Archive for October, 2009
I have no idea what I did today; it all blurs together in a happy mélange of marbles, soccer tutorials from a 6-year-old, 35mm camera talk over dinner, chopping avocados, and a lazy, warm, extended afternoon nap spent drifting in and out of consciousness and idle thought with little indication of where one stopped and the other began. Mmm. Good glory, but the kids have grown. And I think Audrey spent most of the day either on my lap or trying to get there – one wonders how much longer this will last. Small children don’t stay small forever, and I’m glad to glimpse the growth I can.
The previous evening was also awesome. Got off my delayed plane and hightailed it to Mo’s apartment, where we did some usability stuff, during which point in time David joined us, and then we went and got some Indian food for dinner.
Mo (looking at the menu item I was planning on getting): That’s a lot of food.
Me: Good.
Mo: It feeds, like, three people.
Me: Yeah, that sounds about right.
At some point, for fun, I should track what I eat for a week – and also clip on a pedometer. I wonder if my appetite is due to high metabolism, if I eat a normal amount but just distribute the dining differently across meals (I can eat vast quantities of food, but can also just as obliviously skip meals for a day or two because I don’t realize I should stop concentrating on something), or because I run around a lot while not-sleeping, or… something. Oh, I’m going to miss this ability when I get older and (presumably) lose it.
I’ll look at my to-do list again in the morning. It was nice to put everything on pause for a bit; I can’t do it very frequently, nor sustain it very long, but that makes it all the cooler when I do manage to pull it off.
Saturday, October 17th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
For how to proceed with the title of this blog post, see step #7.
- Drop off Karsten
- Get BBQ at Ole Time
- Return rental car, take shuttle to airport
- Discover that your flight is so delayed due to weather that you will arrive in DC approximately 20 hours later than originally planned
- Get plane ticket refund
- Have rental car shuttle driver ask you why you’re back so soon
- Drive 285 miles from Raleigh, NC to Mt. Rainier, MD, cutting delay-induced tardiness from 20h to 30m
- Admire Washington monument at midnight along the way
- Send “I am still alive” emails, blog posts
- Sleep
Thursday, October 15th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
- Cameras won’t kill you, and filming – when you’ve stopped panicking and nervously fidgeting with everything – can actually be a little fun. (I’m still shy and probably will always be, but this – like public speaking – is something I think I can and will get used to, when it’s needed.)
- A title is just a title; having one doesn’t make you any better or worse or smarter or dumber or more or less a person. You’re the same person you were before; you just have a title now, and the responsibilities that come with it. But you, the person handling those responsibilities, are just the same, and it’s always up to you what you’ll learn to become.
- Pro hockey games are fascinating! (Karsten and I got a quick Hockey 101 lesson from Max and Greg this afternoon as this was the first hockey game that both of us had seen.) The skill and teamwork demonstrated were extraordinary – it was Hurricanes vs Penguins, and went into a shootout, and then the first 3 shots were misses for both sides, and then the Penguins won (to our dismay). The arena is also ginormous and full of Lots Of Multimedia. It felt like being in Times Square except with louder music occasionally telling you to scream – and we (CommArch + Co.) certainly did. It was a ton of fun, and now I’m going to go and sit quietly and look at a blank wall for a while…
I’ve been extremely blessed. Throughout my whole life in general – but in particular, I’ve been feeling this strongly and constantly (24/7) recently (and have blathered on about it at length, too). I must continue to remember (something Michael Tiemann said today reminded me of this) that these things aren’t me, but rather come through me, as a stewardship I bear responsibility for. Y’know, the usual… from everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded. So boy, do I have lots of work to do… I hope God’s* happy with his ROI.
*this is the only word I know for this.
Tomorrow is the last day of the CommArch retreat, and then I fly back to DC (and the next morning out to Boston for the weekend – I’m finally taking a trip purely for personal reasons and hanging out with friends and family). Life is good. Life is extremely good.
