Senior Night

There is just something special about Senior Night at a college basketball game. Or maybe only at schools that really appreciate these student athletes and recognize that they are also still college kids. I wonder though, how much it confuses the opponents?

Coach Hatchell starts the seniors on senior night if at all possible. For some it is the only start of their college career and some of those come out at the first dead ball since senior night is a conference game and there are no easy conference games.

Thursday night Laura Barry got her only start. She scored within the first minute of the game - her first points of the year by the stats I found online - which resulted in the bench jumping to their feet and a huge cheer from the crowd. Good for her, good for the team, and good for the crowd. She was wide open and her teammates got her the ball. My thought was that Miami (the opponent) wasn't really prepared for the different starting lineup. Laura stayed in the game until the first media timeout (almost 5 minutes) even after other substitutions. She must have been doing her job well in the coaches eyes as well as in mine.

I remember other years like that as well. With a senior reserve player with few minutes who started on senior night and scored the first basket. Sometimes the years blend together but my memory says it was Jennifer Nelms.

There were 8 seniors honoured this year. Two managers, the video coordinator, and five players: Alex Miller, who has ended her career after continued issues from last year's injury, and Laura Berry, Heather Claytor, Iman McFarland, and Rashanda McCants who all started.

The Carolina Fever (student fan group) was also very supportive. Near the end of the game, instead of the Lets-Go-Tar-Heels chant, they were chanting Thank-you-sen-iors. Though I still do not know what was up with the bright spandex leggings and off the shoulder sweatshirts that many were wearing.

Thank you Seniors for four wonderful years of fast paced team work.
Lets keep it going all the way to April!

-SML

Memories of Robinson Hall

I found Requiem for Classical Physics on Fedora Planet. Matthew Daniels has been doing a great job on updating the Fedora User's Guide. He is also a physics major. I was an astrophysics major and enjoyed double slit experiments. My optics class and the advanced lab class were my favorite classes. Maybe that's why I followed the post and liked the post, but he does try to keep it simple for the non-geeks. Hopefully others may enjoy it as well.

Now I think I'll go grab my copy of Timeline by Michael Crichton where quantum physics meets medieval history in the world of fiction.

-SML

Historic Stadiums

Do you remember the Mastercard Priceless ad where they go to different ballparks? It was baseball parks. It used material from a real story and had controversy over the rights to that usage. It is one that came to my mind today.

I've been to Fenway (of course) and to a game in St Louis (in the 80's at the old Busch Stadium) and maybe one other. It is not so much seeing the different ball parks or ball teams. I have no interest in seeing all the parks but I wouldn't mind seeing more of the historic ones. I missed out on getting to the original Yankee Stadium and to Shea Stadium but there is still Wrigley Field and these days you can probably count Dodger Stadium as one of the few other old fashion ones.

On the other hand I appear to be collecting memories of historic basketball arenas. Last night I went to historic William Neal Reynolds Coliseum to cheer the UNC Tar Heels in a road win over the NC State Wolfpack. Not only is it fun to see the buildings but it is also fun to see the differences in fans and cheering traditions. The NCSU band is good. They played some great music and whoever was on drums last night is great! There were a lot of kids there including whole school groups. The box score showed just over 6000 in attendance and the coliseum holds 9500 so it was a good crowd. There was a lot of blue in that crowd. We ended up sitting high up behind the UNC bench which turned out the be near the Carolina Fever student group and the season ticket holder bus trip folks.

Other venues I have seen (historic and otherwise)
Carmichael Auditorium (UNC)
Dean E Smith Center (UNC)
Cameron Indoor Stadium (Duke)
Reynolds Coliseum (NC State)
Boston Garden (2006 NCAA Women's Final Four)
Wells Fargo Arena (Arizona state hosts 2005 NCAA Tempe Regional)

I have also been to the RBC Center (home of the NC State men's basketball) but only to see a couple of Hurricanes games.

A quick search of the experts on the internet suggests that my "must see" list should include Kansas, Penn, and Minnesota. Being more of a women's hoops fan, I have to add Tennessee, Connecticut, and Stanford.

-SML

Golden Shovel of Wiki Gardening Award?

