before it got too late). Good times :)

Sunday morning we slept in a little bit and then started the long drive home. Huge thanks to Jonathan for driving all day :) We got back in the Philadelphia area around 9PM, snagged some burgers at Red Robin and then headed home.

Last summer I posted an entry “Tell me about your smartphone” where I outlined desirables in a potential smartphone. I never bought one - until this weekend. As requested, here are the details of what I ended up with.

After months of research and considerations it came down to two contenders, Nokia e71x and the HTC Dream (G1):

While I won’t jump in and say either one is perfect (there is no perfect), they both met my core requirements perfectly. I spent about three weeks being indecisive about which I would choose. The e71x is more compact and cheaper, the G1 has a form-factor I prefer and the very cool Android OS, but first gen? I played with them both, poured over comparison charts, blabbered about it in IRC with owners of each model.

When all the dust settled on Friday I headed off to an AT&T retailer to get the Nokia e71x. Due to my lack of credit they wanted a deposit of $500 for a plan (”pay as you go” is not very popular or reasonably priced in the US). Wow. I paid a $400 deposit on my Verizon phone but that was because I didn’t have many options at the time. The retailer told me that they could probably get it reduced to $350, with even the possibility of getting it waived and that they’d get back to me in 3 hours. They never called me. I could actually pay this deposit, but I skipped over to the T-Mobile store down the street to scope out my options for the G1.

The folks at the T-Mobile store were friendly and helpful, and after considering plans and all costs involved (the phone cost more, but they only wanted 1 months payment up front for a deposit and the plans were significantly cheaper for unlimited text and data) I went ahead and bought a white G1. They didn’t have the white one in stock so I’m picking it up tomorrow.

I’m looking forward to wasting hours this week playing with it, and I’m very happy with the choice. Woo, I finally will have a shiny new phone that does more than voice and text for my trip down to SELF on Friday! :)

Now to find a nice pink cover…

My sister’s flight left yesterday morning, luckily no delays this time!

The night before we were at the North Coventry mall when Nita gave us a call to see if we wanted to hang out with her and her sister. Yes! So they came over and we all went out to dinner, where this photo was taken:

Later that evening we all headed back to my apartment for some Mario Party on the Wii. Which reminds me, I didn’t mention my new pink acquisition thanks to my little sis who shares my love for pink! While swinging by Five Below in the KoP mall earlier in the weekend to snag her some cheap sunglasses (she has a tendency to lose them), she found pink Wii controller and nunchuck covers! Squee!

Now I’ll probably have to get a pink skin for the Wii, and absolutely the pink cover once I get my Wii Fit balance board…

This evening I got caught up on a few things that had been lurking on my ToDo list. I really have been slacking on some of my projects and that’s unfortunate. Plans for the weekend thus far are pretty low-key. Tomorrow evening I’m planning on heading down into Philly to see a movie with a friend. Saturday is a bit up in the air, depending on the weather I’ll probably go on a bike ride then or Sunday. Whatever I do, it will be nice to get out of the apartment, having my sister here was a great break from the whole living alone thing, but now I’m back to it and gosh does this place get lonely.

I took Blinker over to my mechanic this morning (Scott Smith over at Smith Automotive). It was awesome that he was able to squeeze the repair in this morning and it didn’t cost me a fortune ($35 in labor, $30 for the part, yay I can pay my rent! …I’m only mostly joking).

The window? Well, I can’t afford to fix it at this moment since they’ll need to take apart the door to even diagnose it so I’m bringing it back on June 8th. Then I get to bring it back for inspection in the beginning of July. Blinker really needs to stop breaking and behave.

Tonight my sister and I will probably be chilling down at the North Coventry Mall and then have some dinner. I drive her to the airport tomorrow morning, and am a bit sad to see her go!

Sad that I just posted about my fixed car and now I’m talking about it being broken!

Yesterday I decided to take my little sister down to Philadelphia for the day and to meet some of my friends. Another friend of mine is in town visiting, so the plan was to swing by and pick him up, then meet Nita and her sister Dannette down there. What actually happened? I am getting on the turnpike, roll my window down to grab the ticket and hear a “clunk” - oh no. My window refuses to go up. So I’m heading down the turnpike with my window open, panicking about what I’m going to do. I arrive where my friend is staying, explain the situation and he lets me put the car in the garage and drives us down to the city instead. It was nice of him.