I’m going to take some quiet time to rest and think and clear my brain now, and hop back onto workin’ early in the morning. There’s much to do, and I want to make sure I’m charged and rested and ready to go for it, and I know the things running around in my brain will take a while to think through and sort out. So it’s time to get my mental house in order so that I can be in PURE OUTPUT MODE!!! again tomorrow.
Thinking time!
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Oh wow. I’m actually able to sleep now after quite some time on the road and without a proper night’s rest (1.5 hours is too little even for me). Before I pass out, a few stray bits to write to disk so that I don’t forget…
- unblock Fedora Insight completely. I’ve done an awful job the past 3 weeks of constantly articulating open tasks and now it’s coming back to bite me – I need to start shouting very loudly and doing very rapidly, though I hate operating in crunch-time mode when I could probably have avoided it. If you’re reading this before I wake up and want something to dive in on, here are the FI tickets, here is a package that needs fixing/review, and we need to nail down the “get everything settled on staging” process so that we can pull the lever on production this week.
- List out all Fedora Marketing deliverables remaining for F12 and figure out completion status, next-actions, blockers remaining to clear, and responsible parties. Start looking ahead to FUDCon, F13, maybe F14 – now that we have the chance to plan ahead, what kinds of things might we begin to think about doing?
- Make sure to take some time for myself to settle back and clear my mind and form a solid picture of “community work” in my head – it comes together faster and faster every time I try to conceptualize it, but the pieces still take time to fiddle themselves into place; it’s still a new idea I haven’t internalized to the point of automation, which is quite nice because it’s easier to play with the thought and reconfigure it, but does take some planning ahead.
- Similarly, wrap up POSSE in my mind, so I can share that with others.
- Remember: the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Right now, I’m going to hit the pillow – maybe this time I’ll get more than 6 hours of sleep, which would be an unusual triumph. It’s been a good day; I’m physically just a bit tired, and the thinking part of my brain is still rattling around at a million miles per hour, but there’s definitely another part of my brain (not the thinking part; I’m not sure what to call it) that’s just wiped. Ah, sleep is going to be so sweet tonight – I’m usually not tired enough to appreciate this, so this is wonderfully strange for me.
Monday, October 12th, 2009 | fedora | No Comments »
Ooo. I just learned that hotels have little washing machines and dryers downstairs sometimes. This makes my life much easier.
I really do suck at this “rest” thing. After Sunday’s “sleep at 1:15am, wake at 2:30 for 2:50 pickup for 5:25am plane” adventure followed by an afternoon of boating (mostly involving my utter failure to catch and throw a frisbee or a tennis ball, and making wild lunges into the lake instead – fun!), you’d think I should be tired. And I was, a bit. I was able to get to sleep sometime around 11-ish, which is extremely early for me.
And then I woke up at 4. Nah, too early, I thought. Managed to lie back down for another half-hour. You’re supposed to be tired. I kept myself in bed until about 4:45, when I gave up, flipped on the lights, and started reading. Made it through about a month of archives before my 5am meeting, did laundry, read some more, and then tried to lie down again in a futile effort to force myself to feel more tired and get more rest. Shut the blinds, turned off the lights, closed my eyes, relaxed… after what seemed like a very long time, I jumped up and went “okay! Surely this must have been a nice 30-minute snooze, at least!”
Less than 10 minutes had passed.
At this point, I’m just giving up on being tired. I’m going to leave room and space in the evenings so that if I have to crash sometime, I can, but this hardly seems imminent. I’ve been trying to use more of my “you’re supposed to be resting, but you’re not tired” time as “let’s pay attention to your body now” time, because that’s where the wear and tear shows up – more stretching, more exercise, that’s always good – but I’m not there yet. I can’t scan myself physically like I can scan myself mentally; I can’t adjust and fine-tune what I’m doing with my body the way I can quickly reconfigure sections of my mind.
