Archive for January, 2010
This would be hilarious if it weren’t annoying. (Well, actually, it’s still pretty amusing.) This is the street outside our hotel.
It’s the kind of thing that, in Boston, I’d go “meh” and not even bother shoveling. However, this is North Carolina – so the TV is blaring emergency information, there’s an address from the governor at 10am, there’s a little ticker at the bottom of the newscast detailing how various medical facilities are closed…
The Events FAD will consequently be convening from the meeting room in our hotel in a few minutes, once we set up our infrastructure there.
On the up side, we’re going to be dogfooding plenty of our remote event participation tools today. Hop aboard #fedora-fad and join the (increasingly distributed) fun!
Saturday, January 30th, 2010 | fedora | No Comments »
That last post about the FAD today wasn’t all that well-written, but at 2:30am I’m satisfied with cranking out some informative text with links to actual logs and what-have-you. Since I tend to write in braindump style, the incoherent writing is likely evidence of incoherent thinking (which means I should get sleep soon). And David Nalley just headed to sleep – he was preceded by Chris Tyler – everyone else has long since dropped into unconsciousness – which means I’m the last of the FADders awake, which means I really should get sleep soon.
I know my team generally (1) always works and (2) never sleeps, but this past week’s email and IRC timestamps have been particularly ridiculous. There are 4 of us, we’re all in the continental USA, and I’m pretty sure the number of hours we’ve all simultaneously not been working in the past 7 days is… if not single-digit, very very close. I guess that’s what happens when you’re doing something you love. I sure do.
Unexpectedly got some more practice being on the wrong end of a camera (the side without all the cool shiny buttons and the viewfinder) today. I thought Greg and Chris Tyler were going to be doing filming for POSSE (and that I was going to get to – hurrah! – watch How They Did That Filming Thing from the sidelines). Instead, I arrived to find out that Greg was headed home to beat the storm and I was going to be in the POSSE video with Chris. After uttering several unprintable words, I proceeded to spend most of the remainder of the setup time anxiously pacing back and forth across the front of the classroom we were filming in.
However, I was less freaked out this time than last time (for the F12 video), so that’s… improvement, right? Being pushed outside your comfort zone is good, and this is something that, at this point, I know I’m extremely unlikely to do unless I’m pushed. So I reckon I do appreciate it, even as I squirm some. When I’m able to be as normally relaxed and happy and excited in front of a camera or an audience as I am when I’m not, then I’ll be satisfied.
The classical radio station was playing 12 variations on “Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman” (Twinkle Twinkle Little Star), one of the solo piano pieces I played when I was in middle school. I rarely listen to recordings (by other people) of pieces that I’ve actually played myself, but when I do, it’s rather entertaining. I’m a good enough pianist to know I’m not a good pianist because I’m able to recognize truly good pianists – and so I can do things like mutter about the lack of portomento in one variation, admire the clarity of the scale runs in another, and switch the station in frustration when my favorite variation is played at the wrong tempo wrong wrong wrong wrong how could they aaagh! and whatnot.
Then again, one of my favorite things to do with Mozart at the moment is to treat his music like one interpretation of a hypothetical fake book and play around with different rhythms and melodies around the same chord changes, so it’s not like I treat classical music as intended either.
Haven’t gotten to play guitar today. Will do that, briefly and softly, for a little bit – then go to bed. It’s 3am, which is… early, for me. I’ll try to sleep for a good 5 hours this time.
Saturday, January 30th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Day 0, Events FAD 2010. We started the day by brainstorming (read the log up to “15:29:59 <mchua> brainstorm wrapping up, any last thoughts?”) on four questions in turn:
- What is a good FUDCon?
- What’s the difference between a FUDCon and a FAD?
- What makes a good FAD?
- How do we send event-recording things to events (and decide which events to send things to – and what are we sending?)
Once we had a plethora of sticky notes blanketing a whiteboard in response to those four questions – and a much better idea of what folks were thinking about – we split into our two tracks: FUDCon 2.0 and FUDCon Live.
