Whatever's on my mind

Hi everyone,

the usual channels already provided it: we are planning a Mini Debconf in Germany — Berlin to be more precise. Yay!

So, how is it gonna be? Well, there is the LinuxTag in Berlin which is held every year; this year’s calendars show it on June 9th to 12th. As the location is the fairground and room is available, we found setting up a Mini Debconf right in the middle of it to be a good idea. The Mini Debconf will thus take place on June 10th and 11th. The night in between will of course be used, too. The hacklab we’re planning will be open from the start until the bitter end — without breaks. That of course is only fun if we’re there to do something. :-)

I sincerely hope that we’re in freeze by then and the Bug Squashing Party in the hacklab will do all the best to Make Things Happen[TM].

I’m also very pleased to see the german debianforum.de trying to participate. We should sort things out soon. This is a great opportunity for both of us to connect and learn from each other.

Well, that’s it for now from my side. For more details, in particular on how to help, see our wiki on debconf.org. You’ll hear more soon!

Finally, I got my notebook working again. It seems a full Gnome installation isn’t exactly what my old MacBook needed. So it lay around for weeks, or rather months now, not being used for anything remotely relevant to anything. After all I then decided to get rid of Gnome at least on the notebook and instead installed LXDE… what can I say? It’s amazing. Removing all the stuff I don’t need anyways on this system (even the pbuilder/cowbuilder stuff is gone) made it really fast again. I’m happy now and the vacation can come with my notebook at hand, since it’s running again.

Yet that’s actually not what I wanted to write about. After a three week break due to illness (and, I admit, bad weather — although it still is pretty snowy and icy outside) I’m back on the track. And it wasn’t even that bad. Of course I’m not back on the level I had before but at least it’s about 5.5 km in 35 minutes. For a beginner who just had a forced break from training, I’m quite satisfied with myself. So, I’m running again.

Yay!

It’s been quite a while since I posted something in my blog. I had to recover from not going to Debconf9 which was real sad. Right before the conference, I mean like a day before it, I got more or less sick and just couldn’t fly the next day. I managed to rebook the flight (thanks to SwissAir) for the next day but it wasn’t meant to be. I would have loved to meet the “Debian crew”, get my GnuPG key a bit more into the web of trust, discuss a few issues, envy the fast end evolved notebooks everyone else has… You can imagine it wasn’t easy to see the conference going its way via live stream when I was actually planned to be there. Again sorry to everyone who worked for me being sponsored and everything!

Anyways, time goes by and a lot happens, none of which I’d like to publish in a blog, except: I got a part time job. :) If you’ve ever asked me about my experience with Linux vServers or web hosting in general, and if you even asked me where to get such with fair prices and good support, I might have mentioned a small firm in Germany which I’m a customer of for a long time now. And about two months ago it just so happened that they called me. I admit, I know the owner of the company (haven’t seen him in a too long time, though) and I already considered us friends. But I was still surprised when he asked me to work for him. It’s not a big deal, he said, just administer the servers we’re running and take care of them. It’s a few hours a month, don’t worry, you can do it! All that with a scary smile… Now it turns out he had more in mind and I’m working on different projects at the same time, but still have the system (all Debian of course) at first priority. I have no clue if he’s satisfied with my work or if he’s just afraid to tell me (you know, us being friends and all), yet the systems are up and running and I’m learning every day. I even got the chance to write a small project in ruby which I wanted to do for a long time. Love it!

So, this is the first time that I recommend him not only because I trusted him with my system but also because I know your system would be safe. ;-) Need an IT partner in Germany or the Netherlands? o-byte.com

Uhhh, I have to ask for a raise after this hymn :)

Something else I forgot? Well, I became a DD but that’s also some time ago, so hmm… no, that’s it… for now.

Yes, it’s true. I finally booked flights (I still wait for a confirmation mail).

So, see you there, I suppose…