It’s such a nifty problem, really. So many interlocking parts that I keep learning about; my limbs are knotted, but they don’t un-knot themselves well because I have such low muscle tone, which can be fixed with careful exercise, but that’s difficult to do because my lung capacity is shot, in part due to scar tissue and constricted muscles – and my brain doesn’t know how to coordinate everything right, and I can’t program in physical intuition that I can’t intellectually understand. (That last part is the easiest in some respects – I can read a lot of books – but it’s also the hardest to link to everything else.)
I’m hoping that stabilizing my sleep and food patterns will help, but that’s still a lot to tackle. It’s gotten much better in the past few years, though – particularly in the last year. I love spiral learning! This is one of those slow-and-steady things; it’s teaching me a lot about how to wrangle longer-term problems that can’t be solved by intense spurts of excitement, which is my usual tactic (and really the only one I’m truly fluent in right now, although I am trying to change that). Ah, the physical world; thou hast inertia, and sometimes this is good.
Monday, October 12th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Here’s a dialogue I’ve been hearing – and participating in – a lot recently. (Well… the ideal version of it. It doesn’t always quite go this well.)
Enthused newbie: I’m coming to care a lot about $foo.
Old-timer: I’ve cared deeply about $foo for many years.
Enthused newbie: I’ve been noticing… $foo is… broken. I mean, look at $bar and $baz happening.
Old-timer: Ayup.
Enthused newbie: And I was thinking, maybe we could… fix it, if we did $frobznit.
Old-timer: Ayup. You know, when I was younger, we tried something similar you might be interested in – look through these archives at $frozbnit, it might help you think about $frobznit.
Enthused newbie: Wheeeeeeeeeeee!
Old-timer: I’m deeply grateful $foo is in good hands.
The funny thing is – I see this most clearly two conversations, but from different sides on each. In Fedora and CommArch and Red Hat and that part of my world, I’m very clearly the enthused newbie. At Olin, when the current students talk about reshaping the school, I’m the low-pass filter, the old-timer, the “who the hell are you?” passerby.
The flipping back and forth is odd, but valuable in making me see things from more perspectives – I can actually feel myself gaining the ability to be a low-pass filter, and choosing to do once in a while. Here’s an email I sent out today; it’s the best expression of something that’s been weighing on my mind for quite some time. (In response to an email thread to the effect of “the curriculum revision of ’06-’07 took a lot of work and fizzled out without results, since we can’t name a single thing that changed; time for a reboot!”)
I feel like such an old fogey saying this, but I think it’s important, so I’m going to do it anyway.
The process was a ton of work, generated a lot of talk, and left results behind. It’s our ability to use those results today that’s fizzled out. Subtle distinction. We aren’t broken; the past’s results aren’t broken; the two are just no longer compatible. That’s all.
The past has worth. Even if it leaves no physical trace behind, things that happen with a spirit of thoughtfulness and openmindedness and bravery have results. Not being able to capture that value now doesn’t mean it wasn’t valuable then – just that the ability to actively use that value is now past. Not being able to wear your winter jacket from 4th grade today doesn’t mean it didn’t keep you warm when you were younger. Honor the fact that the jacket did keep you warm, and acknowledge that it’s time to go get a new one.
I feel like sometimes we don’t do the first enough. The thing we’re trying to change now was once a new, exciting change itself. 2007 wasn’t all that long ago; 2 years from now, the next couple rounds of Olin students will be running full tilt at the changes they care about. And this is awesome. This kind of perpetual dialogue is part of what it means to be continuously reborn. The the continuation of this discussion “after so many years” is not a failure; the ceasing of this conversation would be. This constant trying-stuff and figuring-out is how we renew our practice; this is how we continuously make this making-of-a-school thing mean something real to us as individuals, make it something we care about. Love is a verb in the present tense, not a static noun.
