Leaving the building, Three.

There are basically two major mailing lists in Fedora-land that primarily concern Board activities: the fedora-advisory-board (FAB) list and the fedora-board-list.

The former is the place where the vast majority of discussion about high-level topics occurs. This list is open to everyone and is often used as a source of agenda items for the Board.

The latter is a private space for Board members to discuss sensitive topics. We acknowledge that this might seem out of place in an open, transparent project, but keep in mind that almost all executive entities have the same facilities at their disposal. Often this is an “executive session” or some such time or space.

We (the Board) always try our best to keep material discussions on f-board-l to a minimum, and only surrounding issues that are sensitive. If it can be pushed out to FAB in any way, we talk about it there. The FAB has a much larger membership, and is therefore a far better place to do collaborative work and build informed decisions.

One of the things that tends to happen with a single-purpose list, though, is that as the membership swells, discussions tend to get longer and topics sometimes yaw a bit. To keep this tendency from derailing the original mission of fedora-board-list, and to ensure it gets used as little as possible, the board voted last year to enact a policy of only keeping those members on the list who really need to be there.

Taken only at its most basic face value, this sounds like making the fedora-board-list some sort of exclusive club full of shady backroom deals, but that’s in fact the exact opposite of the real intent and effect. In a project like Fedora, the Board can’t go around making bad deals like this because we don’t have the power to compel the volunteers who are the heart and soul of Fedora — nor would we want it. But there are some issues where we have to deal for small periods of time in confidentiality, and that’s what fedora-board-list enables.

To make sure that we are using fedora-board-list only in the spirit in which it was created, we’ve followed our own policy again, and removed some of the folks who have served both on the Board and as trusted advisors for a time. The people who remain are simply the current Board members as listed on the wiki, and John Poelstra who acts (indispensably!) as our secretary. (The organization and publishing of our minutes has been largely due to his herculean efforts.)

I sent a note to the fedora-advisory-board list this evening to this effect. But I wanted also to make sure the community remains fully aware of the limited use to which we put the fedora-board-list, and our dedication to openness and transparency. We take your trust very seriously, and will continue to work hard to earn it.

Firehose coupling completed.

I got back from Raleigh last night, and promptly fell into bed exhausted. It was a low-sleep night Thursday thanks to a cocktail party thrown by the lovely Alex Maier. I enjoyed seeing all of you awesome Fedora and Red Hat folks who came to have a drink with the “new guy.”

Today I will be AFK for a while so I can do some family related stuff — and pick up my new eyeglasses so I can actually see what I’m doing again, hurrah! I’ll have another, better post this weekend on more material issues once I have time to sit down and gather some thoughts.

Shall we go for all seven next time?

My daughter Evie, who will turn 7 in March, has a few favorite activities on her OLPC XO. Out of all of them, the one that tickles me most is that she loves wardriving. You heard me right.

She will generally haul her XO anywhere she’s allowed, including in the car on trips. Recently we had a day of inclement weather on which the county where Evie goes to school decided to open two hours late, while the county where my son Ethan’s preschool is opened on time. That day, Evie rode with my wife to drop Ethan off at preschool, and of course took her XO along for the ride, watching the network map.

On the way back home after dropping the boy off, my wife stopped at a light in downtown Fredericksburg, and Evie giggled from the back of the car. “What are you giggling about?” asked my wife.

“F***s***b****t**s,” replied Evie, giggling some more.

My wife, disbelieving, turned around and looked at her. “What did you say?“

“That’s what it says for this network, Mommy,” said Evie innocently, showing her the XO’s network neighborhood map, which — sure enough — prominently displayed the unlikely named “F***s***b****t**s” network. Nice!

Thus there followed a conversation about grownup words. Thank goodness Ethan wasn’t in the car at the time, or we’d have our own little George Carlin routine on constant repeat.

Day One.

Orientation at Red Hat started today. I had a great time meeting a bunch of new faces — in many cases, people I might not see again for a long while, if ever, since they are all going to different parts of the company. I was the one employee starting in the Engineering Division, so that was interesting. I got to tell all the other employees in our various break-time conversations about my new job.

We also got into a little bit of conversation at lunch about the continuing work to break down barriers in Fedora and exponentially grow our contributor base. I have a lot of ideas swirling about with regard to that topic, including how it relates to the decline of volunteerism in the USA overall, which I need to sit down and work out on paper.

Max also reminded me of something we need to change — the fact that the vast majority of people conducting the conversation (in blogs and other trendy venues) about principles they share with the open source community, are not connecting with our community as contributors. In fact, some of them don’t even seem to be aware we exist, except in the sense that they consume the products we create.

If you’ve got ideas on how to do this, I’d like to hear them. Then I’m going to ask you to get involved to help implement them.

So in short, I’m more excited about my new job today than I was yesterday — and i was pretty pumped already then. As one of my new coworkers said, and I’ll paraphrase slightly, “I used to be the only person around my office who cared about open source. Now I’m in a company where we all share the same passion.” Right on!

