Is that what happened?

• So my latest blog post for LISA just got posted -- and that's the last long(ish) one; next week BeerOps, Mark Lamourine and I will be posting daily updates as we're there. Also, I've volunteered to help Julie Miller, the Marketing Communications Manager for USENIX, with the opening orientation on Saturday night. I seem to remember taking that the first year I went, though I don't seem to have written it down...

• By the way, shouts out to BeerOps, Mark Lamourine, Matt Simmons and Noah Meyerhans for all the help during LISA Bloggity Sprint 2014. There are beers/chocolate/what-you-owed in plentitude.

• On another note: I'm auditioning a Chromebook, an Acer C720, to see how it works out. Right now I'm using Debian Jessie (testing) via Crouton, which lets you install Linux to a chroot within Chrome. So far: the keyboard is smaller than I'm used to, and the Canadian keyboard in particular is annoying -- they've crammed in tons of extra keys and split the Enter and Shift keys to do so. But overall it's okay; I can run tests for Yogurty in 3 seconds (cf. 12 on my old P3 laptop/server), and even Stellarium seems to run just fine. I've got a refurbished 4GB model on order w/Walmart in the states, and I can pick that up while I'm at LISA. So, you know, looking good.

• Bridget Kromhout's latest post, The First Rule of DevOps Club, is awesome. Quote:

But when the open space opening the next day had an anecdote featuring "ops guys", I'd had enough. I went up, took the mic, and told the audience of several hundred people (of whom perhaps 98% were guys) how erased I feel when I hear that.

I said what I always think (and sometimes say) when this comes up. If you are a guy, and you like to date women, would you place a personal ad that says this? "I'd like to meet a wonderful guy to fall in love and spend my life with. This guy must like long walks on the beach and holding hands, and must also be female." If that sounds ludicrous to you, then you don't actually think "guy" is gender-neutral.

That's a small part of a much longer post; go read the rest.

• Much at $WORK; I've got a new team mate from Belgium who's awesome, I'm starting to find a sense of rhythm, and organizing time is as challenging as ever. There are lots, LOTS of fun things to do, and it's damn hard sometimes to say "I'm just gonna put that on the TODO list and walk away."

• This week my youngest son has switched from "The Wizard of Oz" to "Treasure Island" for story time. He got bored of TWOO and we didn't finish it; I'm curious to see how long he'll stick with TI. Still so much fun to read to them both.