I can point to something I recall changing because of the curriculum review; myself. My way of thinking, my relationship with Olin, the way I do things now – without the curriculum review, they wouldn’t be the same. And yes, I’ve graduated, but not everyone from that time has – and alumni are still part of the extended Olin family, as we go out and change the world and all that good stuff. And yes, the changes in my brain are not that useful to the current frosh – that’s what I mean by results being existent but non-harvestable, and that’s why I’m heartened whenever discussions like this come by on [this mailing list].
Is this wisdom? It doesn’t feel like it; in saying this, I’m also exploring new territory, struggling to express the things I’m thinking and feeling; this isn’t something that I know. But if I flip back to my younger self and read this, I think whoa, I learned stuff in the past two years. And maybe that’s what wisdom is; that increased accumulation of experience and the ability to step back from it to get a better look. Right now, it just feels like… life. Don’t get mired in the past; look at it when it helps you figure out what to do in the present to make the future that you’d like to see. (I do hope that they reboot! It’s out of my hands, as it should be, but I do hope it happens, for what it’s worth.)
I wonder what I look like to them. And I wonder what it looks like for people looking at me from the Fedora side.
Right now, I need to sleep so I can wake up for a 5am meeting. I got about an hour and 15 minutes of sleep today because of travelage (sleep 1:15am, wake up 2:30am for a 2:50 shuttle to a 5:25am flight that… got delayed over an hour, dammit) so my brain is getting fuzzy around the edges. Bedtime now.
Sunday, October 11th, 2009 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
It has come to my attention that my travel schedule is insane. In the next 50 days…
- Raleigh from October 11th to 15th. (Community Architecture team retreat)
- Boston from October 16th to 18th. (Visiting home for a few days to swap out things I have in Washington DC, see family, etc.)
- Toronto from October 23rd to 24th (Ontario Linux Festival)
- Rochester from October 25th to 26th. (RIT!)
- Toronto from October 27th to 30th (Teaching Open Source Summit, FSOSS)
- Singapore from (approximately, tickets not booked yet) November 6th to 14th (POSSE APAC)
…I will be home for less than half of them. And this is not counting…
- Thanksgiving
- A trip to CMU sometime in November (no dates yet)
- Another trip that’s planned but not yet public (though I don’t think the person in question reads this blog)
It’s probably the best “HOWTO be an effective road warrior” curriculum ever designed, especially since for a bunch of these (Raleigh, Toronto, Rochester, Toronto) I’ll be with folks who know how to do the Travel Thing (Karsten, Greg) and thereby able to watch the balance that they strike, after having spent a couple months coming up with my own version of things (which usually involves maniacal amounts of work and then random “…well, that seems interesting, let’s do that!” jaunts to various locations – typically bookstores – in strange cities). Practice, reflection, recalibration, repeat. Eventually I’ll learn where and how to draw my own boundaries, create my own space, keep my own head together in the middle of everything else changing. It’s a valuable skill to have.
I’m also starting to consider the purchase of actual travel gear. Like a travel vibrating alarm clock. I’ve got a non-travel version of one of these, and it’s the only alarm that’s consistently able to rouse me. (It had better. It beeps like crazy, flashes a lamp in my face, and shakes my pillow like thunder.) I can’t hear beeping alarms even when I’m awake, and phone alarms are usually faint enough that I don’t hear them when I’m sleeping half the time (or when I’m awake, for that matter). I’ve given up on ringtones and have been experimenting with various ways of amplifying the vibration of my phone, but no consistent hits yet other than the uncomfortable “wear pants with pockets to bed and stick phone in pocket so it’s jammed into your leg,” which is also a really freaky wake-up experience. There are still variables to tweak, though; putting the phone on something hollow that will clatter (I had great success with a cereal box at pika, but I don’t usually pack a cereal box in my backpack when I travel) seems promising, and timing my sleep cycles so that I only set my alarm to ring when I’m at the light phase of my sleep cycle seems like it would work based on past observations of when I have woken up via phone, but hasn’t been particularly rigorously tested yet.
