[Cadre-politics] status: board

[Dan MacNeil]

GIFTS
BOARD MEETING
MVHUB
DOWNTIME DB
CONFERENCE
SLEEP

GIFTS

Last week, I appealed for donations to cover the $250 we still owe Paul.

Codename KIND LASER came through with $100:

	 "Buy me a beer and I'll write the group a check".

What's more, he changed his mind and insisted on buying the beer.

So, our immediate need is for $150. Again, this is not a life 
threatening need. I am confident that our receivables will eventually 
cover this debt. However, we have owed the money since last September...

BOARD MEETING

Most of my working life, I've operated under mushroom management [1]
This is not an effective way to work.

There will not be a "great game" or "open book" [] style quiz, but
everyone should to try to understand the big picture.

	[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_management
	[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Book_Management

In the next couple days, check the board list archives [4] for updated
financial, plans, agendas, minutes, etc.

	[5] http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/divinerightofkings/

Anyone should feel free to attend the board meeting (Tuesday 6pm @ LTC
on 246 market st). Given the need get through our agenda, participation
by non board members should be mostly limited to observation and posts
to cadre-politics.

MVHUB
I was at the monthly NPA [6] meeting (we host their website) Wednesday 
morning.  There was an interesting presentation from folks at the health 
dept who are planning for a pandemic. []. Discussing issues like 
delivering food to food banks when many of the trucking companies aren't 
running because their workers are sick led to issues like finding all 
the food banks.

	[6] http://npagl.org
	[7] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/02/bird_flu/

....and of course MVHUB [8] came up as the answer. It's been a couple
years now since Felicia Sullivan, Eric Marc Adum, Jane Benfey, David
Siegal and Keven Mullen built MVHUB, but it is still working and
still up to date and still not requiring a lot of maintenance for us or
Felicia.

	[8] http://mvhub.com

DOWNTIME DB

Kamala and I are working limiting the scope to something doable in a
reasonable amount of time. We played with skipping the database and just
appending to files, but the need to put incidents in reverse
chronological order followed by updates to incidents in reverse
chronological order: pushed us back to a database.

CONFERENCE

We're on to present credit card donations [9] at the Grassroots use of 
Technology conference. [10]

[9] 
http://wiki.oc-tech.org/index.php?title=FULL_DESCRIPTIONS#Simple.2C_Cheap_and_Secure_Credit_Card_options

[10] 
http://oc-tech.org/conference2006?PHPSESSID=71d38d45865959b3a55afb293cf5c780

The past few years, the conference has been pretty good. Registration is 
$60. This is covered for VISTAs, but if anyone else wants to go and 
doesn't want to pay, we'll figure something out.

SLEEP

This week I didn't fall asleep at my desk once. However  I'm still 
staying up and getting up later than I want. I still find myself reading 
nytimes or slashdot for a couple hours because I'm "too tired" to do 
real work.

This week, John and I  started sleep and punctuality journals. It seems 
to be helping.

I averaged 7.25 hours of sleep per night last week and was on average 45 
minutes late for work at the lab.  At least on punctuality, I think John 
did better than I did.

Manny is still sleeping through exams, but he did read some of the sleep 
book.

BEYOND SLEEP

Life has more juice for people who aren't zombified from lack of sleep. 
Sleeping well is an end in itself. Sleeping well is also a first step in 
solid life hacking [11]

[11] http://collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2005/10/meet_the_life_h.html

The nytimes.com article touches on some apparent paradoxes.  For 
example, the XP belief that shared space and overheard conversations 
increase productivity [12] and the Peopleware [13] studies that show 
that the productive programmers have large quiet offices.

[12] http://bossavit.com/thoughts/archives/2004_09.html
[13] http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/pw.html

OFFSITE BACKUP

I'm probably making a mistake speaking for John but..

There are a bunch of nagging little problems. For example (simplifying 
somewhat), diffs of diffs getting corrupted. The big barrier has been 
distraction with other small paying and worthy projects like SLICE  and 
other not paying and worthy projects like the boys and girls club.

3PM FRIDAY COFFEE @ EGGROLL CAFE

Five of us were there.

3:00pm arrived just as people were settling into a work groove, 
Consequently until about 3:20pm, I was fearlessly leading myself, paging 
through a Glamour magazine and trying to look as cool as the other 
people in the coffee shop.

Kamala had a good suggestion for Manny on a sacrifice he could make to 
improve his grades. Some of us speculated that Universities might make 
some admission and retention decisions after considering the tution $.

We walked out into the sunshine about 3:50pm. A mob of about 30 young 
woman crossed the street in front of us chanting Greek letters. It was 
very learned. We walked pat the owner of Supa's convenience store stood 
outside his door gently bouncing a small water balloon in his hand. He 
assured us we were not his target as we past. Perhaps he was celebrating 
Holi [14] a bit late.

[14] http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/religion/hinduismhere/thisell.html