Thanks Karsten for mentioning the work done on the Fedora Docs Project wiki cleanup. I didn't know there was a Golden Shovel of Wiki Gardening Award.

It has also been fun reading up on the packaging guidelines and package maintainers procedures. That renaming work is moving along nicely as well. Check out the new entry point for the Package Maintainers - it is the category page so any new pages will automatically show up at the bottom simply by adding [[Category:Package Maintainers]] at the bottom of the page. That work was just done this past weekend, so I was very pleased to see an email this morning pointing another user to a process page by using the NEW page name.

It is easy to use the old names since they redirect with most people not even noticing. This means that many others who are working at this cleanup in other groups go unnoticed. So I would like to pass on the Golden Shovel of Wiki Gardening Award to Fabian Affolter who has been moving a number of the user pages around. He has been working on moving and redirecting the pages of [[FirstnameLastname]] to the format of [[User:loginname]] and the only reason I noticed was by seeing all the moves in the Special:RecentChanges page of the wiki.

Finally, for those that don't know (or don't remember), this "wiki cleanup project" is accomplishing several task but the biggest is to make the search feature work better for everyone. In my mind, this is especially important for new users so that they can find what they need and stick around to help Fedora grow. It is not a hard task. Anyone can help. Find out how in #fedora-docs.

-SML

Oktapodi

Great short!!!

OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORT: "Oktapodi"
The thrilling tale of one octopus' quest to rescue its partner from the cooking pot is one of five nominees for Best Animated Short Subject.

View the short at the "Oktapodi" Web site

[As seen on CBS Sunday Morning show Sunday Feb 22, 2009]


I miss the days of "Best of the Fest" at the Somerville Theatre [particularly April 1990].

Those were the days of

• Bambi meets Godzilla
  
• The Cat Came Back
  
• Creature Comforts
  
• Early Pixar shorts
• Many, many, more
  

-SML

[Corrected link for April 1990]

New URL

Some of my readers may have noticed that I changed the location of the this blog. Others will not even notice since there is a redirect in place.

When I started I did not yet have my company domainname registered so I used the blogger domain with the free hosting. I choose the hostname of laubersolutions since this is about my travels while training for my company.

Then I finally registered laubersolutions.com for my company and now that it has been yet another year since, I thought it was time to put the blog in that domain. Especially since blogger (now part of google) lets me do it for free and redirects the old name. How much easier can it get? The final motivation was deciding to do this before getting onto Fedora Planet.

My dilemma was whether it should be blog.laubersolutions.com or something else. Since "The Traveling Trainer" is more about my personal life even if it is on the road mostly for work, I decided on travelingtrainer.laubersolutions.com. This leaves the blog.laubersolutions.com name available if (or rather when) I get around to setting up a company blog with more on the business itself (instead of me personally) and the technical aspects of Lauber System Solutions (like more linux and application posts).

Anyways - if you have my site bookmarked in the old location, you may want to change it to the new location: http://travelingtrainer.laubersolutions.com

-SML

More gluten free thanks

In an effort to share the love...

Thank you also goes to Not Your Average Joe's for also having a gluten free menu. The rosemary skewered fresh scallops are particularly good. Too many dishes have wine or wine vinegar for me to take family members but it still a good place.

I was introduced to this restaurant when visiting friends and getting take out from Joe's is a common Friday night event when I stay with them. I have eaten at this restaurant on several trips to the Boston area but while looking up the menu for this post I realized that they have a Leesburg, VA location as well. That is doable when I teach in Tysons.

-SML

Planets

No not the kind in the solar system but rather the blog aggregates.

I have joined the world of Planet Fedora. (well, assuming this post shows up correctly.)

After seeing a number of posts on whole feeds versus tags and then which tags to use, I have opted for a tagged feed but am using a planet_fedora tag so I can easily choose to send any content without an otherwise unusual filing system.

Someone asked in irc somewhere about how to get per tag feeds from blogger sites. The parties involved gave up and went to wordpress but I held out and it appears I have the solution.

http://your.blogger.url/feeds/posts/default/-/thelabel/?alt=rss
is what goes into the .planet file.

-SML

A plug for Legal Sea Foods

Since one of the goals of this blog is to find good food, I thought it was about time I said thank you to Legal Sea Foods. I frequent this restaurant when I travel, especially in the Boston area and the DC area.