The goal of the FUDCon 2.0 track is to “refresh the entire “Premier Fedora Events” idea in our community. Break it down to first principles and build it back up, eventually refining processes, decision-making, and ownership. Then put this into practice as we plan 2010.” We ended up with a FUDCon design page and the start of a Premier Fedora Events calendar, plus a lengthy list of Saturday action items and documents to draft tomorrow; the discussions we had along the way (including an analysis and discussion of the FUDCon Toronto survey results from the Marketing team) have been transcribed, and are probably more entertaining reading than today’s deliverables themselves.
The goal of the FUDCon Live track is to bring together the tools (both software and hardware) and processes needed to take remote participation and recording of FUDCons to the next level. As part of this track, we’re working with the freeseer folks to get their events-video-streaming code to be more modular and easily hackable, using 100% FOSS in its toolchain (replacing several encumbered codecs with gstreamer in the backend), and packaged in Fedora (of course). You can see the issue queue we’re working through, along with the #freeseer IRC log and the general FUDCon Live track log (which doesn’t have a lot in it – it was mostly freeseer today).
Memorable moments of the day:
- Clint and Dennis discovering that our new vga2usb converter did not have a FOSS driver available, and the subsequent Max-and-Clint electronics shopping run to get a scan converter in the meantime. The general idea behind using either is to take the VGA output from your computer (what you’d typically send to a monitor) and turn it into a video input for your computer – the kind you’d usually get from a webcam – so that video can easily be streamed. The vga2usb converter is a much simpler solution (intended directly for that use-case) and provides higher-quality video… but it’s more expensive ($300 vs $50) and requires us to find someone who can write a driver for it first.
- Debates on how one would put a pony on one’s expense report.
- We’re going to have women’s t-shirts (well, in general, shirts for folks with sizes we may not have gotten in the past by default) at the next FUDCon! I know it’s a tiny thing – but it’s a tiny thing that means a lot to me; I’ve only ever gotten one geek t-shirt made to fit me during my entire career as a hacker to date.
- Michael Cunningham’s surprise visit, during which frisbees flew across the room (he threw them, too).
- A mass trip to see the movie Avatar – in 3D IMAX. And let me tell you: there is nothing better than watching a gorgeous epic sci-fi movie with a bunch of fellow geeks – particularly when it’s accompanied by free popcorn and soda. As bonus points, we continued to defy death during a (very, very slow) drive back to the hotel while experiencing the rarity that is Raleigh’s White Terror – snow, and possibly even more than an inch of it in a single night! (Yes, my Bostonian driver sense is laughing now.)
- Remote participants chiming in during the brainstorm and subsequent discussions and hacking – a big thank-you to Thanh and Andrew from freeseer, as well as to Susan, John, Yaakov, Karsten, and everyone else who joined us on IRC and added their ideas to the pool.
That last point bears repeating. One of the things I’m enjoying greatly about this FAD is the amount of dogfooding we’re doing – in my (biased) opinion, we’re doing a pretty good job of keeping things up to date in a way that lets remote participants eavesdrop and participate. Instead of writing notes only when asked to do it, we’re transcribing all the time; the wiki is continuously kept up-to-date, and we’ll occasionally ping those we know to be remote and watching and say “hey, we’d like your input on this thing.”
It’s a lot of work, but it’s great to have – for remotees, for our future selves (it’s making it easier to type these wrap-up notes now, for instance), and for my own ability to participate in the live conversations at the FAD, since sometimes lipreading in a heated discussion jumps between people faster than I can follow, particularly when concentrating on something else (like transcribing our whiteboard notes to the wiki). People have been taking transcription shifts in an ad-hoc manner throughout the day in order to pull this off, and my wrists and I for one am grateful. Suggestions on how we can make things even more accessible to remote participants would be extremely welcome!
We’re in #fedora-fad on irc.freenode.net tomorrow and the day after (Saturday and Sunday) as well if you’d like to join in on the fun – depending on the weather and the road conditions, we may be hacking from the hotel, or we may be hacking from the Red Hat office (all of 5 miles away, mind you) – but either way, we’ll be on IRC and hackin’.
