Archive for May, 2010
Okay, yes. Dancing is awesome. I’d like more, please.
I was briefly tempted by Beantown Camp and Swing Out New Hampshire, but… I don’t think the scheduling works out at all, and… oh well. So when can I get my next fix? Possibilities:
- Blues Blaze in NYC, October 1-3, 2010
- Boston Fusion Exchange, January 7-9, 2011. Apparently Boston’s hosting xFX this year (thanks to Liz for pointing this stuff out to me). Depends on whether I’m in the continent around then; there’s a chance my family may be doing something in the Philippines, but… but… but… so tempted.
- ATLX, sometime in March-ish. (Bonus: the prospect of persuading Andrew to take a side trip to the Coca-Cola museum.) Or the Boston Tea Party, probably also sometime in March-ish. Or… both. Perhaps. Depending.
- BluesSHOUT! in Boston, May 27-29, 2011. Liz pointed me to videos from last year, and… wow. Just… wow. I’ll never be able to do some of that stuff, but… wow. The complication is that there’s a weekend between Olin’s Commencement and BluesSHOUT! so I’ll either have to be able to work from Boston for a week (…probably okay, I think) or make a second trip up, if I do this – turns out Stanford’s Commencement (my brother Jason) is June 12, so I’ll be fine with scheduling there, it’s just a long time to leave an apartment empty and I am in Raleigh to actually be able to be at the office more. Then again, it may be a good excuse for Fun Road Trip Stupidity. I am a fan of Fun Road Trip Stupidity. Particularly when I can rope others in on it.
- What else is there?
Pointers, tips, travel buddies? When else am I going to be young, stupid, and mobile? (Okay, the “young” part is the only one with a timeout here. Stupidity will last forever. Mobility will last as long as I want it to.)
Other, non-dance trips on my queue, in addition to work-stuff. Scattered and incomplete. I need to actually pull together my calendar for this stuff at some point.
- Some sort of camping in New England, possibly in the fall, because according to Mr. Bouchard, Florida does not have “real camping.” Which apparently involves forests. And stuff. There is supposedly a FOSS geek camping trip in… New Jersey or thereabouts, in… October or September or… something of the sort, and… let me just ask Jonathan about that when I see him in Rochester in June. Yeah. I’ll do that.
- October 27-30, 2010: Frontiers in Education (engineering and computing) in DC. On a panel! Woo!
- Thanksgiving in Seattle with Guama (my maternal grandmother) and all my aunts on my mom’s side. That’ll be great.
- FUDCon NA, of course. Tempe, AZ, I hope. It would be nice to be on Robyn and Ryan’s home turf.
- Return To Panama City: Kitesurfing Edition – especially once Andrew has a house that can host dancing parties, which I would be more than happy to help plan…
- I mentioned this above, sort of, but Stanford’s 2011 Commencement in June (the Jason Chua edition). Except I may have to go back again the following year if my brother decides to go for a Masters as well. He’s just trying to milk us all for more graduation presents, really. He also decided, to my dismay, that he does not actually want to bike across the USA any more – so I’ll have to find some other way to make that trip.
- I’m sure that there will be POSSEs next summer and throughout the year that need instructors, though I’m trying to reduce the percentage of POSSEs I teach at because we really, really need to grow our instructor pool.
I am… incredibly lucky to be able to even think about doing this. I don’t know how much I’ll get to do – I consider basically every trip a bonus trip – but… I’m definitely enjoying this mobility. And since I have 2 years of it left before grad school, when it’ll be much harder for me to Go Places because I have to Be Somewhere for classes and whatnot, I’m going to use it. As much as possible.
Monday, May 31st, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
There comes a point during a long, long, late-night dance session where you and your partner are basically holding each other up, barely conscious except for the dancing, but still going. The lights are down so low you can barely make out the names scrawled in marker on the scattered plastic cups by the water table; most of those names are of people who’ve already gone home. The music is dripping through the air like molasses and your feet are just sort of trailing lazily across the wooden floor, and someone’s singing “Summertime,” and then you walk outside and the night is warm and good.
Mmmmm.
This is my second time doing this. The first was a long time ago, almost 4 years ago, back in Connecticut. I’ve got to do this again.