I tried to put car worries behind me and we met up with Nita and Dannette at Penn’s Landing. Walked around the Landing and watched some kind of tugboat war for a few minutes before heading up to South Street. The novelty of having an “Annette” and a “Dannette” was not lost, especially when they are both nicknamed “Nettie” and would both look when said nickname was spoken.

South Street was fun, first we hit Jim’s Steaks to treat Annette to a Philly cheese steak (Pat’s and Geno’s were a bit far). I’d never been there, and finally gathered up the courage to get a cheesesteak with cheese whiz on it - and it was fine! I’m no fan of cheese whiz, but maybe there is something to these crazy traditional Philly steaks wit whiz.

The rest of the afternoon was more wandering through shops, then we wandered through society hill and back to the cars. At the garage we decided to head up to Oaks to see Wolverine! We arrived a bit early for the movie, so skipped over to Max & Ermas for some drinks and cookies.

The movie was fun and we left the theater around 10 and it was starting to rain. I still didn’t have my car back, and driving home in the rain with my window down wasn’t an awesome option, so we were dropped off at the apartment and made arrangements for me to pick it up this morning.

I picked it up this morning and fretted the entire way home over how to handle the window situation. I went with getting some pliers to pull up the window to see if I could get it on the track, if that didn’t work I’d use some online instructions to try and take the door apart to see if I can fix the inside myself. That fails? Go to the mechanic! My mechanic didn’t work today, so I was hoping I could at least get the window *up* so I planned to get some masking tape to hold it in place if all else failed.

So I pull into the Walmart parking lot and some smoke/steam starts coming out of the front of my car. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Look at the dashboard, the heat indicator says the engine is running hotter than normal, more smoke coming out, indicator for heat is visibly rising, my sister exclaims “that smells like coolant!”. I pull into a spot and pop open the hood - sure enough a hose has cracked and is spraying coolant all over my engine.

I almost cried.

But instead of crying I formulated a plan to fix Blinker enough to take her home! We hit the Walmart, snagged the planned pliers and masking tape, but added electrical tape, coolant, towel and duct tape to the list. Supplies acquired, we headed back to the car and wiped off the hose with a towel and wrapped the crack in electrical tape (I didn’t know what else probably wouldn’t melt… computer geek here!) and poured half a bottle of coolant into the tank. The 3 mile drive home was fine, while the tape held it visibly brought the engine temperature down. Upon getting back it was obvious that the tape wouldn’t have held for much longer, it had already started to leak.

Wow, so I still have a window to deal with! I move forward with my pliers plan, first trying with just pliers - but they kept slipping and I was worried I’d damage the window. Pliers wrapped in towel? Towel is too thick, couldn’t get a proper grip. Frustrated I started taking apart the door, but then became concerned when I reread the directions that called for a “door panel clip prying tool” which seemed to be important to not doing permanent damage to the clips holding the door panel on. I nearly threw up my hands at that point when I remembered the duct tape. I wrapped the pliers in duct tape and within 3 minutes had pulled up my window - hurrah! Unfortunately I couldn’t get it back on the track, and while trying I heard something *fall* inside the door - broken track clips? Sigh. At least I had the window up, so I secured it in place with my handy blue masking tape (as recommended here). Not exactly classy, but it’ll keep the rain out for now.

Great, fixed window but I can’t actually USE my car! I need my car to work by Wednesday morning so I can bring my sister to the airport! I am going to call my mechanic in the morning and see what he can do for me. I’m hoping he can do a quick fix job on the cracked hose (I’ll even provide replacement coolant, I bought enough!) and possibly take a peek at the window - even if I can’t afford to or he doesn’t have the parts to fix it properly maybe just prop it up so I can get rid of the masking tape. Cars!

I’m glad my sister is here, she’s keeping me sane through these car troubles and it’s great to have her in town in general. Today any potential plans were ruined by car issues, but we’ve had a fine time just chilling out with computers, tv, and a 2 mile walk down and back from the local Wawa for some soda and snacks. I missed family, I’m wondering if I should start making a more dedicated effort to stay in better contact and see them more often.

My sister’s flight finally came into PHL Friday night around 11:30, so by midnight we were taking 76 through the city to head back to my apartment. I had planned on pizza that evening, but arriving back around 1AM left us with the options of a local diner or Wawa. Wanting her to have the “Philadelphia Experience” we headed over to Wawa and touchscreen-ordered ourselves a couple hoagies.