Saturday, January 30th, 2010 | fedora | 1 Comment »
The Events FAD officially starts in 6 hours. Unofficially, it’s been ramping up into being for a couple hours now.
4:30ish: pick up Chris Tyler from the airport. Actually, by the time he comes out to the car, I’m running circles around my automobile in glee – but that’s a different subject and a different story that’s someone else’s to tell. Since Paul (Frields) is out and we’re the only other out-of-towners here early, we grab dinner and spend most of it talking about open source and education (predictably – I mean, it’s me and Chris).
I’m trying to figure out the different skillsets – and mindsets – that make someone a good engineer, a good open source engineer in a community, and a good teacher of open source engineers – there’s technical skill, there’s the grokking of the culture of collaboration (and the tools we use to do it), and then there’s the ability to convey all of the above to people with no prior context to it via the making of introductions, the assigning of projects so big and complex and difficult they can not be done without community. It’s… trying to draw clean boxes and lines around something that’s inherently fuzzy and messy and ever-shifting, though. Doesn’t quite work. I have some stuff to ponder now.
8-something: Chris and I meet Paul in the parking lot of our hotel. There may be snow tomorrow, Paul says. Perhaps multiple inches!!! according to the news. Chris (from Toronto) and I (from Boston) look at each other and crack up.
10:30ish: Dennis Gilmore and Jon Stanley touch down at the airport; we grab (my second) dinner and head to the hotel. Shortly thereafter people begin to pile into #fedora-fad, and shortly thereafter we’re all in Paul and Clint’s room with our laptops out. Paul tunes my guitar and demonstrates his mad skillz, Clint points me at some gstreamer tutorials, I start reading through one while listening to the guys talk about the way the freeseer code is written, alternating between that, emails, and guitar.
Midnight-something: Mass exodus to Waffle House, walking out of the hotel exactly as David Nalley pulls up. I have now had my first Waffle House waffle; it is tasty. 3.5 hours later, I’ve whittled down my inbox backlog to 91 messages, and proceed to sleep (in just a couple minutes now). Hacking begins tomorrow.
(well, strictly speaking, continues – freeseer tinkering has already begun.)
Friday, January 29th, 2010 | fedora | 1 Comment »
One of the things I’ve been starting to do while traveling is take a portable instrument with me. I’ve got two – a travel acoustic guitar and a travel 5-string fretless electric bass. And I’ve been teaching myself both. Slowly. From scratch. With no idea what I’m doing.
In the tradition of “release early release often,” I submit my first attempts at playing the guitar that resemble a recognizable song. Behold the crappiness! (If you actually like these songs and do not wish to see them butchered, do not play the videos below.)
The first song is “Blackbird,” by the Beatles.
And the second is “Diamonds and Rust,” by Joan Baez.
I learned both songs by watching the fingers of high school friends playing them, then eventually asking them to do portions of it slowly so I could watch, then hand me the guitar so I could imitate. Not long after this, they taught me to read tab notation. I memorized both songs, and then proceeded to go to college and not borrow a guitar for five years.
Every time I pick up my guitar, I try to get a little better at something. Maybe it’s just switching between the F and G7 chords. Maybe it’s having a less awkward pull-off in that one section of “Diamonds and Rust.” Maybe it won’t last into the next practice section, but maybe it will.
Learning is fun. Learning to learn is also fun. I’m context-switching between emails, guitar, and reading gstreamer tutorials tonight – and will continue to do so until interrupted by a trip to Waffle House. Life is good.
Friday, January 29th, 2010 | Uncategorized, music | 1 Comment »
Katie pretty much said everything I wanted to say about Dr. M. Thank you, Dr. M, for the school I love.
So I’ve been thinking about mortality lately. More than usual, I mean. One of the things that frightens me most is this: that every teacher I’ve ever gotten close to, every mentor I’ve ever had, is probably going to die before I do. Yes, yes, I know it’s not a given, and that one does learn just as much from younger folks than older folks, but… still. Those Who Have Gone Before are going to… go before.
