Definition of a good host: Someone who sits on the couch with you at night when you’re visiting town, and lets you be antisocial and work. ?
This week I’m down in Raleigh at Red Hat HQ working on the marketing, messages, and mayhem (mama mia, I love alliteration) for the coming of Sulphur. Coming into a Red Hat office is its own special brand of excitement. If coming to work for Red Hat is like jumping a fast-moving train, then coming to work at a Red Hat office is like catching that streaking caboose, and then working your way up through each car juggling angry, wet cats and bumping into passengers. These chance collisions, though, lead to great conversations, which lead to fast-flying ideas, which lead to great “a-ha!” moments, and often a workable plan of action.
I spent some time with Kara, who’s helping Fedora leverage Red Hat’s excellent press channels, to set up a timeline for press work that needs to be completed inside Red Hat. We’ll also be talking on the fedora-marketing-list about how we can work in harmony with that timeline, refining our message of innovation and community involvement.
We also worked on bubbling up some entries from my recent call for stories. The big winner seems to be recent Planet Fedora immigrant Tim Niemueller and his team of soccer-playing robots, the Allemaniacs. They’re a real success story by any measure, not just because of their two back-to-back world championships in the RoboCup competition, but also because they used their team’s needs as a way to get involved and give back to open source in Fedora. Not only are the robots powered by Fedora, but the humans are Fedora-equipped as well, and they have contributed back to the wellspring by adding and maintaining packages for the benefit of robots (and humans) everywhere.
Keep an eye out for more about Tim and the Allemaniacs in the future!
In other news about robots, everyone apparently has a Roomba except for me. My wife seems to be TCB in that area, and I think everyone should give her a little sympathy this week, because she cleaned the whole house top to bottom in my absence (while overseeing every other operational concern in the household) to get ready for a real estate brokers’ open house which they canceled at the LAST. POSSIBLE. MINUTE. Yet another clue that there is no bigger scam in the country than the idea that you need a real estate agent.
Not to rub it in, but I have two Roombas. And both, at the moment, are down for the count. It seems my dog sheds SO MUCH, that she has killed them both. The first one really works just fine, but it vacuums about 1/3 of the room then does that sad Roomba cry like its full or stuck. Its neither, just dog furred up. The 2nd is a ‘Dirt Dog’ which actually did much better with the dog hair, until it wrapped around the brush bits and in unclogging it I made it so the deck wont go up/down anymore. It just drives around ‘cleaning’ without ever lowering the brushes. But then I’m sure you knew I had a dog for even at Fose, 400 miles from my house with clean clothes, I still had dog fur on me. If you have a shedding type pet, skip the Roomba.