Yesterday we slept in a bit and eventually made it out the door around 11:30. First stop was right down 422 a few miles to wander around the Philadelphia Premium Outlets. The temperature was still nice enough to walk around the open mall, but by 1PM it was getting warm and we hopped back into the car to head down to the blissfully air-conditioned King of Prussia Mall. We snagged a quick lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon there. Around 4:30 we decided to head back, with a quick detour to hit the grocery store and a salon to get our eyebrows waxed. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had such a girly day.

Once back at the apartment we settled down in front of the TV to play some MarioKart on the Wii! She had never played, but being the cruel sister I am I threw her in the deep end and we logged onto WFC to play a match against some friends. I was quite pleased with how quickly she picked up the controls and after a couple hours of playing she was really holding her own in the races (read: beating me). We then played a couple little games from Wii Play and ordered a pizza. The rest of the evening was spent with movies.

Today we’re heading down to wander around Philadelphia. It’s going to be another hot day, and the chance of showers this afternoon isn’t particularly impressing me. But we’ll throw caution to the wind and wander around South Street and Penn’s Landing anyway :) Plus we’re meeting up with a friend who is in town visiting from San Francisco, he used to live out here and knows the city far better than I do, so my sister won’t be stuck with just clueless me for a tour guide ;)

So far the weekend has successfully kept my mind mostly off my unfortunate inability to go to UDS. Still, reading about everyone’s travel plans has made me mope a bit! Hopefully I’ll get to go to the next one.

I am supposed to be returning from the Philadelphia airport right now, with my sister. Instead I’m still at my apartment, refreshing the USAir Flight Status page to see when her 6:19PM flight is actually going to leave - right now they estimate it at 10PM, ouch. It was on time when she arrived at the airport, mechanical problems pushed it to 7:05PM… next I knew it had been pushed to 10PM. I feel bad for my sister, she’s had to sit in the dreadfully dull Portland airport all evening. For me this just means I have all this unexpected time this evening to work on things, and write in my blog!

Hopefully this super-late night won’t put too much of a dent in the weekend. Planning on just chilling out, possibly hitting the mall and meeting up with some people tomorrow. Sunday is Philly day (South Street, Penn’s Landing). Monday we were invited to a BBQ. Should be a fun weekend.

Oh, and Blinker is fixed! It’s amazing how satisfying this repair is. Since I bought this car a year ago (wow, it’s been a year, just renewed my registration tonight) it’s been making a noise related to the compressor, the complete failure of the A/C is only the latest manifestation of this ongoing problem. But now the noise is gone! Blinker runs beautifully and quietly! Well, as quiet as a 9 year old car with 150K miles on it will run :)

My sister’s flight finally departed at 10:04! Estimated arrival at 11:24PM, so I’ll be heading down pretty soon.

I bought a Wii this weekend. It’s been on my “want” list for quite some time now but I kept putting it off due to financial considerations. I still had those considerations on my mind, but I needed some retail therapy. Nudge me via email to swap Wii and MarioKart codes :)

I ended up snagging the used Wii for $200 at GameStop, and since I had $60 worth of trade-in games I walked out of there with the Wii for $140 - not bad! Along with Wii Sports I snagged Mario Kart and Wii Play (extra controller!). I then spent the entire weekend playing games and watching TV. It was a good weekend, I needed the down time badly. And now I have a shiny fun console for when my sister arrives on Friday (I have a PS2, but few multiplayer games).

Now that I’ve finished Burn Notice and have watched the Dollhouse season finale (hooray for it being renewed!!) I needed something else to watch. I ended up watching all of The Big Bang Theory last week and watched the entire first season of Dexter this weekend. Both great shows. I really lost faith in the quality of television a few years ago, but I’m either lowering my standards lately or the quality of programming has improved significantly. I’m also very pleased with the availability of programming. The networks (and PBS!!!) now offer much of their popular programming for free through their websites, both hulu and youtube offer significant amounts of programming for free. Cable? Don’t even remotely need it, and quite honestly unless all of it is available on demand it would be pretty useless to me, flexibility is too important to me. Rushing to the TV at a certain time to catch a program? How quaint!