…or I could just drop <$30 and just Have A Clock That Works. I hate getting more stuff, though. (Except for books and music.) If I can do something with what I have, I will. Eh, maybe when I move back to Boston for the spring semester (and thus have the ability to set up a little electronics workbench) I’ll whip out an AVR and make my dream alarm clock. That’d be fun.
Yup, all packed up now. Bedtime!
Saturday, October 10th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Wonderful day today. First the Green Festival with Erin Dowd, who has the kind of viewpoint on credentialism that I’ve been struggling to get in my own brain for years; the festival itself had free food samples, so I was exceedingly pleased. Then dinner at Gallaudet with pika’s Ian Smith, who I wish I’d known when we were both kids; it would have been a riot to have another preteen hard of hearing geek to take apart a TTY with. We’re close in age (I’m nearly a year older) and grew up less than half an hour away from each other, but just had no idea. Good food, good friends, good conversations – everything I could ask for on an off-day.
Listing this out for my own benefit – my plane’s a 5:25am flight and the supershuttle to the airport is coming by sometime between 2:55-3:10am (public transit here sleeps at night; it’s one thing I miss about NYC). Before then, I ought to…
- pay rent
- do laundry
- pack
- sleep
Everything else can be ignored until I’m off the plane; it sounds like Karsten and I will have a bit of down time between arriving at RDU and the start of CommArch festivities, so I’ll probably use that time to (1) run around like a maniac, since I’ll have been cooped up on a plane, and (2) make sure personal/family stuff is all set ’till the weekend, and (3) make sure Fedora Marketing (specifically, FI), FUDCon, POSSE, and the contents of my overloaded inbox are also set ’till the weekend. The first is to calm me down somewhat; the other two are to let me have a wonderfully distraction-free week. Boy am I rapidly learning to deal with my perfectionism.
I will not have a bass this week, which makes me sad. I was supposed to be able to get my fretless 5-string travel bass from the shop before I left Chicago on Thursday, but the factory delivered the wrong (fretted) bass to the shop, and then delivery of the proper bass somehow got delayed, so it looks like I will get my bass on Halloween. Oh well. It can come out to Singapore with me.
I think that I am going to try to enforce September’s “6 hours of sleep a night” experiment this week (with the full knowledge that I probably won’t be able to sleep for 6 hours, but I need to make sure I budget my time so that I can). Rest is extremely good for me, and I’ll be getting little enough of it this month that I should rein myself way back below what I think my capacity actually is; I often operate (in terms of energy-level rationing) with very little margin, and I wonder what it is like to not do that.
Ok! Getting through that list so I can get a little bit of sleep tonight. Laundry takes time to do.
Saturday, October 10th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Via Kevin: This was too hilarious not to share. The KFC and Jollibee mascots dance off to the tune of a Korean girl group. With that girl group’s dance moves. Ahh, the Philippines.
I don’t understand red velvet cake. Why an arbitrary, otherwise extraneous coloring? It’s not like it makes it taste better. Did they really need that point of differentiation? In any case, it tastes good.
The Lincoln Memorial is beautiful at night. After dinner with Jason, Maja, and Greg at Kramer & Afterwords (mmm, open source and education geekery – also the source of aforementioned red velvet cake), I decided to bike out and see it – I have not seen the memorials since my 8th grade class visited DC, and that hardly counts because we were on such a tightly chaperoned, rapidly choreographed tour (because 13-year-olds can’t be trusted to independently explore) that I hardly got a chance to be present and soak up the space.
This time I did. There were a surprising number of tourists for so late at night, but everyone was quiet and subdued, and I just slowly walked around, reading the carvings. The speeches on the wall are beautiful; simple and direct. The statue is appropriately monumental, and lit to nice effect. Supposedly, Lincoln’s hands are fingerspelling the letters “A” and “L” in honor of the sculptor’s deaf son – and they do, more or less.
