Tag Archives: lexington

OpenStack 6th Birthday, Lexington, KY

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Yesterday I spent the day at the University of Kentucky at the OpenStack 6th Birthday Meetup. The day was arranged by Cody Bumgardner and Kathryn Wong from the UK College of Engineering.

UK has an OpenStack cloud that they use for instruction, as well as for research, and they’ve got a 6PB Ceph cluster hanging off of it. There were presentations about the various aspects of this cloud, and how it’s being used.

I gave an introduction to OpenStack – the Foundation, the software, and the community – for the attendees that were just getting started. Patrick McGarry gave a talk about how Ceph works.

Nassir Hussamddin closed the day with a really cool presentation about CloudLab, which is a tool shared by a number of universities that allows users to spin up an OpenStack cloud (not just a VM, but an entire cloud) on demand for testing purposes. Definitely worth looking into further.

Big thanks to Dell, the University of Kentucky, and the OpenStack Foundation, who, along with RDO, sponsored this event.

Out Of Touch Lexingtonians

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Once again the rich folks in Lexington are talking out of both sides of their mouths, and it really irritates me.

They claim that they oppose the sidewalks on Tates Creek Road because it will spoil the grass, because it will be dangerous for people to walk there, and because the people will be exposed to exhaust fumes. But we know better, don’t we?

The truth is that they don’t want *that kind* of people walking in front of their million dollar homes.

Whenever there’s something proposed in Lexington that benefits the low-income folks who don’t drive SUVs and don’t own horses, it gets shot down. And the sidewalk proposal will probably fail in the city council tonight, because the city council is a bunch of spoiled rich kids who are more interested in having direct flights to Las Vegas and Martha’s Vineyard than they are about whether their less advantaged neighbors are able to walk to work without ruining their clothes.

It’s not even like there’s a cost involved – this is a federal grant.

The number of completely ludicrous statements made in opposition to the sidewalk would be funny if it wasn’t so disgusting.

“Sidewalks would destroy the greenery of the corridor and increase storm-water run off,” said Steve Kesten,

… leaning against the side of his Lexus SUV that gets 7 miles to the gallon, downhill.

“I see no good reason for sidewalks out here, and neither do my neighbors.”

…. Presumably because they all have SUVs, too, and so don’t need to walk anywhere.

“My constituents don’t see people walking along the road,” Beard said, adding that when he drives along Tates Creek, “I never, I mean never, have seen anyone walking.”

… Presumably because he was talking on his cell phone and drinking his Starbucks at the time.

Lexington is increasingly a divided society, with a widening gap between the rich folks that run the show and the poor folks who make up the majority of the population. Here’s hoping I’m wrong about the council meeting tonight. At least this is a good sign.

Come work for me

I’m looking for a PHP programmer looking for an challenging position in the Lexington area. Our code uses the Cake PHP framework, and we’ve got several projects with a certain amount of shared code between them. Our biggest projects are ClearMyRecord.com and Hard2Hire.com, both of which are about helping people get their lives back together in one way or another.

I’ve got job postings on Monster.com, but I’ve found that finding people by word of mouth and personal contacts is way more effective than any of the job boards, both in finding the people with the skills and finding people who are likely to be a good fit for the team.

Ideally, we’re looking for someone with some OO PHP experience, and some knowledge of, or experience with, MVC methodologies. If you’ve used Cake, that’s great, but it’s certainly not required. And if you have MVC experience in some other language, like Ruby on Rails, or Catalyst, that actually translates pretty easily into what we’re doing, particularly if you’re interested in learning new things, and can convince me that you’re the right person for the job.

If you’re interested, or know someone who is, or want more information about the position, please contact me.

LexingtonKY.Gov

Lexington has a new website.

I won’t complain about the design, because I’m not a designer, and only vaguely know good design from a hole in the ground. Designer friends and acquaintances assure me it’s terrible. What do I know?

I could, I suppose, complain that the calendar has RSS, but no ICal, so it’s not actually useful. But I suppose that not everybody likes for calendars to be actually useful.

However, what I will complain about is that the website was produced by a company not only outside of Lexington, not only outside of Kentucky, but in California. I’ve mentioned before, I know. how much it bugs me that the Lexington City Council routinely makes business decisions that harm central Kentucky and assist folks outside of our local economy, so this shouldn’t be a surprise to me. But it still irritates me. Enormously.

Our city council is a bunch of rich folks who never had to manage a budget bigger than their grocery money, and are now running the show for a small city. I admit, it’s a tiny city, and really probably not very important in the grand scheme of things. But it’s MY city, and it’s MY home, and it’s where MY kids go to school, and it’s where I pay taxes. And, darn it, I want to support LOCAL businesses, LOCAL farmers, LOCAL schools, and LOCAL artists. It infuriates me when our city council *consistently* sends work out of state, when there are DOZENS of local web firms that could have done the job cheaper and better, and kept the money in the local economy.

I’d have voted for someone else in the city council race, but my district’s seat was uncontested.

Maybe I should run.

Equestrian Games and Short-sightedness

Downtown Demolition

Lexington is host to the 2010 FEI World Equestrian Games. Exactly what this means, I’m not sure. Something like a horsey olympics. Folks around here seem to think it’s a big deal.

This has been the excuse for a wave of short-sightedness that is epic even for Lexington, where the City Council seems to be composed of people who can’t think past the end of the week unless someone draws pictures.

In preparation for these games, just 2 years away, they are spending a huge amount of money, and building a facility to host them. The assumption is that after the games, folks will flock from around the world to use our fabulous new facility. Of course, since Lexington doesn’t have an international airport, this seems wildly unlikely.

Additionally, and more sadly, they are building a ginormous hotel downtown to host the folks who will come for the games. So for a couple weeks, we’ll have a full hotel in Lexington, and then for the next 20 years it will be an empty eyesore. But, even sadder, they chose to tear down some of the oldest buildings in downtown lexington, and drive out some of the longest-established businesses in downtown, for this venture.

They had a city council meeting in which they asked for the people’s opinion on this. The people, unsurprisingly, were strongly opposed to it. However, the city council see this being a cash cow, and can’t think past the end of 2010. Tragic. So The Dame is no more. And the Mad Hatter is no more. And a number of other businesses that were here when my parents were in college. And for what? So that some ponies can prance about and some arab sheikhs can be comfortable for two weeks. Then what? Well, the current city council will no longer be in office, so what do they care?