I’m bringing Blinker (my 2000 Pontiac Grand Am GT) to the shop tomorrow. I’ve taken it to a couple places for diagnosis and the consensus is that it’s got a bad A/C compressor. Estimates have been from $700-1000 for replacement, which is unpleasant but I’ve budgeted accordingly, the shop down the street gave me a quote of $770. The shop is helpfully within biking distance (walking too, it’s only 1.5 miles away) so that’s convenient. I made sure to stock up on things this weekend so even if it takes until Friday to be completed I’ll be alright without a car. And if all else fails I can ride my bike down to Wawa.

I’ve been looking at smartphones lately and finally decided upon the Nokia E71x with AT&T. This is the culmination of piles of research and a bit of “settling” for something less than perfect. The truth is that perfect doesn’t exist. The G1 came closest, but it’s a bit pricey and t-mobile is not a great option in my area, this Nokia is a nice second. I’ll be getting it in the next few weeks - yay! No more stupid phone! Oh, and pink covers and face-plates exist, that was a vital part of my research.

Spent this evening with a bit of Season 2 Dexter, a giant chicken burrito from a local Mexican place and then an Ubuntu Learning Team meeting (I’m now on the team board, hurrah!). I think I’ll be turning in early tonight, sleep is nice and I have to be up early tomorrow.

Wednesday night I skipped down to Philly for an amazing pollo y papas burrito at MexiCali Cafe and then over to PLUG for Kyle Burton’s Intro to Git talk (slides are on his talks page). Great presentation, and in an interesting twist of fate, while sitting at the meeting I received an email from my co-maintainer on webcalendar saying that he’d like to switch our repository from svn to git. I really need to buckle down and learn Git now!

After the presentation we went out for the standard after-meeting hanging out at the Best House down the street. Unfortunately the sky opened up and rain poured out of the sky in buckets shortly after we arrived. By 11 it hadn’t let up and we decided to wander back to our cars, resigned to getting soaked. And getting soaked we did! The drive home in that was a bit slow and I didn’t get back until after midnight, by which time Pottstown at least was only suffering from a bit of drizzle. There was too much rain this week.

Last night I was able to snag an IMAX ticket for the new Star Trek movie, woo! It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to an opening of a Star Trek movie. It was a fun opening night audience, and the movie itself was a lot of fun. I love the characters from the original series, so seeing them re-imagined was a treat, and Simon Pegg as Scotty? Hilarious, brilliant!

I came home shortly after midnight and sat down at my desk to check IRC and email before bed, no internet connection. Lights? Check. Wires? Check. Log into firewall server to see what the deal is? Fail. I snagged a keyboard and plugged the firewall into my monitor - nothing on the screen, no response when I hit keys. I did a hard reboot and halfway through the filesystem check the screen filled with harddrive errors and timeouts. Sigh. I should have expected this, the drive made some clicking noises earlier in the week but they went away and I was busy worrying about other things. Yes, I was helpfully reminded this morning that “denial is not a good hardware maintenance plan” :)

So it’s almost 1AM and I have computer parts all over my living room as I’m scheming a way to get a working firewall without a spare IDE harddrive. I ended up popping the NIC out of the machine with the bad harddrive and putting it in my Sparc Ultra10. The plan had been to retire the sparc this summer because it was becoming more of a power-drain liability than an asset (”yay a sparc!” has been fun, but ultimately it just ran my IRC bots and did some backups). Why not turn it into a firewall? It took me an hour or so to get the machine up with the second NIC and the same bare-bones configuration restored from backups so I had DNS and dhcp. This morning I was able to finish up the configuration to get ipsec back up, and it’s all restored with the exception of bind for internal addressing, I still need to rewrite my zone file (backups of /etc? of course! backups of /var/cache/bind? oh bother!). I’ll rewrite that in the morning. It’s working great so far, I’m pleased with the result, even if I’m now starting to worry about the reliability of the sparc’s harddrives.

I mentioned in my last entry that I might bring my sister Annette down for a few days around Memorial Day. I spoke with my mother yesterday to confirm the dates and times when she would be would be available for driving Annette down to the Portland, Maine airport. When I finally got around to buying the tickets today I was disappointed to discover the prices for flights less than 2 weeks in the future had jumped significantly (oops, this seems normal, next time I’ll know better). So I adjusted the dates a bit and bought the tickets. She’ll be flying from Portland on the evening of Friday the 22nd, spending the long Memorial Day weekend here, and going home Wednesday morning. I’m excited, it’s been far too long since we’ve seen each other. I figure we’ll head down to Philly one day (museums? south street?). I’ll take her to the giant KoP mall one day, perhaps take her out to New Hope. We’ll see based on the weather.