I biked through most of the other memorials (Korean War, WWII, Washington, etc) and then headed for Mt. Rainier. It started raining on the way, but it was a nice rain, not too cold or hard, and I didn’t mind getting soaked through so much. When I got back, I tried to do some zikula stuff, but found that my brain was awake enough to comprehend and produce text, but too zonked to do anything useful with the information, meaning that I mostly stared aimlessly at tickets for a couple minutes before realizing it was fruitless and resolving to write out the stuff swimming around in my brain and then call it a night.
*a few minutes of rapid typing*
And… there. I’ve written that post (the other one tonight) now, so it’s time to go to sleep.
Saturday, October 10th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Because we’ve got, through ticket trackers and that kind of thing, some semblance of records of how we produce code – but precious few records of how we produce things like talks on open source, or how various people go through the process of thinking about them. Note that I am still new enough to speaking so as to have to pull my process together more or less from scratch (and fight a rather healthy dose of “but… how do I do this? I don’t know!” fear), so… y’know, if I eventually figure out how to do this, anybody can. That is my thesis, anyway.
Here’s what was rolling around in my head on the bike ride home, awkwardly phrased: “The point of a talk is sparking insight, not conveying information.” I’m thinking about the talk I’m going to be giving at OnLinux, and how I’m going to do it; what is the speaking style that is a natural extension of the way I teach? I think it has something to do with the way I run meetings.
The motivation is to have as many simultaneous actively participating people in the meeting as possible – ideally, at all times in the meeting, everyone in the meeting should be doing something really cool (and hopefully Marketing-related) – not just waiting for their turn to speak. Think of it as a virtual version of the law of two feet. (From https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_meetings)
In other words, I don’t care if you’re learning what I’m teaching; I care that you’re learning, and I care that you care about what you’re learning. Or at least that’s how I ran my tutorials back when I was a TA. Similarly, I don’t care if people listening to my talk actually listen to my talk; I care that they think about something that they think is really cool as a result of the time we spend together. I want them to have their ideas, not my ideas.
This is the way I listen to talks myself – unless I’m right in the front row, I’m usually unable to actually catch all the things the speaker says (hearing loss + echo-riffic rooms + too far away to lipread = ehhh) so I clutch at what I do hear and run forward with it in my mind; this is great, because it means I’m both engaged and intellectually excited during the entire duration of the talk. It’s a way of customizing the talk for yourself as a listener. And I would like my audience to do that. Everyone.
Hm. Okay, I have a piece of the target, and the other piece is “what area do I want people to be thinking about?” and that is in the abstract (though maybe I ought to come up with a more deliverable/action-oriented one, or something. Ehh. I’ll worry about that if I think I need it later. But anyway, I can figure out how to use my session time so that this is the effect it has. I wonder if I can find a way to convey this thought at the beginning of the talk. Hm.
Anyway, here’s the presentation abstract that I wrote at… something like 5am on Friday morning. I’ll try to work the presentation out here as it evolves; it’ll be interesting to be able to look back and watch how my thinking on giving talks (or this particular one, anyhow) takes shape. As usual, comments welcome. The presentation was sparked by this list and a conversation at POSSE.
The Invisible Traceback: blockers that make potential contributors drop out (and how to fix them)
Unix Philosophy #12, Rule of Repair: “When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.” This applies to both code and culture; when someone gets stuck and hollers for help, they are helping their community find and fix a participation process bug. However, the new contributor on-ramp pipeline is particularly tricky to debug; potential participants often struggle in silence, giving you no indication of their presence, let alone why they were unable to begin working with your project community. We’ll go over some common blockers that quietly prevent students (and other new contributors) from beginning to participate in open source, and how to fix them no matter who you are.
Beginners enthusiastically welcomed – this talk is for everyone who’s ever wanted to contribute to open source as well as everyone who’s ever wanted to help someone else get started with contributing. It took me over 6 years of banging my head against a solitary wall to figure out how to contribute back to open source (and it’s been worth it) – here’s how to figure out (or help someone figure out) the same thing in 99.999% less time.
Saturday, October 10th, 2009 | fedora, teaching open source | No Comments »
