Easy come, easy go.

Today, thanks to the superb punctuality and workmanship of DMR Handyman Service, we have a brand new set of vinyl front-porch railing, to replace the crummy, unsealed wood junk that the builders used when they constructed our house. Ron, the founder and main go-to guy for DMR, did a great job, plus he also painted the ceiling of our porch and some other trim. Plus, he always shows up — on time — when he says he will, and cleans up when he’s finished. We may be $2700 lighter, but it was well worth it, especially when I probably would have ended up collapsing the whole darn structure if I’d tried to do it myself.

Non-entry.

We had a lovely little get-together of some good friends after Eleya’s CAbi party. Normally I am not a big fan of these sell-from-home businesses, but Eleya tells me (with her seamstress’ spidey-sense) that these clothes are very well made. To be honest, I just think she looks good in ‘em, especially this ensemble. Anyway, everyone had a great time hanging out (as we always do), and I got to bed late, late, LATE. Today was spent just practicing, doing a little Fedora work, and generally recovering.

Bite-size Friday.

Errands.

One of the errands hanging about was a state inspection for our van, so I went to take care of that today after taking off work early. Seems a lot of people are off for Good Friday, but not me. In any case, I found that our service station has wireless up, but they have it locked to visitors. This came as a real culture shock after spending last week in and around Boston where you practically couldn’t get away from free and open wireless.

It’s a kind of cultural norm, and with the D.C. area being the conservative (read: stuffy and ill-informed) place it is, locking your customers out of wireless appears to be the norm here. IIRC there are a few places that buck this trend, like Starbucks and Borders. Yes, they may be “evil” überchains, but with that territory comes some perks — like being able to afford IT offices that deploy turnkey solutions that benefit their customers.

New tunes.

In band news, we are now total sellout whores. But in a good way. Well, if you consider “a good way” to be “raking in big dollars to do a one-off show for one of the biggest lobbying associations in the country.” And since I consider taking money away from those kind of concerns to be not only laudable but practically a civic duty, it’s like a bonus that I get to do it by playing music. I’ll tell you who it is after we do the gig. The only downside is that we’ve had to learn half a dozen “50′s cover tunes” to placate one of the people on the client’s side of the fence. Not our usual bag, but for this kind of money, it seemed worth it. It’s not like no other respectable band has ever done a cover tune.

Gold in them thar hills.

I had a root canal on Tuesday which made up for a very long period where I should have gone to the dentist but didn’t. Thankfully, every other tooth I have was found to be in a great condition; I just had one that (to quote the dentist) “kinda went crazy.” The procedure was relatively painless, and the next-day soreness was mild and easily manageable with a couple Advil. I’m getting a gold permanent crown next month — gold because it’s one of my back molars, so I won’t be doing CB4 Part Deux or anything.

Crash.

Eleya and I finally watched — after a long wait for our Netflix queue to settle — the 2005 Best Picture winner Crash. I have to say I was not thoroughly impressed. Most of the acting was fine, some inspired (Terrence Howard, Matt Dillon, and a great cameo by Tony Danza), and some so-so at best. If you ask me, Ludacris was pretty darn solid. The directing was similarly hit or miss, but the photography had some standout moments, especially the lighting schemes, which were very bold.

However, the movie kicked off with an overly precious bit of monologue by Don Cheadle, who deserved better; seemed painted in broad strokes; was peppered with blunt manipulations and contrivances; and rushed through a series of vignettes that really deserved a more nuanced script and the time to play it out. (That said script was lacking a bit was not a huge surprise, given the very formulaic work the writer-director, Paul Haggis, turned in for last year’s Million Dollar Baby, which had the distinct advantage of Clint Eastwood’s stately direction.) A movie that depicts an intersection between that many characters needs to have room to breathe, and that generally means a more epic length. Cf. Nashville, Short Cuts, and Magnolia. This is not to say the movie was bad — it had a few charms to offer, especially the piece of the story that revolved around the Hispanic locksmith and his little girl.