Not just with dying, either – stepping out, stepping down, from a project or a role, too. I haven’t hit this too much yet; I’ve still spent the majority of my time in a system where the model is that teachers stay behind and students graduate. And so far, when someone’s stepped out of certain shoes, and they or others have asked me to fill them, I’ve been able to grow into them fast enough to walk to wherever it was that needed walking-to (with many padded layers of socks, and many hands to hold as we stumbled along the way). But there’s usually a sense of please please come back take this back you do it so much better or at least a must pass this to somebody more competent in turn sort of thing going on. (Though I am getting better about this as I start internalizing the idea that I’m worth something nonzero.)
But. People leaving before me. In a way where I can’t call them back, or ask them for advice again. That scares me. Probably more than my own leaving-anything scares me, or even my own departure from something (including this world). It’s one of the reasons why I am so ridiculously concerned about my own transitions-out; I try to buffer as much potential suckiness for other people as I can. Because each leaving is also a time for others to do some stepping-in-and-flourishing – each goodbye brings with it the potential for multiple happy hellos. And it’s the latter that I want to look at, shepherd, watch – pre-emptively, if need be, if I can’t do it after the cutoff.
One of the reasons I live life so furiously, appreciate it so madly, is that I regard (and have as long as I can remember) everything I’ve gotten past the age of 3 to be Super Extra Mega Bonus Overtime Round. The constant drilling of “and when you were little you almost died!!!” accomplished not the intended instillation of caution in my early childhood head, but a sense of waking up each morning and going “Whoa, I’m still alive! That’s awesome! Fascinating. What shall we do with that today?”
It kinda puts things in perspective. Have a shitty day? But wait! I am alive! There are so many things that… well, I’m glad I’ve had the time I’ve had. I hope for more – much more – but don’t expect it. I build my life to pass the bus/raptor test because of that. I mean, the first time I ever wrote a will, it was in colored pencil and specified which of my stuffed animals should go to which cousins, and that my $100-something life savings at the time should go to my little brother for school. I build my life so that if I disappear, the things and people that I love don’t get screwed over.
And when I love, I love furiously. I care and care and care about that which I care about in a way I can only describe as very Fire Tiger. It’s fierce enough to stop itself from being fierce; sometimes I love things enough to not love them, to try and rein and temper the flames so that they don’t consume whatever it is that I love. It’s one of the hardest things I do. Learning how not to get angry, how not to lose my temper, how not to fight, how not to utterly destroy – that’s tough. Directing and tempering the flames is hard, but also very valuable.
When I leave this world, I will leave it as a fighter, and I will leave it gracefully.
It will be fun.
Thursday, January 28th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Got to Raleigh in time for an early dinner last night, and then a lovely 7.5 hours of sleep (since I hadn’t actually done that since I left on Saturday).
Point A: Home in Boston, departed approximately 2pm on Saturday after (finally) cleaning my room (which took a while – but now I have a floor!)
Point B: IKEA, where I pulled out my laptop and discovered the existence of…
Point C: …the Boilermaker Jazz Band playing at an all-night dance, which I proceeded to go to, drive all night, and then…
Point D: …go to 8:30am Mass on Sunday morning. It was very unintentional and unplanned – I passed the church just as the Mass was starting and thought “well, I should go.” I’m glad I did. That was a very different sort of Catholic mass than the ones I’m used to – it was definitely still a Mass (there was a bishop presiding, so it also took twice as long as usual) but it was an incredibly energetic one. The congregation was predominantly African-American, and such a singing at Catholic Mass I’ve never heard (accompanied by a very enthusiastic organ, drum, and bass, with the cantor doing a call-and-response) and during the Our Father people reached out to link the entire church into one giant long chain of people holding hands, and when we were doing the sign of peace people were almost literally leaping out of their rows to run across the church and hug each other (even to shake the hand of me, a stranger). Wow. Very different sort of energy than the services I’m used to.
And then I kept going until I hit…
Point E: Raleigh, whereupon I peeked in on some FAD hotel stuff, did some thinking, some eating, some more thinking, and then crashed hard for 7.5 hours of blissful unconsciousness until I couldn’t sleep any more.
