status: finished
Thu Mar 6 03:23:52 EST 2008
FANCY INTRO ERIC BRYANT FUND RAISING KAMALA KALLURI BOOZE-UP ART CROOKE JODI DELIBERTIS & BECKY JOHNSON BARRY WARSAW FRED MARTIN FANCY INTRO I've got 6-7 unfinished status messages in my drafts folder. My favorite is titled "Status sinner leadership". It attempts to pass through Servant Leadership: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership It suggests that the boss should do enough actual work so he screws up fairly often and is sympathetic to failures of his underlings. There is a good quote from the Scarlett Letter about how it tortures the Rev Dimsdale that almost nobody believes him when he talks about what a sinner he is. Unfortunately just as I was finishing it up, I lost patience with our last technical staffer and fired him. (This was back in November) I guess that particular piece of holier-than-thou won't see the light of day for a while. So the goal of this particular status report is to finish before the helpful insomnia leaves me. ERIC BRYANT Eric is on a a bit of a grant writing rampage. He's latest is at: http://thecsl.org/sys/bids-grants.d/grants.d/applied.d/2008.d/riley.d/ In his spare time, he's been making presentations to groups in Lawrence about the benefits of being part of http://mvhub.com Apart from the time the projector was missing, it seems to be going well. In the idle time between 3:00am and 6:00am, that he'd otherwise be sleeping, He's looking for a room in Lowell. His Cambridge lodgings are now a 2.5 hour commute away. Even a room for a month or so, so he can look for something would be good. I can't speak to him as a house-mate but as an office mate he's a good cook and faithful maker of coffee. He's over the zero on the neat/slob number line. He goes outside to smoke. He otherwise has excellent manners and a dry wit. FUND RAISING My own fund raising efforts of late have been a good bit lamer. Chuck M's very nice login page for webmail and other stuff has a funny quote from the fortune program. See: http://login.thecsl.org/ In a fit of power madness and NPR.org envy, I took it away. So far with no results. I'd have done better to put an ad for Eric's housing. KAMALA KALLURI Kamala just got back from India and is leaving soon for California. In between she got a tiny bit done on tying the server monitoring system to the downtime database. BOOZE-UP The executive committee on the 15th is (probably) moving to Mimi's house which may complicate the booze-up. Stay tuned. ART CROOKE The prospect of not having to get up at 3:00am to replace a bad hard drive is quite exciting to me. Art stepped in to help bail us out with the Mass Service grant and then stepped out to do some other good stuff but not with us. Now he's back. He's been grinding away at Falko Timmo's RAID howto: http://www.howtoforge.com/software-raid1-grub-boot-debian-etch Right now, Art's hung up on booting from the RAID array. Perversely on our fancy newish AMD-64, SATA box (aka bambi) (hd2,0) is swapped with (hd1,0) at the time grub loads the kernel but swapped back to /dev/sdc1 when /etc/fstab is mounted. My fancy grub-fu has been handy. (Did you know the grub shell has auto tab completion like bash ?) But it was art that pinned down the swapping thing. MADHU VENUGOPAL Starting in the Summer, Madhu did some nice quality checking for John's improvements to http://MVhub.com Since then, She wrote a very nice script to securely let people set their own away/vacation messages. Madhu is one of the two people who we've never physically met who have made a substantial contribution to our work. The other (CRD) works at google last I heard. Right now Madhu's working on getting the web calendar for going http://www.artsomerville.org/ again. CHRIS SACCA This is actually, very, very old news, but Chris is a debian developer. He's maintaining 2 important packages: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=csacca%40thecsl.org ...and has the whole @debian.org address aloth space thing going on. I just noticed all this. If it was me, I'd be mentioning this sort of thing, every time I said hello to people. JODI DELIBERTIS & BECKY JOHNSON Jodi and Becky work for Jericho road tonight they came by work with Charlotte, Karen, Melissa, Mimi and I to work on an organizational assessment. As these things go, it was quite pleasant. So far, we're not as lame as i thought we were. My 2nd favorite bit was how well we did aligning our programs to our strategy and mission despite not having a written strategy. My 1st favorite bit was how well we did for boldness. Becky is studying to be a minister. Her first sermon isn't bad.[] [] http://www.firstparish.org/cms/content/view/607/45/ BARRY WARSAW Barry Warsaw is the founding developer for Mailman, which is the software this list is run on. He recently replied: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2008-March/019827.html ...to an email I posted to the mailman developer's list. I may never wash my keyboard or monitor again. FRED MARTIN Fred is in Las Vagas at the moment. I don't know if this connected to him winning yet another award: http://www.massachusetts.edu/staff/psa2007martin.html ... Isn't it traditional for professors who get tenured way early to buy everyone a beer?