In general, though, the film came off as sophomoric and unworthy of the Best Picture Oscar — especially when compared to the subtle but devastating emotional wallop of Brokeback Mountain — and suffered from the growing epidemic of self-obsessed L.A.-centric navel-gazing. Out here in the real world, most of us are aware that, yes, RACISM IS VERY BAD. I couldn’t help thinking, after watching Crash, about Jon Stewart’s Oscar night joke about “issue” movies, to the effect that “none of those things were ever a problem again.” If only. Then we could look forward to years of movie-watching unhampered by well-meaning, preachy films like this one. Marginally recommended.

Snapshots from the trenches.

It’s nice to be home (finally). After my flight Saturday morning, I sat in traffic for 2-1/2 hours on the way home. Then I dropped my stuff, hugged the wife and kids, and drove another hour down to Richmond to help some friends with their house-painting project. Lovely folks they are, they fed me dinner, and after driving home rather later than I expected, I totally fell into bed and crashed until about 9:30 this morning.

The smell of fresh-brewed coffee cured my morning blues (did I mention my wife rocks?) and thankfully there wasn’t a lot of email to catch up in the wake of the conference. I transcribed my notes from the historic (?) first Fedora Project Board meeting and sent them off to Fearless Leader for distribution. We are working hard to get some public-facing infrastructure up, so we can effectively expose our process to the community. There are some delays, but nothing we shouldn’t be able to handle in fairly short order. Stay tuned for news.

Oh, and here are some “exciting action shots” from LinuxWorld and FUDCon. The suit-to-geek ratio was way up this year. Anyhoo, it will be easy to tell from these images that I am not much of a photographer. I had a few snaps of Max and Greg at the closing keynote as well as some other odds and ends that were so terrible I can’t even post them.

Here’s the view coming down to the show floor:

Somehow I managed to not have my camera with me (or ready to shoot, in any case) whenever I met someone interesting, especially the Fedorans. The lovely and congenial Alex Maier, for instance, stopped by the Fedora booth on Thursday while I was there, and I managed to get no picture. I can report that she has a fabulous smile, and that rumors abound of her ability to drink a bar full of Tibetan yak herders under a table. Unfortunately, I could neither confirm nor deny these rumors with any of the Tibetan yak herders, since they kept getting dragged off by Intel Fembots monotonously repeating, “HAVE YOU TAKEN THE TOUR? HAVE YOU TAKEN THE TOUR?” But here’s all the other marketeers from Da Hat:

I was a good $12-15 cab ride from the convention center, but the tradeoff was that (1) I got the room at my per diem rate, and (2) I had a corner suite with an awesome view of Boston Harbor. I had a shot of the suite’s interior, but what with all the hookers, Curvoisier, crack pipes, and what-not littered around from the night before, it was kind of hard to get a bead on how nice the room was. Here’s the view, though:

Warren Togami started off Friday morning with an overview of Fedora that helped set the stage for newcomers and dispel some of the frequent silly FUD surrounding the distribution. Most importantly, he made it clear that Red Hat loves Fedora, wants it to succeed on its own terms, and is trying to Do The Right Thing by the community — you know, when they’re not trying to destroy FOSS by burying it under truckloads of cash.

This shot came right before the Fedora Core 5 DVDs arrived in their super-collectible logo sleeve, and attendees started overturning cars and burning storefronts to get to them:

Christopher Aillon’s presentation on NetworkManager was one that I attended. He did a good job, even when being heckled by Seth. (Just kidding!)

Unfortunately, that’s all I’ve got that’s worth posting, and I’m sure that point is arguable at best. Hopefully there will be more from other folks shortly.

The Wrap-Up

Anne Margulies from MIT just gave an amazing presentation on MIT OpenCourseWare. Max Spevack is now giving our closing keynote, “State of the Fedora,” with a lot of momentum provided by Ms. Margulies. MIT’s work in opening knowledge to the global community is very inspring, and we can be proud of our FOSS community heritage, both in helping to make that work possible, if only on a conceptual level, and in how we are still leading the charge for freeing global knowledge assets.

