60 hours, er 43 hours, in CR.Well, thanks to an unfortunate flight delay, Delta got me to Atlanta too late to make my flight to Costa Rica last night. So I made the best of my night in Atlanta — which, much to their customer service credit, Delta took care of with no prompting from me — by catching up with an old musical compadre. Early this morning I was back at ATL, and made it to Costa Rica this time — a few minutes early even. Carolina Hines, one of the conference organizers for EXPOSOL where I’m speaking, picked me up and whisked me off to a meeting with officials from CAMTIC, the Costa Rican Chamber of Information and Communication Technologies. From there we shot back to the hotel so I could check in, change clothes and place a quick call home via softphone. The hotel is positively luxurious, and even more importantly the internet connection is great! It was very refreshing to talk about free software with Carolina as we drove around town — her background is psychology, not software. She’s super-passionate about free software but she understands well that for so many people around the world, free software is a tool for human freedom far beyond code, programming, and infrastructure. She advocates and brings free software to human rights groups throughout Central America and to places where the chief concern is not how to contribute back to a free software community, but how to use the software to secure basic human freedoms and break cycles of poverty. (Sure puts a lot of intracommunity disagreements into perspective, doesn’t it?) Then it was off to a lovely cafe on the other side of town to have frozen cappuccino (NOM) and dinner (a hearts of palm salad wrap, NOM) with some members of the local free software community. We had a fantastic conversation about all things Fedora, about each of the attendee’s work in free software, and about Drupal which it turns out is as popular here as everywhere else I’ve been. Everyone has been incredibly nice since I got here. Thankfully most of them speak good English, since I have no Spanish. It seems like it’s quite easy to get around Costa Rica with just English, but I still dislike the feeling of not having a smidge of local language. Maybe before my next visit? Leo, one of the guys I met at dinner, gave me a ride back to the hotel and we talked about the car-centric culture in Costa Rica, working from home, and collaborating across wide time zone differences. Tomorrow I give my speech, and thankfully the conference is here at the hotel so I don’t have to be anyone’s burden to taxi around town. I catch an early morning flight out on Friday — no rest for the wicked! — which should get me back to Washington DC at around rush hour time. Yay! So I planned a boondoggle around that issue. Instead of sitting in traffic for two hours to get home, I’m taking the Metro into Georgetown to have dinner with my dad and his wife. I guess all these meals and ritzy and exotic places around the hemisphere would classify me as a jetsetter — if I weren’t such a schlub! |
Upcoming travel.It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks for me. I’m leaving tomorrow to attend and speak at EXPOSOL in Costa Rica. I’ll be discussing cultivation of cummunities and how companies and communities can learn to work together for the benefit of both. I’ve never been to CR before and I hear it’s beautiful. Only problem is I have but two days to be there before I head back to the USA! Next week I’ll be going to the Red Hat Summit in Boston, where I’ll be working as a volunteer staff member. Unfortunately this year I won’t be hanging out at the Fedora booth nonstop, although I’m certain I’ll be by from time to time. Instead, I’ll be working at the information desk, helping to marshal at session rooms, and stuffing bags at our “Red Hat gives back” charity area, where we’re donating time and effort to Crayons to Cradles. I’m really looking forward to that one. The Summit is always a fantastic event, but I think putting a charitable drive in the middle of the proceedings is a great way to show people that they really can make a difference, whether it’s in open source or not. You can still register for the Summit — it is always an incredible value, packed with learning, fun, and the ability to engage directly with engineers and open source luminaries. This will be my sixth Summit (I’ve been to every event since the second one in Nashville) and I always look forward to them. See you there! |
SELF pimping.Once again this year I’ll be traveling down to the Southeast Linux Fest for a weekend full of informative talks, social fun, and exceptional collaboration opportunities with fellow Linux geeks from around the region and the nation. SELF has been an enormous hit since its inaugural outing in 2009. I’ll be joined by fabulous people from across the Fedora friendsphere, and of course there will be lots of free goodies at the Fedora booth for everyone. My presentation on Friday is going to be on PyGObject, making the transition from PyGTK to the new world of introspection awesomeness, and what that means to people who do programming as a hobby and not for their bread and butter. I promise to keep things down to earth and accessible by newbies and hopefully not make those of higher skill levels cringe often. Except for bad jokes, those are pretty much a given, as those of you who’ve been to some of my other talks can attest. By the time you read this, or shortly thereafter, the SELF schedule should be appearing on the web site, and you can see for yourself how valuable a trip to the conference can be. Linux community events like SELF are booming in popularity because they feature great speakers, invaluable learning opportunities, and fantastic social networking outlets for a pittance. A big thank you to my employer, Red Hat, for giving me the time and funding to make it to the event, as well as being a Platinum sponsor of SELF 2011. (By the way, Linode, a Diamond sponsor this year, is where I run this blog… Did I mention how happy I am with their service?) But no matter how many sponsors there are, it takes a lot of fine people dedicating a huge amount of time, expertise, and effort to put on any community event like SELF. That this event has become so popular so quickly shows not only that SELF is filling a necessary gap in the Southeast region of the US, but that it’s done so with style, ambition, and the sure, guiding hand of great volunteers. Hats off to you guys and best of luck for another incredible event at SELF 2011! UPDATE: Unfortunately, previously mentioned grilling event was contingent upon Our Meaty Champion becoming the Fedora 16 namesake. So, no dice. But there may yet be hope for a related outing, stay tuned while at SELF. |