My legs were shaking as I walked down the stairs on the way out. I’m probably going to be in a bit of pain tomorrow morning, but nothing that won’t fix itself in time to do it again at Piers Park and then again in Brookline. I never thought that dancing would be a good way for me to clear my head – it started as a “let me learn how to deal with physical contact!” exercise (and a bit of a “let me figure out how to get lots of hyperactive energy out!” in the case of lindy), but it’s… really nice now that I can consistently stop the chatter in my brain when I’m out on the floor. As it turns out, this is very useful.
I wonder if there are any 24-hour diners in the Boston area that have parking. I could use some food.
Sunday, May 30th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Played a bit of guitar with Melanie in the morning. First time she and I have tried a song by ear with two different parts – one of us on lead, one of us on rhythm. “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is the only one we both know, so we did that, and switched off; it didn’t go too badly, actually. Fun! Must try again.
Street Performer’s day at Quincy Market: took the train downtown with Audrey, who insisted on either sitting on my lap or climbing on my shoulders for every performance (everything from juggling to guitar to escape artistry to aerial silks). Introduced the kid to subway surfing, too. Got back to the subway just as it started to rain, and got home without becoming overly soaked.
Drove out to Springstep in Medford, where the Boilermaker Jazz Band (my favorite swing band) played for hours – danced and danced and danced. Worked kitchen shift as a volunteer (boring: essentially consists of making awful coffee over and over) and am waiting for the burritos to go out because need can haz food. Disadvantage of wearing not-a-skirt and having short hair: sometimes people think I’m a lead. Oh well. I feel a lot more comfortable in something that’s not a dress, so I continue wearing what I wear. Considering new shoes at some point when these fall apart. Maybe something with arch support.
Dancing is great – all kinds of leads out on the floor, great music, dancing ’till my feet start aching, then peel off sticky shirt, replace with fresh one (FUDCon Berlin – thank you, Mo!) and walk slowly to the car, light tiredness upon my eyes, and throw self in back seat for short nap (which is what I’m about to do).
Satisfyingly sleepy. Short nap should fix. Then dancing more ’till 4am. Tomorrow: more dancing at Piers Park, right near where I used to live in East Boston and the site of my favorite-ever Boston skyline. And then more dancing ’till 4am. Woo!
Saturday, May 29th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I love task queues; for someone who context-switches as much as I do (both mentally and in terms of physical location), they are ways to keep the switching overhead as low as possible. It’s easy to get a clear picture of exactly what to do next. That having been said, I’ve been struggling to find, triage, and clear a few of my task queues lately, so I thought I’d ramble for a bit on progress so as to get my head clear on what I’m trying to do.
First are the physical queues, which are (now that I have a few days in Boston) rapidly being cleared. For instance:
- My room now has a floor again (the “stuff Mel needs to pick up and put in its proper place” queue)
- My laundry’s almost done (the “clean clothes” queue)
- I need to triage and deal with my mail. There are disadvantages to frequent travel; I have tons of scholarly journal back-issues to read now – and should really just start taking these things on the plane with me instead of having to stare at the Skymall catalog and be bored. Haven’t started on this one yet.
Then there are my FOSS project queues.
- Fedora Marketing – I’m going to be clearing this queue before Tuesday’s meeting (in other words, “what is Mel doing Tuesday morning?”)
- Fedora Infrastructure, which has a single ticket that is blocked, so I’m basically set on this one.
- Sugar Labs. A good chunk of these are due to my utter inability to maintain the IRC Activity well – when we make the SoaS Activity Inclusion Critera for the upcoming v4, I will use that as a target motivation for charging through cleaning that stuff up. The others on that list that I should have are related to SoaS. I need… to triage myself out of a bunch of the rest, and then just start working on stuff. I think the weekly SoaS meetings will help with this.
- OLPC (I had 2 tickets but I just cleared them – they referred to builds that were years out of date. Now I have 0 tickets in this tracker. Yay!)
- TracBacks, my Trac plugin, which is also woefully unmaintained. It’s mostly an activation energy issue; most of these bugs aren’t hard, it’s just that I no longer have that dev/testing environment set up and have no motivation to set it up again right now. This is something I need shoulder-surfing on… if someone were to want to, say, learn about Trac plugins by helping me work through these for a day, I’d totally take the time to walk them through a dev environment setup (thereby recreating my own) and all that. But in the absence of that, I just… don’t… do it. Any takers who want to kick my ass to do something on this?
