[Cadre-politics] summer status

[Dan MacNeil]

MONEY

The board meeting is next Tuesday so I will have more detailed finances
in the next report.

We just accepted an anonymous $500 donation.

Big thanks to codename, "NINJA CUPCAKE". I just put the donation in the
mail to our friends at the CTCNET VISTA program [1].

	[1] http://cpcs.umb.edu/vista/

What was nifty about this gift was that it was the first one I asked for
directly and specifically:

	ME: "oh, um, what's the best way to ask you for money?"	

	NINJA CUPCAKE: "The direct approach works pretty well."

	ME: "Err, could we have $500?"
	
	NINJA CUPCAKE: "For what?"

	ME: "To pay down the debt we've owed since September?"

	NINJA CUPCAKE: "Sure, is a check ok?"


We've still only got about $145 in the checking account [2]

	[2]  http://thecsl.org/sys/finance.d/csl_checkbook.xls

Now we are only $250 in debt. We will eventually be able to pay this but
we sure would appreciate another gift [3]

	[3] http://thecsl.org/go/donate/

Let me know if you want me to buy you mid afternoon coffee and little 
debbie's snack cakes and ask you directly.

JOB FAIR

Charlotte was gracious enough to allow us a large corner of LTC's booth
at the UML job fair. The 4 foot tall, "PEACE LOVE LINUX" poster, that we 
printed on Fred's huge plotter was quite stylin'.

We picked up 15 resumes, 2 solid leads and 10 box lunches that didn't 
seem to belong to anyone. I was a bit disapointed at the quality of 
elivator pitches.

An elevator pitch is what useful info you can share about yourself with
a stranger riding in an elevator, I was surprised at how awkward some
pitches at the job fair were.

I'm tempted to march everyone over to the Olsen lobby and ride up and
down until everyone had a smooth elevator pitch.

NEW RECRUITS

Please welcome Rob Vanderly (robv at thecsl.org) , Matt Ouellette
(matto at thecsl.org) and probably an MBA student to do marketing.

Rob worked with John Miller for a week over spring break on the Beowulf
thing and comes well recommended.

Matt had a reasonable elevator pitch at the job fair.

We will have 7-8 people full time in the lab this summer. While a lot of
time will be spent getting up to speed, I'm hopeful that we can get a
lot done.

I'm working on some specific and well defined evaluation criteria for 
the summer people. I hope have it to the list for everyone's review soon.

UTEC
John got the firewall rule fixed on the database machine so the check
station now is updating. The check station is where the youth swipe 
their bar-coded ID cards. ---I'd been bashing my head against this 
randomly since early April and John got it taken care of in less than an 
hour.

Gregg and I have made some progress on getting the sync script finally
finished. I threw it over the wall without adequate testing and he is
rewarding my sloth with cryptic problem reports like: "It doesn't work."

DOWNTIME DB

Kamala and I simplified things a bit for phase 0.1. The first version
will merely append updates to the status file. [4]

	[4] http://downtime.thecsl.org

Goals of the downtime report are to:

	1) make it easier to report downtime than editing raw html

	2) make analysis of causes of downtime possible, so we
	   can have less of it.

JOHN'S WORK

In between his goodwill tours and SLICE work, John has been struggling
with obscure bugs in the off site backup.

You really should at least quickly checkout the before SLICE [5] and
after SLICE [6].

	[5] http://slice.uml.edu/
	[6] http://slice.thecsl.org/

He's thinking about extending his VISTA term a bit, which is a happy
thought.