I have always enjoyed this restaurant and have memories of going to the Kendall Square location with family as a child. Since discovering food allergies, it has been nice to know there was someplace good with "real food" and that was friendly about special requests. The latest food challenges in my family has been avoiding wheat. It is not an allergy and not all gluten sources seem to be a problem but too much wheat is definitely uncomfortable.

So thank you Legal Sea Foods for having a gluten free menu. I think I just about have it memorized! Being able to get fried calamari (with a chick pea flour) is wonderful and the crab dip and seafood chips is another favorite.

-SML

Think Pink

It is February and it is Breast Cancer Awareness month. Over the past few years, there has been a growing movement for the NCAA basketball teams to support this awareness. Even the mens teams have been seen with coaches wearing ribbons and a few players with pink shoelaces. In the women's game there have been pink warmup suits and pink shoelaces and for a couple of years now, pink uniforms [from Nike as far as I know] used for at least one game during February by many teams. [These would be the pink uniforms that UNC wore at the MD game the weekend that NCSU's Coush Yow died.] According to ESPN, more than 1000 teams will participate in this years WBCA Pink Zone initiative.

Today, while I am wearing pink and cheering on the Tar Heel women's basketball team in hopes that they will bounce back from a road loss and beat Georgia Tech today in Chapel Hill, an even bigger game will be going on down the road... Virginia at NC State for the 4th annual Hoops for Hope game which is sold out. The "the first advance sell-out in the history of the Wolfpack women’s basketball program" and something Coach Yow always hoped would happen - especially for a Hoops for Hope game.

Go Wolfpack.
Go Heels.

Update:
Pack wins 60-54
Heels win 73-50

FUDcon

I have not been training as much lately but I have been getting more involved in the Fedora Project. I attended FUDcon F11 and had a wonderful time meeting new people. I learned a lot about how the project is run and suddenly I find myself with plenty of tasks to keep me busy.

• I was already helping the docs project with general wiki maintainance (renaming, categorization, and now also patrolling) and learning about MediaWiki.
• I hope to do more with the updates to the various guides, especially the Users Guide and the Installation Guide, which will update my DocBook skills and teach me Publican.
  
• After FUDcon I found I had volunteered to herd cats - er - assist the Packaging Guide folks from a docs standpoint and that has evolved into helping with some other packaging related pages and documents as well.
• I will be helping with the transition of some content to a CMS and so am learning about Zikula and also have been invited to assist the infrastructure team (now there is a lot of opportunity to keep busy!)

It is all interesting and lot of fun. It is also a group of international people so the hours are bit interesting. I seem to find myself asleep when many of the interesting conversations occur. Or I end up staying up too late and finding that morning comes too early.

Great Museums

I have know for years that the Boston Museum of Science was a great place. Here are some things I learned this year.

• The dinosaur is "big, big, big". It also has a name I can't remember and wears a red and white scarf in the winter.
• It takes the opportunity to touch the fur of New England animals to get one glove off a small child
• Getting the other glove and the coat takes even more interactive activities - like creating dragons on the computer and "releasing" them to fly on the animated big screen. [This was VERY cool.] (Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids (Temporary Exhibit)
• Looking at X-rays is fun and apparently, so is listening to the stories of people who had X-rays taken.
• Baby chickens are cute but it is more fun to play the computer game to find the cancer in the mouse. (Human Body Connection)
• Swings in the winter are even better when no coat is required. (Science in the Park)
• The Discovery Center (between the cafe and the IMAX) is a great place for young children to take a break from the stimulation of the museum and do regular preschool like things. The staff is wonderful. We learned about rocks that start fires, are used to make toothpaste, and are heavy or light. We held the bones of a big bird that does not fly (ostrich). We learned the dance of the honey bee. We read books. And yes, the price is part of the exhibit hall ticket.
  
• The virtual fish tank is even more fun than the flying dragons.
• Even with the help of a child it is not always possible to find Waldo.
• The Discovery Center also has a great list of "exhibits that are enjoyed by children 8 years of age and younger" which was very helpful and very accurate.
• Mondays in mid January (just after school resumes) is a nice quiet time to go the museum.
• It will take more visits to see all the spectacular things.