Category: My LUG Adventures

4 years is a long time.
Tonight, I went to the Linux coffee hour and the guys were even like – Damn marcia, we’re going to help you install tinder. Someone suggested Farmer net or something like this.
I was all – there must be something seriously wrong with Robert because I find him attractive.

Yea. Turned out he hasn’t had a job in 10 years or so – yea. I knew it. He couldn’t even scp into his freaking server (lame) and he thinks Red Hat Academy is cool… not that it isn’t… for me, it’s ridiculous.

Of course I was super impressed by his A+ certification – Yea. Right.
This is why I’m single – still…

We started a list –
1. Must love Linux
2. Must have a job

Update:

3. Must be able to handle me running through the house with my laptop bag and passport in hand shouting Ciao baby… Got to go try to do some good in this world… as I run out the door.

No. Couldn’t even install tinder on my burner… hehe piece of junk  😉

So, I did not exactly attend the Seattle LUG but I did have a few minutes to hang out with the Greater Seattle LUG president. He was ultra cool and smart. Also, he was wearing a kilt FTW!

After the Security Summit, he, Nate Downes and I hung out for a short while. He was telling me about SEAGL.
I hope I can check it out at the end of October… but I am not sure I can get up there.

I can say this, when I left speaking with the Seattle LUG president, I walked away with a few things:

1. I may never be replaced as Interim LUG President. It could be years!
2. He gave me hope for the club.
3. He assisted me in realizing that a conference is not that tough to coordinate. After all, I was events coordinator back in the day at Pearson and did a lot of Events coordinating at Microchip with Marc.
4. Some men do look good in a kilt! 🙂

The bottom line was – I wanted to go. He got me excited about the event. This was fantastic. I wish I could have gotten his pic. Oh Well… Here’s another pic of my badge…

We had a really good turn out and learned a lot of great stuff.

Here are some things we worked on:

• Got Android running on Banana Pi.
• Installed Berry boot and loaded – puppy, retro pi, debian
• Demonstrated Xbian

Presentation by adrenaline – Automate your redbox top 25 list and email the results to yourself

or cron and postfix your way to entertainment.

In Dec 2014, according to sources, the BDFL at Phoenix LUG did not act so benevolent. Neither did his wife apparently. Apparently, the exchange went like this:

BDFL of PLUG to member – “F*** YOU!”
Member – shocked silence
Allegedly, the “steering committee” stepped in and all was good. Odd, that’s not what I heard from the recipient of the offending F.U.

Phoenix Linux User Group is the most TOXIC LUG I have ever attended.

Denver was awesome!

The LUG there is run by a guy named Griz. He’s awesome.
The even was held at McAfee which is actually owned by Intel now.
The actual location was in Englewood.

There were free beverages but more importantly, there was great discussion. The people at this LUG really really rocked!

I’d love to be a part of this LUG…
It wasn’t too cooold the days I was in Denver, but wow… I heard it was below 0 the week before.

Here is the really strange part….

I booked the Radisson which is also Red Lion. I got the hotel on Priceline.The hotel was about 10 miles away from the Englewood meeting. The rail system was awesome and a really great guy gave me a ride back to the hotel.

That was when I found out the strange part…

The hotel I was staying at (about 10 miles away from the LUG meeting) was actually where they used to hold the LUG meetings.

OMG!!!! That was so weird and awesome!!!

🙂
Here’s the Presentation!

DenverFreeCulture

This was a bust. We ended up going to Social Box.. Bleh. This was a total disappointment. Not only did I have to hack our way into getting net the month before but this month, there wasn’t even a place to plug in. Seriously!

In the past, we always had a place to plug in and collaborate. This month, we left as soon as I arrived. That was a little awkward considering the LUG BDFL arrived just as we were heading out. There was at least 5 of us who left. I know more wanted to but we just didn’t care. No computers? No Internet? No happy hour? Wow.

Of course, it wasn’t the PLUG’s fault the format changed. That was totally not. It was just such a major disappointment from what it was. It was great before. Now, it SUCKS.

We are supposed to have the room tomorrow that we can actually plug in our computers and collaborate. Perhpas I can muddle through the menu – which includes (I do not lie) SMORES and $12 calamari. It was $4 at happy hour previously… Bummer!

Their calamari was amazing. Now, I guess I’ll find out.

So, this November – November 12, I did attend the Sunland LUG. There were a few more people this month than in past months. I did miss the October meeting and will miss the December meeting. In Dec., I am speaking to Colorado LUG about Free Culture. I am hoping to get the video equipment working so I can show them some exclusive video from the past. That’s me… a blast from the past.