And now since I was up half the night last night restoring my firewall and then worked all day, I’m beat. Going to call it an early night.

I slept in this morning. Sleeping in is somewhat unusual for me, but for some reason I’ve had a very difficult time sleeping lately, I’ll take what I can get! Once I got up I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my desktop from 8.10 (Intrepid) to 9.04 (Jaunty). It went well aside from a change in menu structure that made all my custom menus for logging into servers at work go away. Sigh. I haven’t quite found a way to fix this aside from writing .desktop launch files for each one and manually hacking at the menu config files. I don’t quite know how I’m going to handle this yet, but it sure is annoying. Word on the street is that a new menu editor will be available in the next XFCE release, but that doesn’t help me a whole lot now.

I also decided to fiddle around with the laptop hooked up to my TV. It’s an old Inspiron 7500 and I was considering reinstalling it because I thought I could squeeze some more speed out of it. Upon thinking about this I decided to take the 120G harddrive out of my (possibly) dying Compaq laptop. I thought the Compaq was dying because of the weird behavior it was exhibiting, and “it can’t be the harddrive, it’s only a year old!” Well, I think that was a foolish conclusion, it looks like it is the harddrive. I looked up the purchase date - over a year ago, warranty? 1 year. Darn it! Instead of any reinstallation at this point I just popped the old drive back on the Inspiron and did further manual tweaking of settings.

It’s been raining all day, so I decided to skip heading down to the Sly Fox Goat Race, in spite of Lew Bryson’s great post about it that really made me want to go back this year (I missed it last year too). Instead, this afternoon was spent doing boring things like dishes, shopping and running other errands.

Yesterday when returning from the Philly Jaunty Release Party I remember remarking about a “weird smell” in my car when we got into it after the party. I didn’t think much of it until this afternoon when I got in my car to go out - it was a very strong stagnant water smell. I started looking around, and found a nice big puddle on the floor behind the driver’s seat. GREAT. It’s been suggested that it’s related to the A/C, possibly a clogged drain pipe that backed up into the car and settled in the lowest point. I’m actually sort of hoping this is the problem, because it means that getting my A/C problems addressed in general will help solve this problem too, and it’s not an additional problem as I had feared upon discovery.

Speaking of brokenish things… the record-breaking heat last week gave me a taste of what summer is going to be like here in my apartment and I was not impressed. The temperature has gone down to be more seasonable, but it was still getting quite hot in here until Stephen let me borrow a spare window fan. It’s nice and cool in here again :) Hooray for fans!

Right now I’m just chilling with some project stuff and Angel (already seen them all, watching again as background noise!). Aside from finishing Angel last month (while I was in England, with the person who got me into Buffy in the first place!) I recently finished up watching the second season of Burn Notice - fantastic show, described to me as “imagine james bond and macguyver had a kid. now imagine that kid is friends with bruce campbell…” how could I not check it out? I’ve also been watching Dollhouse. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it at first, but it’s grown on me, even if it’s still a bit of a guilty pleasure rather than Very Good Television.

I still mostly fail at cooking, but I’m getting better. I picked up some crab-stuffed salmon and made some mashed potatoes for dinner tonight. It was good, and in spite of how simple it was (already prepped salmon put in oven for 20 minutes, potatoes boiled and mashed), it was cooking! And since the salmon was on sale it was a very good dinner for about $5. I guess in general I’ve been less hard on myself lately for not cooking, the fresh prepared foods at the grocery store that just require tossing in the oven can be quite tasty and healthy (at least, healthier than frequent take-out!).

I have been quite lonely this weekend. I was talking to my 20 year old sister Annette last night when the subject of her coming down to visit came up. Huh. She currently doesn’t have a job and a round trip flight from Portland to Philadelphia is only about $150. I’m now thinking of flying her down for a long Memorial Day weekend (bring her down Thursday morning, I have to work Thursday and Friday, but Sat-Mon I’m off and she goes home Tuesday). We’ll see how things go, but it’s been over three years since I’ve seen her and I think she could use the break from her normal life, I hope it works out.