In the “information economy” — however time-worn that particular appellation might be — the value of an idea lies not in how it helps hoard, but how it helps distribute the basis and tools for creating and transmitting knowledge, and having a lasting effect on our world. I have no doubt other people have better made this assertion, and for some time now. But hearing how MIT has taken some of the very fundamental core concepts of open source, and applied them to its mission, has shown me personally how wide-ranging and high-impact this idea truly is.

By the way, Thomas Chung of FedoraNews.org has been videotaping some of the intriguing sessions held here, and I am betting you will see these videos online very soon.

This event has been a fantastic opportunity for me, not just as a new Board member, but as a Fedora user and contributor. I’ve met people who are important to me whether or not they know me — people like Warren, Jeremy, Seth, Jesse, Paul, Karsten, Nalin, and Greg. You guys ROCK. Not just because you do cool work, but because your cool work makes my cool work possible. And also because the stuff you have helped build has contributed to my personal knowledge, and my ability to distribute that knowledge into the world. Seriously, thank you.

Now, on to FUDPub!

FUDsters unite!

Today is the Boston FUDCon and I am super-stoked about it. Last night after LinuxWorld ended most of us Fedorans went to the Boston Beer Works right next to historic Fenway Park for dinner; I had (among other things) fried pickles. Despite the vegetable in the name, not a health dish. (Go figure.)

Now we’re preparing for kickoff and things are buzzing in the “Command Center.” I helped get Karsten’s shiny new FC5 (upgraded last night in only 3 hours!) working with ipw2200, and we listened to Jack’s tale of woe regarding a vent pipe and his rear window, which seemed like a horrendously unfair blow from the karma cops given the tremendous effort he’s put forth making everything happen here in Boston.

I’m going to try and get some pictures, and will check in with them later.

BoFfo.

I figured, since I just got home from dinner and had a little time on my hands before I try to get some Docs work done, that I would post some abbreviated minutes from the BoF session earlier this evening for those of you who missed it. (“I wouldn’t say we were ‘missing’ it, Paul.”) This is a combination of the introductory comments made by the panel, questions asked by the audience members, and answers given by the people in attendance. Hopefully any of the other attendees who heard something different than I, or find something erroneous herein, will feel free to correct it. If you see something that looks wrong to you, it’s probably because I’ve misstated it.

• Jack turned the mic over to Max Spevack, the new chairman of the Fedora Project Board, who talked a bit about the board and how it was constituted. Basically, this boiled down to people who have contributed/are contributing a lot to Fedora, regardless of whether they agree with Red Hat about any particular subject. (That’s a paraphrase and not verbatim, thus no quotes.)
• Max wants to make sure that the financials of the Fedora Project are made as transparent as possible.
• Why can’t we do a proviate non-profit foundation? It’s not that it can’t be done. It’s that doing it does not bear a substantial value beyond what the Fedora community can already do for itself.
• The illustrious Jeremy Katz opened the door for the perennial MP3, DVD, etc. questions, which were dealt with efficiently. He did not hesitate to point out that legal MP3 usage is possible with the generous efforts of the kind people at Fluendo. He further pointed out that they have other neat GStreamer related goodies in the works.
• If Fedora changes away from CVS to some other revision control system, we only want to change once. At least for the next “three to four years” (that’s a quote from Jeremy, who wisely refuses to crystal-ball any further out than that).
• A question was raised about continuing hearsay of mixing third-party yum repositories. Extras is now open for everything that is appropriate for inclusion in the actual “Fedora” umbrella. Third party repositories are welcome to move whatever they can into Extras. In addition, their continued cooperation with each other will minimize the chances of these kinds of conflict. Beyond that, Fedora doesn’t have any real interest in “making” third-party repositories do anything they don’t want to.
• Lots of progress has been made on the Fedora LiveCD. But it needs more work, and would benefit from the help of a few ambitious community members with mad Python and Anaconda skillz. Jeremy mentioned that, when you think about it, the LiveCD problem is very much related to Stateless Linux, which has undergone a sort of resurrection lately. There are “people actively working on” Stateless again at this point.
• One audience member asked what the focus of Fedora was, and the general answer seemed to be that this was a “herding cats” question. In particular, the question seemed to be about the GUI-central nature of Anaconda, which has progressed at the expense of the text-mode installer. This progression has been driven by requirements. Since running X is no longer even close to the big deal it used to be, that is where the work has gone. CLI-oriented folks are used to doing their own thing, and most of them are (or should be) choosing Kickstart for installation anyway.