I thoroughly enjoyed the LUG at Sunland.
The topic was basically what people would like to see and learn. It was great!

I hope to visit their LUG again sometime because I never leave there without feeling good and learning something. This is a great LUG!

They discussed shaving the time to 1.5 hours.
They discussed a lot of interesting topics.
I really liked the one guy who helped them with one command to recursively search. I think he is on the right track. If you teach them one command line command, maybe, eventually, the users will be more comfortable with command line.

I would be happy to demostrate Mint to the group. However, these are users more comfortable with desktop and not servers, with gui and not command line. I think it’s great to see the diversity of user experience.

From them, I begin to understand what users want. I begin to understand how the simplicity can be valued over options and complexity. It is a very awesome experience for me. Also, a couple of the guys are a HOOT!

So, I went to the West Side meeting at Gangplank in Avondale. As it turned out, one of the attendees did not realize there was a meeting just down the road – literally, from where he worked. I’m sure people might get some value from the PLUG.

It all depends on your work, your interests, your attitude and well, frankly – your age.
I find there is somewhat of a disconnect as far as diversity in the LUGs here.

So, Sunland LUG is in a 55+ community and the members are older.
PLUG consists of those in the mid 40s and over range.
MPGLUG does have a variety of ages and nationalities. For some reason, we seem to attract a lot of people from Pennsylvania in the East meeting.

Avondale Gangplank seemed like a good setting for this first meet and greet. There were some suggestions on the format and venue.

We are looking for something closer to Downtown and Avondale is a little far west.
We will look into that in the near future.

I had a great time. There were 3 really great guys who attended. We ended up chatting after for another hour or so. We talked about Hadoop and clusters. We discussed education. We talked about horsepower and cars.

All in all, it was nice to connect with some people on the west side and these meetings will continue as long as people keep attending!

I wasn’t really going to post about this. It just like didn’t even cross my mind very much. It wasn’t important to me, really until today. I had not thought about it… until I spoke with a friend of mine working on i2p.

Basically, we were talking about TOR and HTTPS Everywhere, OPENWrt and lighthttpd.
Somewhere in that conversation we started to discuss the Banana and that is when I remembered. That is when it struck me. It was a while ago.

I am sure anyone who reads this might tire about my stories of discrimination.
Well, if so, stop reading now.

It’s not a horrible and vivid tale. It was over in a matter of seconds.

Todd: So, did you decide what you’re going to do with your pi?
Me: Yeah, I’m going to work on a TOR relay.
Todd – laughing: Well good luck with _that_
He continued to laugh as he walked away.

I’m not sure which installfest this happened at. I do remember it was at UAT so it was over a month ago.

Tell me something?

Is it so laughable that I would be able to work on something like this?

There were witnesses.
People who were sitting right next to me when he did this.

I don’t understand why someone like this – someone so ignorant and arrogant can laugh at me.
Just thinking about it makes me want to cry like a little girl. LOL.

Seriously, though.
We recently had a discussion about brogrammers in a mailing list.
This guy isn’t even a brogrammer. He’s barely anything at all.

WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING AT ME.

Here’s the most amusing and well, painful part. I dedicated my life to this community. I really did. There were a lot of other things I could have done. I enjoyed it, don’t get me wrong.
However, this kind of behavior, it’s unnecessary and painful.
You know, we don’t need to have this type of behavior.
This is exactly the type of behavior we don’t want.

Also, do you know what I have done to people in programming classes that questioned my ability. I have seriously put them in their place and put the smack down.

I remember when Mark did this to me in 8086 assembly.
In those days, we had this thing called a blackboard – really it was green. The teacher used chalk.
Mark was a friend of mine but he had the ridiculous notion that he would cut me down in class in front of everyone.

This was a bad idea because I already had an EE course, binary and some assembly language.
Durng the course, the instructor asked us to suggest code. Mark, like a fool, suggested code during this session after he poked fun at me and insinuated I could not code.
After he was done with his suggestion, I raised my hand and suggested an alternative because it was actually more efficient.

The instructor deleted all the suggestions Mark made and put in mine because I was correct. I turned to him and said, “Don’t ever, say I don’t know my shit.” He goes, “damn.” I said, “I went easy on you this time. Don’t let it happen again.”

TOR relay is a good project.
https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en

i2p is also good.
https://geti2p.net/en/

I have a raspberry and a banana. I may do both.

This guy… he can’t break me.
You can’t break something that is already broken!