I’ve been feeling good this year about the status of women in F/OSS. The percentages are still low (in spite of the Google bursary, the number of female attendees was abysmally low at the UKUUG spring conference) but there are a number of factors contributing to my optimism:

• Hey cool, female computer scientist Barbara Liskov was awarded the Turing Award for 2008! How inspiring!
• Ada Lovelace Day was an outstanding success. While I didn’t take part (was busy!), hundreds of other bloggers, men and women alike, did. Wow! I read some amazing posts and learned a lot that day.
• On a personal level, I much less frequently encounter people who are surprised to see a woman involved
• In a similar vein as the last, I encounter far less discrimination as I once did
• The number of women on the Ubuntu Women Mailing List and IRC channel continues to grow steadily, as do the number of women involved with Ubuntu in general
• Without trying, I’ve found myself working on F/OSS projects with women much more frequently

For the first time I am starting to feel accepted and not out of place within F/OSS communities.

Then the situation with “that Ruby presentation” came about and reminded me that while we’re on the right track, we’re not there yet. For those who aren’t aware of the situation, Audrey Eschright wrote a fantastic blog post about what happened and how she felt about it: Dear Fellow Rubyists. She articulated many of the feelings I’ve had over the years when it comes to scantily-clad women being used in presentations at conferences, of which I’ll only post a snipping of here:

Women are a tiny minority in the Ruby world, and we know it. Even before someone says, “hey, it’s cool to see women working with Ruby”. (These sorts of comments are often heard as “holy cow, there’s a chick in this room.” It’s not an issue of intent. It’s that we already felt like we have a blinking arrow over our heads.)

And since we’re a minority, and we often encounter awkward responses to that, we feel marginalized. We also tend to feel marginalized when we encounter sexualized images when we’re in a room full of men we don’t know very well. Even women who like porn can feel that way. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether we like sexual content, it’s whether we’re okay with seeing it in a professional context. Some women may be fine with this (especially if they know the presenter), some may find it tacky and awkward, and some may have the immediate urge to flee the room and be anywhere else right now.

I was also pleased with her follow-up which worked to address the situation: So now what? To me, this screams “We’re not helpless victims and we are not content to simply complain. We want to actively fix things.” Bravo! I’m not involved with Ruby (I’m not even a programmer, I’m a sysadmin!) so the blog entry storm addressing Ruby and the fallout within the community haven’t really interested me, but in the general Women In F/OSS arena there have been a few blog posts that have stood out these past few days:

• Selena Deckelmann’s What works? Getting more women involved in open source. and her follow-up success story: What’s changed? Portland as an example of increasing women’s participation. I can only hope that female participation in Philadelphia continues to grow similarly, I certainly work hard to implement these same techniques and encourage others around me to do the same.
• Hackety.org: A Selection Of Thoughts From Actual Women. It was excellent to read such a cross-section of thoughts from women on the situation. Predictably there were women who were all over the board with their thoughts (women are just people, after all, and we all have our opinions). The general consensus tended to be that most of us aren’t specifically offended by porn being included in a presentation at a professional conference, but that we didn’t feel it was appropriate in that setting and that it tends to make us uncomfortable.
• Catherine Devlin’s right to complaint. I think her first sentence sums of what was most striking to me about her post: “It’s not that the community needs to ensure offensive content never happens, or that the community needs to find a single standard of what is appropriate.” Absolutely. In any community there will be a few folks who are going to be out of line, but it’s the reaction within the community to poor behavior that is vital. It makes me hand out this link often: Dorothea Salo’s What Some Folks Can Do, If They Choose which explains how important it is when men within the community speak up when they see disrespectful behavior.

Guess what was on my mind on Wednesday evening as I was finishing up preparations for my Ubuntu Open Week presentation on Ubuntu Women? I was so nervous! The last time we had an Ubuntu Women presentation for UOW was back when Gutsy was released and we had to moderate the channel. While there were some good questions, the whole session was very stressful. The next time I was approached to do an UOW session on the project I declined.

So 23:00 UTC rolls around last night and I start my presentation in #ubuntu-classroom. There are lots of people in #ubuntu-classroom-chat piping up with discussion. The session went amazingly well. There were fantastic questions, there were no issues that even made us consider moderating the channel, people were engaging and overwhelmingly excellent. A full log of the session is up now: MeetingLogs/openweekJaunty/UbuntuWomen (it’s a shame -chat wasn’t logged, because the discussion there was great).