Then there are my projects that should have queues and don’t (or don’t have clear ones). In other words, my queue of queues to make.
- POSSE
- Plover
- CFS SoaS deployment (I really need an infrastructure to-do list for this.)
- Operation: Finances!
- Operation: Being Healthy! (I know the first ticket is “actually get a doctor and see them about this cough that’s been around for nearly 2 months now”)
- Operation: Music! (mostly working on the “guitar” component right now)
Yeah, that’s a lot of queues. Once I have them, I can manage and reduce them. I guess I do try to run my life like an engineering project when I get overwhelmed. It doesn’t always work. Lest you think I’m actually disciplined, I’m not – I usually run through life as a mad improvisation most if not all of the time – it’s just that when I go “oh my gosh what do I do now flailflailflail” this is how I structure my thinking about figuring that out.
Friday, May 28th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I’ve been at Red Hat for a year – May 28th was my first official full day of work as a CommArch intern. And I’m still as happy about it now as I was back then. Happier and more excited, if anything, now that I’m getting to know how things work and see more of the potential for all the crazy awesome that lies ahead. Never thought I’d actually want to stay in a place this long, and think about staying even longer. But then again, life can surprise you sometimes.
Thanks to my team – Max and Karsten, and of course Greg, plus the extended CommArch family – for a wonderful year.
Friday, May 28th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Yep. This is still what I want to do when I grow up. Maybe not the exact picture, but the general idea – for instance, I could see myself being happy working on engineering education from the “industry” side of the 3-way academia-opensource-industry bridge rather than purely the academic side alone. And chickens in the backyard (though someone else will have to take care of them) would not be a bad addition, given how much I love doing random things with eggs in the morning and how awesome fresh eggs are (seriously, I can’t get over how good they are; Karsten and Karlie have spoiled me for life).
It’s less about the house (for instance, I don’t need a machine shop in the basement – ready 24/7 access to one somewhere else would do) and more about the way I’m living and thinking there – free to run around, not tied to any worries or obligations like a mortgage to stress out about (I realize that “pay for house in cash” is an audacious goal, but… we’ll see) or debts to pay or people yelling at me to do things I don’t want to do. Freedom, and the ability to share that freedom. Note how other people stay in the house while I’m out and maintain it and live in it and keep it buzzing and all the normal things that people tend to do when they actually live somewhere. It’s something that I can come home to, but which I’m not obligated to come home to at any particular point in time, somewhere I can go “oh hey, jazz band is playing in Connecticut!” and 5 minutes later be out the door and on the road without a second thought, because everything else is already taken care of.
Since writing that post about Maker House, I’ve confirmed that frequent nomadic travel is indeed a way of life that I adore. I know exactly what goes in my backpack for a 1-week trip, I’ve gotten good at simultaneously removing my shoes, laptop, and jacket in the most efficient way possible while walking through a security line pulling out bins, I’ve had the satisfaction of watching sunrises and sunsets on opposite sides of a continent – on different continents, even! – within a 24 hour time period, and I’ve strolled (well, really, sprinted) through strange cities late at night with no curfew, no chaperone, and nobody dictating my agenda. Man, now this is the way to see the world. Someday I’ll take a few months (hopefully a full year) off and get that round-the-world plane ticket and just do that. Will probably be writing up a lot of it as I go along. This will probably happen after grad school, which means I need to (1) get my PhD and then (2) be able to afford to do it. I can wait. Maybe that’ll be my graduation present to myself.
I still love manic random worksprints, and I think I always will. Sometimes they go until 5am. Sometimes they go longer. Sometimes I don’t sleep for a few days in a row and then collapse on the ride back (see: FUDCon Toronto) – I love those moments, though. It’s a great feeling that you get after a long, hard job well done, to which you’ve put every ounce of your remaining energy and ability. To be tapped to your limits and really pushed and used, with nothing in the way of that… it’s one of the best highs I know. And the crash after a good run is such a sweet sleep. To be tired and worn-out and alive (not burnt-out, but satisfyingly exhausted) is an art, but when you nail that balance… mmm.
