It’s been a busy few weeks.
I guess the best place to start is with Inara. Our little shnoodle is now happily walking on a leash. Peg got her a little back pack to wear while out for walks. We put in treats and a little weight so she can feel it there. And as she’s cleaned up after the plastic bag goes in the backpack. Since she’s been using that she’s excited to go for a walk. She walks as tall as she can with her little frame. Her tail is up and she’s active and curious on the walks. It’s great to see.
Right now, Inara is trying to figure out how to get to the jerky that’s sitting on the arm of the sofa. She either has to go over me or come around me on the floor and jump up next to me with little room to spare. She’s pawing on my forearm as try to type. I’m wondering if she’ll make a choice one way or the other, or give up altogether.
A couple weeks ago I went to ShmooCon for the first time. Of course it was on Valentine’s weekend that it was going on. Valentine’s day I spent there helping to get the lab set up. As many of these things go it was much activity getting things set to go, without much happening for technical and environmental reasons.
I came home and Peg and I exchanged gifts. I gave her a card and she gave me her purple M&Ms with a personal note on them. We then had dinner in and a nice evening together.
Then I spent the next three days at ShmooCon talking with people and sitting in on some great talks. I also found several talks that were less than inspiring. Overall it was a lot of fun even though it was a working event and I learned quite a bit. The lab guys were great to work with and very helpful. We got an impressive amount data from monitoring the network that’s being blogged about by Ron Gula.
A few of us in the CALug have gotten together to figure out a way to give back a bit. This has led us to meeting with J0hnny Long from Hackers for Charity. During our lunch the other day we flushed out a few ideas we had on how we can help with his project. Johnny mentioned that he was getting some computers donated from a company and he was going to turn them around and give them to a charity in Baltimore. This had me perk up and volunteer the Ubutnu Maryland Logo Team to do the install of Ubuntu on the machines for him. I figured we had the experience of doing install fests and the methodology down for that. We’ll see what happens with that once he gets more details on the donations.
Then Wednesday night the MD Ubuntu team had a meeting out in Frederick. A group of about 15 of us met at TGIFriday’s for dinner and talk. There were quite a few new faces and several from the Columbia area came out to support the effort. I was impressed with the turnout of the Frederick crew. There was a lot of interest in starting a team meeting out there. So we discussed a few things off the cuff and got some good ideas together. More details will be coming out in the next week or so.
Another topic there was IRC chats for the team. We decided to move it back to an 8pm start time and limit the chat ‘officially’ to an hour. With it being IRC, we can run over if needed. Up until now, we’ve been having the chat in the #ubuntu-us-md room on Freenode. It was suggested that we use #ubuntu-meeting to get a little higher profile for our IRC meetings. We’ll look into that now that we’re an official team.
So the next major event we have going with the MD team is the March 8th Ubuntu Install Fest in Columbia so come out and join us if you want help installing Ubuntu to your PC or laptop. We’ll also be doing GPG key signings for those interested in that.
Most importantly thanks to Peg for putting up with my extra circular activities and extra work time that I’ve put in that has kept me out of the house more lately than normal. I’m lucky to have you around!
Well it’s now late so I’ll post more another time. Inara has given up on the jerky. Maybe next time she’ll get it.