Leaving the building, Two.

Normally I’m really good at meeting deadlines by a good margin. However, with all the excitement going on ’round these here parts with leaving the old job and getting the house ready for sale, time has been short recently. Nevertheless, I got my conference talk submitted this morning for OSCON 2008. I may end up building this up at a couple other upcoming conferences in the meantime.

Any melancholia in the last post aside, I’m TOTALLY EXCITED about starting at Red Hat tomorrow. This morning I got the remainder of my forms for Human Capital filled out. I realized it has been a long time since I thought hard about benefits, and things like how much supplemental insurance to buy. I left a couple of these later-deadline items for orientation, since there will be people speaking about benefits there.

I’ll be driving down to Raleigh this afternoon, and from the time I leave until the time I get my new laptop (which is currently waiting in the sheltering arms of Mr. Nottingham) set up, I’ll be completely off the interwebz. You can leave me email but any IRC presence I have during this time is robotic.

I intend to use that time to read GTD, which I just (finally!) picked up yesterday. I could tell the story here about why it took me until now to get a hold of this book, but it would simply read EPIC FAIL. Thus my needing the book, get it?

Max told me the other night that he knew some engineers at Red Hat who got into some sort of “organize your life” routine, an initial stage of which is disappearing for a couple days while you Get Your S[tuff] Together. I don’t know if GTD has that feature; if so, I haven’t reached that chapter of the book yet. Anyway, these engineers apparently have reaped great rewards from whatever they did, and I hope to do the same. I’ve already been transitioning to some online tools that should give me what I need — based on what I’ve read of other people’s experiences — to make the system work for me. More on this later.

Leaving the building, One.

Today marked the end of this stage of my career, as I left public service. Yesterday, friends threw me a going-away luncheon where I told them, among other things, this (the best recollection I have of what I said):

It took a very special job offer from a very special employer to make me even consider leaving here. Over the last seventeen years, I’ve had amazing opportunities to work with brilliant and dedicated people, pursuing a noble mission to make our country and our world a better place. Red Hat is one of the only private companies I know that also falls into that category.

Friends not only from my current office, where I’ve been for about six years, but also from my previous one where I spent 1996-2001, came out to see me off, including a couple I haven’t seen in quite a number of years. It was not a huge affair, but heartwarming nonetheless; many of the friends I’ve made at work are scattered around the United States these days. At the luncheon, I was presented with a couple of lovely plaques, including one with a blown up photo of me in my younger, less careworn days with a bunch of my coworkers. This was from my old office, and they had marked my dates of service there as “1996-2008,” because they felt like I had always remained “one of the family.”

One former supervisor of mine, who has since vaulted into the executive ranks in our building (“Get to know me!”), told me that just as he had heard I was leaving, he’d been preparing to call me about a job with his office. He said although he felt my new employer was very lucky to get me, to call him if I ever wanted to come back.

Over the last week, I received some very nice emails and phone calls from friends, and as I went through my files to pull my few personal papers for safe-keeping, I came across a number of forgotten gems — some letters of commendation, some simple notes of thanks. It made me realize that I did have a very positive impact on a lot of people in the last seventeen years — something that’s hard for me to even write, because I generally don’t like dwelling on those kinds of things.

I spent most of the day today cleaning up my desk, delivering files to people, showing a coworker how to work with an internal mirror I had set up, and wiping my laptop to pass on to a coworker. At 3:00 I went over to our other building, and after a meeting there with one of the security officers, I turned in all my cards, badges, and credentials, and was escorted out of the building (in the kindest and friendliest way).

I don’t usually have moments of visual apparition, but as I drove home off the Marine base, I did experience a moment where I thought I saw peripherally, in my rear view mirror, the fence-wire gates shutting after me. Of course nothing so terribly grandiose or foreboding actually happened. I cranked up some old Prince, “Pop Life,” on my stereo. Then — probably for the last time for a very long while — I rounded the turn onto the county road, taking me away from my old life and toward the indistinct but seductive promise of a new one, and I saw the gates behind me were still open.

Easier than garrotting.

The problem with my (otherwise totally rocking) Dell XPS M1330 I previously blogged about here, and earlier here, where the Dell MediaDirect application restored itself over the first several gigs of my hard disk, wiping out part of my LVM physical volume, is solved.

To prevent the Dell MediaDirect from reinstantiating on certain reboots where the BIOS thinks you’ve had a problem, just zero out the whole drive before repartitioning. (Obviously this means a complete loss of data, so back up your data first, mmkay?) That says to me that the BIOS is looking for certain things on the hard disk at precise sector offsets. If they’re not found, the BIOS will instead simply issue an error message instead of an army of flying data-killing monkeys.

If you decide you want MD back, you can use the recovery CDs that come with your system. Reinstall MD before restoring the OS. However, I’m guessing no one reading this is probably going to want that.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to Matt Domsch for his usual above-and-beyond care.