Teaching, music jamming, dancing, cooking in a busy kitchen and eating elbow-to-elbow with dozens of others at a crowded table – raucous, energy-spewing, hyperactive ways of being alive. The latter two are with my family – as much as I complain about them, they’re awesome, and I do appreciate those moments – there’s nothing like a house overstuffed with 8 sisters and their 6 husbands and 14 kids, all singing ABBA at the top of their lungs, for a classic reunion moment. Those are great. And so are the quieter moments of being alone, which I also need for balance, and to recharge – quietly playing guitar on the porch, climbing trees, and walking through a city on a hot summer wolfing down street-vendor falafel from a styrofoam container, biking through sprinklers at dusk (yeah, I still do that now – the temptation is just too much).
Being able to gamble the entirety of your life on something risky and potentially stupid (yet still worth going for) is a blessing I don’t take for granted, because I haven’t always been able to do that. A big one for me is the long, hard haul towards changing engineering education for the better. (open source!) Then there’s the somewhat more stupid and reckless stuff, like motorcycling and kitesurfing and fighting in martial arts tournaments (okay, the last one is less stupid/reckless; yay safety precautions!) and parkour and whatnot. Maybe a crazy startup someday. Who knows? (I’ll note that yes, most of these things involve physical exertion that demands a fitness level higher than my current one – still waiting for my parents to give me my 529 and IRA like we discussed, and then I’m starting the “be healthy” project in earnest.)
I love that my future actually looks like this now. Or that it can. (I still need to apply to grad school.) I may get Maker House yet.
Another lovely feature of the future: lazy late-morning or early-afternoon naps, like the one I’m about to take after lunch today. Throwing laundry in the basement, off for a few errands, then food-time, and then… nap. Mmm. The satisfaction of getting good work done through the faint haze of residual tiredness from last night’s dancing is rather delicious.
And tonight I get to do it all again.
Friday, May 28th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
If you’re interested in marketing/branding and/or open source outside the domain of software, read Robyn Bergeron’s comment on Chris Grams’s post on whether “truly great design can be done the open source way.”
I guess, to put it in terms that I’ve heard you use, the “chorus, not a crowd” thing – there might be a conductor who says, “we’re going to sing a song – but I’m not going to pick the song, you guys can decide the song, and what parts you want to sing. I’ll be here to referee while you pick the song, and I’ll direct it and keep everyone singing together when we’re ready.”
One of the things I’m most excited about the Fedora Marketing Team is that we are learning how to do marketing the open source way. Not just marketing of open source things, but marketing done by a community practicing radical transparency, breaking a common vision into modular pieces, making not just our outputs but our tools and processes open and subject to review, debate, refreshing.
It will be time for me to pass the hat on soon, and to a pair of far more able hands. I think it’s been apparent to anyone watching the Marketing Team that Robyn Bergeron has been stepping up to inspire and lead the team more and more as time goes by. It’s really just a title change so that she’s doing it in name as well as deed; on our June 1st meeting, we will pass an invisible baton, and ding! I will officially be Robyn’s minion. I’m looking forward to this, as it fulfills two goals I’ve had ever since I started leading Marketing this past July: (1) leadership by the community, of the community, and for the community, and (2) having marketers run marketing.
The last one, perhaps, requires a bit of explanation. I’m an engineer by training. I walked into this job knowing nothing about marketing at all; in fact, the first thing I had to do when I was asked to lead the team was look up “marketing” on Wikipedia, because I did not know what it meant. And as I got started, I notice that… whereas the Infrastructure team had many sysadmins, and the Design team had designers, and so forth, the Marketing team… had very few marketers. Excellent contributors and open source community members, to be sure – but we needed to bridge out to those with expertise in the domain of marketing as well.
And what a difference it’s made. In the past 8 months, we’ve been fortunate to have new contributors come in and teach us about market research, SWOT, keyword optimization, and more – techniques and ways of looking at the world that I as a relatively new-to-the-world engineer hadn’t heard of or even considered before, and I think the process has been similarly eye-opening for others in the community.
“Open source marketing is the community-driven process responsible for enabling users to identify, anticipate, and satisfy their own requirements sustainably.” –draft definition of open source marketing
We’re moving in all the right directions to get better and better at this, and I’m looking forward to seeing where the team goes – and continuing to help shape it as a contributor and general Marketing minion. (One of the things I’m most looking forward to is having more free time to learn how to work with upstream Marketing groups, and figuring out what that dynamic looks like.)
