I’m planning to do a little Geocaching at Red Hat Summit next week, and would welcome some company. Let me know.
Here’s a map of some of the caches right around the venue:
Hopefully RHSummit will be better than OpenStack Summit, in terms of not spending the entire week sick in my room.
Continuing in the series about the RDO Meetup in Vancouver, in this recording we have Karsten Wade, of the CentOS project, talking about CentOS’s relationship with RDO, and with OpenStack in general. He talks about the CentOS build infrastructure, CI, package repos, and the CentOS Cloud SIG.
(If the player below doesn’t work for you, you can listen HERE.)
Last month at the RDO meetup in Vancouver, a number of topics were discussed. Jarda talked about RDO-Manager, the installation and management tool based on TripleO. Here’s just that part of the meeting.
If the embedded player below doesn’t work for you, you can listen HERE.
For additional information:
Well, I *planned* to go geocaching at OpenStack Summit, but it really didn’t work out. Almost every moment that I wasn’t working the expo hall, I was in my hotel room, in bed. Yes, I spent most of OpenStack Summit week sick, and didn’t get out of the hotel much.
However, I did get out to go Geocaching one morning on the way over to the convention center, and I found Canada Place Cache, my first cache in many moons, and my first cache in Canada.
I also looked for Barrel of Trees, which I didn’t find because the place was overrun with muggles and I never got a chance to go back.
What was really cool, though, was how many OpenStack enthusiasts approached me either at the event, or online, saying that they were also planning to go geocaching, and thanking me for making them think of it. I always like to find out the *other* hobbies of the people I know in the geek world. That is, their hobbies outside of the particular technical discipline we share. It makes people more human, and way more interesting.
So, stay tuned, and come geocaching with me at Red Hat Summit, and at OpenStack Summit in Tokyo.
A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.
– The Angel’s Game, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Coming to the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver?
Like Geocaching?
It looks like there’s a lot of caches around the summit location. This map shows the 500 closest.
I keep meaning to spend a little time at conferences walking around the area and geocaching. Perhaps if I have a few folks with me I’ll see more of it, and meet some interesting people as well.
If you’re interested in Geocaching in Vancover, let me know, and we’ll try to set something up. I’ll be there from Sunday night (May 17th) through Thursday night (May 21st), and although I know it’s an incredibly busy week, I expect we can find an hour or two free in there somewhere.
I’ll also bring my new CryptoCard travel bug to drop off somewhere, since all of my other travel bugs have long since vanished.
I’m also hoping that by the time Red Hat Summit rolls around, I have some special Red Hat community project geocoins to accompany our geocaching outing. If this works out, I’ll try to make it a regular feature of my conference trips. So, here’s hoping.
This week we did ApacheCon in Austin. I shipped the original Apache feather to the venue for 20th birthday of the Apache web server project, and it hung above the stage for the keynotes.
It’s an item that we’re very proud of, and of some historical significance.
The conference producers treated it like it was the Declaration of Independence or something. They handled it carefully and reverently.
At the end of the event the guy in charge of A/V came to me with some twine.
He said he had removed it from the hanging hooks on the feather in order to use black nylon that matched the stage dressing, and which would hang more securely. But he saved these scraps of twine because he knew how significant the item was to us.
Now, it’s not that the twine mattered – it was something I added years after the original was made. It’s that he cared enough, and respected our heritage enough to save it and track me down, that impressed me so very much. It really put a wonderful final touch on an almost-perfect event.
And this is why, among many other reasons, we love our conference production company, The Linux Foundation.
It’s only 8:30 local time, but I’m pretty wiped out. Day one has been amazing.
The morning started with the keynotes, which included the State of the Feather, with Ross Gardler, two sponsor keynotes by Mike Maxey (Pivotal), and Chip Childers (Cloud Foundry), and then the main opening keynote by Brian Behlendorf. Brian has long been someone that I’ve really looked up to, not just because he catalyzed the Apache web server project, but because of the deep thought that he’s given to issues around Open Source, community, and our role as responsible members of the human race. (Videos coming soon of all these keynotes.)
Right after the keynote, I moderated what I’ve been referring to as the “grey beard panel”, where several members of the original Apache Group (Jim Jagielski, Dirk-Willem van Gulik, Randy Terbush, Brian Behlendorf, Roy Fielding, and Ken Coar) reminisced about how things were in the early days, what mistakes were made, what things they might have done differently (SSL was a big item on this list), and other related items.
I’ve long joked that I do ApacheCon so that I can travel to exciting places and hang out on stage with my heroes. This was definitely one of those moments.
In the afternoon I gave my “Write a Better FM” talk, which is a continually evolving thing. Rikki said some very encouraging things about it. In all, I think it went really well.
Then we had the reception at Old School, which was very nice, if a little loud. And now I’m back in the hotel room trying to decide whether to catch up on email, or go seek out some more social -ness. Probably go with the former and go to bed early.
Our Nest thermostat got broken, so I took it apart. It’s amazing how little is actually in there.
On Thursday, my daughter wrecked her car. She was very upset. Her car was her baby. When I picked her up at the site of the accident, I said, among other things, “this is why we have insurance.”
Last evening, I suddenly realized that she didn’t understand what insurance is, and thought that, having her chance at having a car, this was, literally, the end of the road until she got a job and earned enough to replace it. She was perfectly willing to do this, having been at fault in the accident and taking responsibility for that, but it was, understandably, very disheartening.
Once we explained to her how insurance works, the differences between liability insurance and comprehensive insurance, and how the process was going to work, she was much less despondent.
So, parents of new drivers, take a moment to explain to your kids how insurance works. There’s a lot of things that we might assume they understand, which they don’t, because they’ve never had to.