Truer words, no. 54.Good article by my buddy John Poelstra with which I vehemently agree. I’ve been doing something similar with email for a couple years now using offlineimap, synchronizing a few times a day rather than keeping an app open all day or making myself the slave of instant notifications about new email. It’s made a huge difference in my productivity. I’m not perfectly disciplined about this, but more often than not these days, I tend to ask myself before syncing my email, “Is there something coming that you need in order to make progress on your most important task right now?” Often the answer is no. Sometimes I might be tempted to pull email out of habit, or because I need a break from my current task, or because I’m procrastinating. In all these cases there are better remedies available. Habits can be an indicator of not thinking through what you’re doing, and I’m trying to get better at that in general — so breaking this habit is something I work at constantly. If I need a break, I try to just switch tasks instead, or in the case of overall fatigue, I leave my office for a few minutes to get some perspective. Sometimes a short walk or playing with the family dog lets me come back refreshed and ready to focus. Procrastinating is a special problem that I just try to meet head on, although again I’m not the epitome of doing that well. Email and communication are vitally important in my job, but they are not the only important thing I need to do in my job. It’s important to keep your tools in perspective and remember that the thing that makes you valuable to your employer is not just your ability to communicate — it’s the ability to communicate something worthwhile. And communicating something worthwhile often requires you to be able to focus and think clearly without yielding to the distraction of your communication tools. |
Who’s up late polishing the blade.My blogging mojo has been lackluster of late, but that’s because work has been so terribly busy lately. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on putting together a departmental team presentation for the upcoming Red Hat Summit. Wrangling a multi-presenter session isn’t easy and I have a lot of respect for people who are able to do it well. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of quality time with Inkscape to get the slides into something resembling a coherent theme. In the process I’ve learned a few tricks such as as the optional switches for scaling elements, which let you decide whether or not to also scale properties (such as their gradients or the rounding of corners on rectangles). If I sat around for a few hours with Inkscape just playing around, I don’t think I would have discovered nearly as much. Having a concrete goal — in this case, completing a specific diagram for a specific purpose — really has helped me focus on what I needed to get the job done. But it hasn’t all been bullet-wrangling and drawing. Plenty of other work all has to keep going on in the meantime. For instance, next week I’m headed to Westford for some meetings in the office, first time back since right before Thanksgiving of last year (jeez, how time flies). Then back home for a week, then the next week I’ll be traveling to Costa Rica to speak at a conference, followed by a short couple of days home and then the Red Hat Summit in Boston. I’ll also definitely be attending the upcoming Southeast Linux Fest 2011, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. I love that particular conference and have been at both previous years. I expect this one will be just as incredible. If you are in the southeast region of the USA, you really should make it a point to attend. It’s very inexpensive, and a great way to learn and soak up all the goodness of the free software community from luminaries living almost in your back yard. Come join the fun June 10-12! I’ve been working with the Fedora Insight team as well. We’re working out some cosmetic changes that will make the site a little easier to navigate as we add further features. We’re also planning some next phase deliverables and as always invite comment, but especially assistance. One of my recent proposals to the team was a change process that will help us manage site development in a collaborative but careful way. I also put up some additional Drupal module packages for review here:
I also did my part by finishing up the review for Drupal 7, which is in updates-testing now for Fedora 15 and EPEL. Andrea Veri is securing a development host that we can break as needed while we get new features working on Insight. And Robyn Bergeron is working on a SOP that will show Marketing team participants how to promote selected Planet posts for the feed on Insight. It’s a very exciting (and exhausting) time right now with so much going on, and it’s been a lot of working weekends to try and stay caught up, but the results make me happy. I’ll try to get more and shorter updates coming to this blog over the next month. And I am going to get back to work on PulseCaster as well, as soon as time allows. |