I, for one, welcome our new pwnie-toting overlord. Looking forward to plowing forth on F14 under your benevolent reign, Robyn!
Friday, May 28th, 2010 | fedora | No Comments »
- Go to sleep at 2am
- Wake up a bit after 5am
- Work a bit
- Drive a friend to the airport (have fun at WisCon, Sumana!)
- Work a bit more
- Hack on open steno software for a bit (or rather, fail to install Tkinter in Python 3 – I’ll do this when I upgrade to F13 this weekend – but learn how to chord “hello, world” on a steno keyboard and get an orientation to the code enough to start tinkering with new features – thanks, Mirabai!)
- Meetings and conversations
- Drive back to Boston, periodically interrupted by…
- POSSE California meeting
- Free hot dogs
- Traffic (ok, this part not so fun – New York and Boston are not over 7 hours apart)
- Arrive at Blues Union, dance until you’re basically a pile of sweaty clothes collapsed onto a chair
- Drive home with radio on and windows down so as to stay awake and not run car into tree
- Shower
- Emails and various small work-things
- 2am POSSE China meeting
I’ve got a red, white, and blue thread bracelet around my right wrist that will stay on for the next few days – it’s the marker for bix, which goes through late Monday night. This weekend, I am a dancer.
And a hacker. Three things I want to tinker with over the long weekend:
- Upgrade my infrastructure (work laptop, deployment netbook collection, trove-of-ancient-hardware) to F13 and whatnot, reallocate hardware as needed and install new programs that have been on my list for a while.
- Offlineimap + postfix adventures with Karsten
- Plover feature coding for Mirabai
Also, food and sleep and stretching and rest and thinking and yay. And clearing email backlog. So much backlog…
Not a bad life, really. Certainly a full one.
Friday, May 28th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I left New York for BIX (dance festivities) early in the afternoon. New York and then Connecticut traffic crept by, and gradually my predicted arrival time shifted from 2 hours before the dance to 2 hours late to the dance. I wasn’t exactly the happiest camper about this, so I swung over to a rest stop so I could call BIX and let the volunteer coordinators know I’d be incredibly late.
The first thing I noticed when I pulled in was the row of signs saying “FREE FOOD.” Hm, I thought. I like Connecticut. Further investigation revealed several large tents with people in various military/American insignia grilling hot dogs. “Want a hot dog?” the guy at the grill asked me. “Do I!” I replied, obligingly stuffing my face.
Turns out they’re a group of Polish veterans who have been grilling at this rest stop for Memorial Day weekends (they set up Thursday through Sunday) for the past 7 years. The event used to be run by a group of boy scouts, but the boy scouts all got older and outgrew it, so these folks picked it up – 6,000 visitors a day, they said, so at least 3,000 hot dogs, and a few hundred gallons of coffee. Per day. They went to the supermarket, folded down the back seats of their Honda Odysseys, and started flinging bags of hot dog buns into it until the van was full. They grill breakfast sandwiches in the morning, switch up the hotdogs for meatball sandwiches for variety, and otherwise just hang out and feed travelers all weekend, once a year.
What a great idea. It certainly completely made my day… I’m going to have to do this at some point. (I asked how, and they said you had to get permission from the state to camp out and grill at a rest stop – so… excellent. Future adventures shall be had.)
Onwards back to Boston now – hopefully I’ll get there in time for some dancing tonight, at least.
Thursday, May 27th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
All righty, I’ve got me a setlist full of lyrics to learn, and I want to take at least 3 of them and arrange and learn them for fingerstyle guitar[0]. I have ’till August. Norah Jones concert, here I come.
It’ll probably be:
- Don’t Know Why (because I have the chords for that painfully worked out already, just need to add the melody and make the fingering less agonizingly awkward)
- Sunrise (because I think it’s well-suited to a fingerstyle arrangement)
- Something Else I Dunno Yet (I guess I could count “Shoot the Moon” here if I actually tab and record my arrangement, though technically it isn’t part of the setlist.
[0] This is part 1 of 2 of my guitar goals for the summer. The other one is finishing volume 1 of the Berklee Method for Guitar. My guitar is traveling the country with me this summer. MUSIC SHALL BE PLAYED!
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