Anyway, that’s how I remember it. I took some notes with Tomboy during the session to keep things somewhat straight. Again, if you see an error or omission, it’s likely mine alone.

Touchdown!

Arrived in Boston safe and sound; actually it was a very nice flight from the folks I usually call “USScare.” Now I’m heading over to the BCEC to pick up my materials, possibly make dinner plans, and head over to Jack Aboutboul’s Fedora BoF. I have no idea when Karsten’s getting in, which has very little to do with whether he told me when he was getting in.

Tough love.

When Evie and Ethan were born we entered into the several-week period known as the Zone of No Sleep — for Mommy, since she was breast-feeding. After that, we too had to teach our children to sleep on their own.

Parenthetical to counter the inevitable cries of “Where were you, Lazybones?”: A lot of people will tell you that you can refrigerate or freeze milk for use by Daddy, but THEY LIE. Every bottle we tried seemed to infect the milk with disgusting artificial overtones. (And yes, it does mean you have to taste it to tell the difference. ‘Nuff said.) Yes, there is a distinct possiblity that out of all the different models we tried, every single one was the wrong one, but in the end it became a matter of economics. In our case, Daddy goes to work early and, thanks to our particular situation, Mommy stays home with the kids. So if someone was going to catch a nap in the middle of the day, it had better be Mommy. Ergo, Mommy did the waking up and feeding, and a damn fine job of it, too.

Anyway, back to the main point. When the kids were old enough to go four hours between feedings, we made a concerted effort to teach them to sleep rather than demand unnecessary feeding. Feeding is not something human beings do just for sustenance. We also do it for comfort, or out of habit. Sleep is just as necessary to health as food, and children have to learn good sleep habits just like they need to learn good eating habits. In this case, the “eating habits” when a child is being breastfed is sort of a foregone conclusion — they are eating what’s provably best for them, and they always eat as much as they need to. So we do what we can by teaching good sleep habits on top of that. Part of good sleep habits is learning that it is not normal to interrupt sound sleep to eat constantly. While one or two night feedings is completely normal for babies after a few months, we didn’t find more than that was helpful at all for our kids.

Sleep is also just as important for mothers. Sleep deprivation is unhealthy and can be dangerous, especially if mothers are behind the wheel during the day. I would be willing to bet that parents taking the road that Heather & Jon (and Eleya & I) took — in other words, taking control of the feeding schedule — are distinctly lowering the effects of postpartum depression and/or birth-associated psychological stress. This is not beauty sleep we’re talking about; there’s no vanity involved, only the sense that the parents have to be in reasonable condition to make good judgments about the actual work of parenting.

It took very litle time for both our kids to start sleeping six, and then very shortly eight, hours a night on their own. They both were paragons of health throughout the process, normal to high in their weight category for their age, and (thanks, we’re convinced, to breast-feeding) never suffered from ear infections or other maladies — until they were older, off the breast, and socially interacting with the seething pits of viral investation we like to call Other People’s Kids. (In all seriousness, we’re not freaks about that, either. It’s how your immune system learns, too.)

It’s about time people realized that one way of parenting is not better than all others. We all try to do the right thing, and that’s all we can do.

It’s official.

Last night we had our official record release gala at IOTA and everything went swimmingly. The band even backed the completely fabulous Edie Carey for a few songs. Rich and I had wanted to do this for some time, since hearing her at a previous show, and both of us listen to her music incessantly. Now we have cemented our plans both for weasling our way into yet another artist’s musical career, and for padding our résumés with star power. Edie, you are so completely awesome, it’s hard to put into words how cool it was to share a stage with you. It was really a dream come true.

UPDATE: So I’m sitting here listening to all the Edie clips I can find on the Internet. I swear to God, I do this every time I see her live. Am I a closet stalker? Only time and the 11:00 news will tell.