Following the session we moved the conversation over to #ubuntu-women and continued going over key project points in a discussion where there were dissenting views and opinions but everyone remained polite and open-minded. At the end of the evening I believe disagreements remained, but everyone chose to respect each other and our different opinions and part as friends.

So…

Thank you to the members of the Ubuntu Women project who came by to be supportive and help me answer questions.

Thank you to the members of the US Pennsylvania LoCo team I’m part of for coming and lending their support.

Thank you to everyone who attended the session and asked such engaging questions.

Thank you to those who couldn’t attend but offered words of support.

Thank you to those who had differing views but chose to express them in helpful, polite and constructive ways.

Thank you to the Ubuntu community for making the Ubuntu project a place I can be genuinely proud of being a part of.

You all rock!

Tomorrow, April 29th, at 23:00 UTC I’ll be doing an Ubuntu Open Week session on the Ubuntu Women Project in #ubuntu-classroom (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions and discussion).

I will be focusing on:

1. General intro to project
2. Why we feel such a project is important
3. Project resources

Aside from the basics of above I’ll try to put emphasis on our commitment to not being separatist or exclusive, as this is a subject I’ve been encountering a lot lately.

Following this introduction I’ll open up the session for Q&A. So if there is anything you wanted to know and wish to ask about the project, please join us!

Today was hot, it appeared to have peaked around 91F, matching the record set in this area 19 years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced 90F degree weather in April before, this is the second day of it and it looks to be lasting through Tuesday. My apartment is retrofitted for A/C, which means there is a big window unit in my living room wall that at full power cuts the temperature in here down to the low 80s. Low 80s indoors is still a bit warm for me, but mostly tolerable for the hopefully infrequent 90+ days. Mostly. My stomach is on the queasy side this evening and I think the cherry Rita’s waterice was my dinner.

The A/C in my car has stopped working. This is something I was anticipating and starting to budget for since the diagnosis a couple months back that my A/C compressor was dying, I had just hoped it would wait a few more months, sigh!

I mentioned in my last post that I brought my “test server” with me to the Trenton Computer Festival. It occurred to me that I never posted about this! The new test server is a $159.99 Refurbished HP DC5100 Combo (specs here if that site goes away). I maxed out the RAM for about $50 and am considering swapping out the hard drive for something bigger than 40G. I installed Debian Lenny with a Xen dom0 kernel and have deployed a few VMs on it. It’s been a great little machine, and during the TCF I just ran OpenSuse off of a LIveCD. As for the other machines on my network… I’ve mostly retired my old test server, the P3 1U, and I will probably be shutting down the sparc Ultra10 once I get the services it runs offloaded to a VM. Retiring the sparc makes me sad, but at this point the novelty and actual usefulness of it no longer outweighs the power and heat concerns.

There are a couple software notes that I’ve been meaning to blog about in some form too…

First: VLC! I’ve been a VLC user for quite some time, but always defaulted to mplayer on slower machines due to some perceived notion that it would run better (maybe because it lacks GUI controls?). Well, I was wrong. On my old Inspiron (650mhz P3, 256M RAM) that is connected to my TV I have to run mplayer with an 8K cache to get movies not to be too choppy, and even this isn’t enough for larger files. So one day when I was trying to play something and it didn’t work, frustrated I tossed on VLC and not only did it work, but I didn’t have to set any caches or change any video options, the movie ran almost flawlessly! So it’s VLC on the old laptop now, sorry mplayer.

Second: Thunderbird. I have a pleia2 gmail account which I don’t often access via the web interface and at work we have some clients using Thunderbird on Ubuntu. Hmm, maybe I should be checking the gmail account with Thunderbird so I can learn how to use it and have the added benefit of actually checking my gmail account? I configured this about a year ago with POP w/o deleting stuff from the server, before they offered IMAP. I don’t like POP, and having everything organized locally on Thunderbird caused a crazy mess when I logged in via the web interface. I kept saying I’d switch to IMAP and get the mess under control and finally did that last week. Annoyingly though, Thunderbird’s default settings for IMAP only have it poll the Inbox during it’s scheduled email checks, folders that had stuff automatically sent to them server-side were not polled. I found a fix for this in the Thunderbird FAQ:

Check all IMAP folders for new mail
Thunderbird can download mail from all accounts when you start the program. Just open the Config Editor, search for the preference mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new, and change its value to true.

Hooray!