All in all, a great trip – I’ve never done that long a solo drive by myself, but I’ve always wanted to, and I can now say that I really, really, really like it. Open road, middle of the night, nothing but you and your thoughts and the occasional passing truck. Passing trees and valleys and fascinating cities and small towns in broad daylight and being able to stop the car and just stare at a forest dripping with moss or a rock face shining with ice or to walk down a funny-looking street for a while without anyone thinking you’re weird. Being able to pop on IRC and say hello and talk a little when I feel the need for Peopleness (usually prompted by “my back is tense, I need to stop driving for a bit and stretch, how do I make myself not drive for a while? COMPUTER!”), and then pop off and drive again. Long stretch of time and space for me. About 30 hours – one of the longest uninterrupted stretches of time-for-me I’ve ever had.
The Mel likes. The Mel should possibly try long-distance biking at some point (or running, or some human-powered form of locomotion) so as to see if the same sort of experience can be had with, ah, less fossil fuel consumption.
I am now wide, wide awake and possibly overly excited about being in Raleigh this week – expense reports time, and then TO THE OFFICE! YAYYY!!!! (That’s really actually me being very very happy! This week is Edumacation Week, and it is going to totally rock.)
Monday, January 25th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I started out for Raleigh this afternoon, alternating between driving and doing tiny worksprints (thank you, mobile broadband!) of the “send out these 3 overdue emails – ok, stretch and run around and drive some more” variety. This made progress wonderfully relaxed and slow – after a driving period spent listening and scatting along to the Boilermaker Jazz Band (and admiring the piano bits – particularly one song where it’s trading fours with the guitarist) I grabbed an early (cheap! yay!) dinner at the IKEA in New Haven and discovered that who should be playing in East Hartford tonight but… the Boilermaker Jazz Band.
15 minutes later I was in the car driving the 45 minutes back north to East Hartford, happy that I’d brought my dance shoes along for exactly such an occasion (I plan on looking for blues/swing dances in Raleigh this week). I’m writing this from the adjoining auditorium – after 3 solid hours of dancing, I’m drenched in sweat and need a break from the floor. It goes ’till 4am, and we shall see how long I last. (Cardiovascular fitness… does not haz. Gotta work on that endurance.)
I don’t know a single soul here, but that’s okay! I’m bolder now* – brave enough to ask the guys I want to dance with if they’d like to dance, fluent enough to mostly keep up with some of the faster dancers on the floor, quick enough a study to learn as I go. The Mel who learned to dance in high school would call my present self a “good dancer,” but I know the truth is closer to “I’ve begun to be able to learn.”
*than I was when I first started to dance in high school. Being bolder than my high school self is not particularly hard, to be quite honest; when you need to steel yourself to order a cheeseburger at the McDonald’s counter, you are shy. (In my defense, I hadn’t really done that by myself too many times before high school – I have gotten used to it by now. Heck, I can even talk to waiters at non-fast-food restaurants without looking awkwardly like a beet due to not knowing what to do. Yay!)
And I’ve begun to listen – thanks to studying with Kevin, I can pick out some elements of what the band is doing that I think I can practice replicating when I get to a keyboard again. While the band was taking a break, I got up the courage (after stalling three times by drinking glasses of water) to approach Mark Kotision, the band’s pianist. (“Aaah,” went Mel’s brain. “What are you doing? He is a really freakin’ good pianist – look at that fluent economy of motion, listen to the casual shuffle of that tricky series of syncopated chords as he simultaneously sings – and you’re about to ask some really stupid questions? RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!” “Be quiet, brain,” said Mel. “There are times where I choose to be Brave yet Stupid. Now… is one of those times.”)
Anyway. To my surprise, he not only answered my questions, he went “Oh! There’s a piano in the next room,” and so we went over and he showed me comping, and how you’d play differently if there’s a string player, and the difference between stride (in 2/4, with strong octaves in the left hand keeping time) and what I think was called “dance style” (in 4/4, what Mark mostly played – he switches between the two a lot), and generally was ridiculously awesome about answering my questions until his bandmates called him back up front to play the next round of songs. Wow. If I was a fan before… all I can say is that I aspire to be that gracious about teaching the things I know, now and in the future.
I do not know how long I’m going to last tonight – it’s not the sleep that worries me (I’m good for consciousness for a long, long time), it’s the “I am around a lot of strange people interacting intensely with them at a fast pace” bit, which tends to fill my introversion buffer pretty fast. I will need a long, long, long time of solo driving to unwind and decompress from The Peopleness – but long, long, long, long solo driving time is what I have to look forward to, so it’s all good.
They’re playing one of my favorite songs now – “The Nearness Of You.”
(I adore the Norah Jones cover of this song.) I’m going back in.
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
First, a non-SLOBs update: a number of us (led by Walter) are working on a grant proposal for the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition. It’s due at the end of the day – if you have a moment to read or edit or comment on the proposal, we’d greatly appreciate it.
Now: what’s up with SLOBs?
Finances:
Walter has written more notes on the state of our finances, but the short version is that we’ve got about $7000 USD discretionary funds and really need someone who’s not on the board to step up and be our financial officer for… well, ideally, a year, but I’d be happy with an interim volunteer for 2-3 months, which would give us time to figure out a better long-term solution. Email slobs AT lists DOT sugarlabs DOT org if you’re interested or know someone who might be.
Infrastructure:
We approved $300 for shipping of Wikipedia’s server donations – and since those machines stand a good chance of letting us not need to buy a $3000 machine, we deferred the motion to spend $3000 on that (the Infrastructure team will re-request the funding if it turns out that the Wikipedia server donations don’t remove this need after all).
Trademark:
We’re moving forward on the trademark process – here’s a background briefing on the current state of our progress on it, and we appreciate everyone’s patience (and simultaneously, everyone’s impatience, as it keeps us moving forward!)
You can help us with the next step, which is generating trademark case studies. There are instructions on the page on how to contribute – the wiki page we’re editing is called [[Trademark case studies]]. As I write this, the page is still a stub, but Sean Daly will be filling it in with a template and examples and instructions on how to contribute shortly (but feel free to leave notes and links there anyway in the absence of those instructions – we could use data to put through that process once Sean puts the process up).
That’s it – Walter should be posting meeting minutes/logs shortly.
Friday, January 22nd, 2010 | sugar | 1 Comment »
By way of explanation where that photo of 3-year-old Mel came from: I was feeling all whiny and unproductive earlier this week, so I pinged the nearest friend and went “I need to whine for five minutes, can haz tolerance?” whereupon Sebastian not only listened to me whining, but did some conversational jujitsu and somehow got me from WHINE WHINE WHINE to going “d’aww!” over pictures of chipmunks, baby foxes, baby hedgehogs, and small children. Several minutes later I was happy again and all launched back into Productive Mode. Friends are cool.
Asheesh’s microblog/facebook setup might actually entice me to do the same, meaning I may actually have functional Facebook status messages and dents/tweets at some point. Now, that doesn’t mean I’m going to read stuff coming in – I’m distractable enough as it stands, so I currently only look for tweets/dents/facebook-things when I am pointed at a specific piece of content, or looking for the same. I got to hang out with him and Kat Walsh late Monday night earlier this week – it was nice to finally meet Asheesh in person.
Today’s triumph: the discovery that my musculoskeletal system is much less messed up than it was a year ago. A year ago, my RSI was rapidly approaching the point where I couldn’t type for more than a few minutes at a time and more than an hour or two total for the whole day before the combination of pain and common sense overcame my masochism (it just always hurt). I went to see Abi (the massage therapist who’s been working with me on my RSI for many months now) today for the first time since fall, expecting to find that I’d completely relapsed.
Instead, we found just a bit of residual tightness in my shoulders and neck and spine. The scar tissue on my neck (tracheotomy) and ribcage (chest tubes) is actually soft and pliable. My shoulders are more open; I stand taller. Aaaaand I still have really tight forearm and hand (yes, hand – I have knots in the middle of my palm) muscles. Well… it’s getting there. My right forearm is currently a mass of soreness, and I’m turning in early for the night to let my hands rest from that. No keyboard for 7 hours.
Friday, January 22nd, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
