[Cadre-politics] status: prodigal update

[Dan MacNeil]

EXCUSES, EXCUSES, EXCUSES

BOOMER (the work)

BOOMER (the paperwork)

BOOMER (the training)

MVHUB

CASH FLOW

BUDGET

ERIC BRYANT

JOHN MILLER

KAMALA KALLURI

SUZANNE KNAPP

MURIEL PARSEGHIAN

NILAM KAPASI

JOE GULBIKI

LAST BOARD MEETING

CONFERENCE IN CALIFORNIA

CONFERENCE IN LOWELL

CONFERENCE IN DC.

MATT OUELLETTE

JOSH BONNETT & ALIYA ABBASI

MANUEL CASTILLO

STEPHANE ALNET

TIM DEERING

NOTABLE TRIUMPH

HEALTH, SLEEP, ETC


EXCUSES, EXCUSES, EXCUSES
I notice that some of the bush administration people are getting in
trouble for quoting scripture. So sadly, you succubi humorists
without a broad liberal arts education will have some trouble figuring
out the meaning of the subject line of this message.

It has been months since the last status update. At least five days ago,
I promised Josh I'd do an update "today"

It feels like several times a week there is news worth reporting. I'll
try to work backwards and get caught up.

In the past weeks, there were a few times when it was necessary to spit
out teeth, smile, and start swinging again. However, almost every day we
are doing better than the previous.

We have more volunteers than we've had ever. Our budget is 3 times what
it was last year. We may get paid to take MVHub state wide and (I think)
a plan is starting to come together.

The only areas we are hurting are cash flow and sys admin labor.

BOOMER (the work)
I'd forgotten most of the little hassles of MS windows. (binary config
files, licenses, spy-ware, high memory usage), but tech support for the
little lab at the community center at Caleb's Chestnut Square and the
boys and girls club has re-acquainted me with this entertainment.

It is frustrating to delay the clean re-install of the OS, while
licenses are hunted down or re-purchased. At this level tech support
pays $10 an hour  when it exists at all and there isn't much continuity
between techs and their records.

The folks at http://TechSoup.org are quite helpful and to give Microsoft
credit you can purchase licenses pretty cheaply.  I'm happy there still
is no serious Linux Genuine Advantage [1]

	[1] http://www.linuxgenuineadvantage.org/

I'd also gotten a bit blinded to little feature/bugs of Linux. Joe
Gulbicki, one of our boomer volunteers managed hundreds of of windows
2003 servers for Verizon, before joining us but hasn't any Linux
experience. When talking about doing security updates, it was a little
weird to realize that there are at least 6 reasonable ways to apply
security updates to a debian/ubuntu system (aptitude,gnome-apt, apt-get,
synaptic, adept, update-manager)

We're running xubuntu on a couple machines with 64Mb of RAM at Caleb.
Everyone agrees this is better than MS XP. Things got a bit awkward
when the locals asked:

	 "How do I save to a floppy ?"

I knew the answer wasn't:

	sudo mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floopy
	cp ~/Desktop/homework.doc /mnt/floppy
	sudo umount /mnt/floppy

CD-ROMs put a nice little icon on the desktop, but floppies are a bit
more awkward. The latest (fawn: 07.04) version of xubuntu has a version
of xfce that puts a floppy icon on the desktop.

BOOMER (the paperwork)
It feels like I've spent more time reporting on our results, creating
plans and (trying to) recruit volunteers than actually working or
providing the doubtful benefit of my supervision to volunteers.

For a brief time, our payments were suspended as we had recruited 2 of
the promised 6 boomer aged volunteers. (right now we're at 4 with a shot
at 5)

The biggest lesson learned was that when I had to the chance to revise
the grant, I should have taken it. The grant was to start December and
didn't start until February. I didn't lower our goals when I had the
chance. Apparently there is a big difference between not meeting high
goals and meeting low ones.

Thanks to Peter Miller and Fred Martin for their advice on being
tactful. Thanks to Josh Harding for his observation that one could
simultaneously speak truth to power and step on one's own genitalia.

BOOMER (the training)
As part of the grant we were encouraged to attend training on attracting
boomer volunteers.[2]  It was last Friday and it was was pretty good.

[2]
http://nationalserviceresources.org/epicenter/practices/index.php?ep_action=view&web_id=33560

Probably the biggest take-aways for me were that we should create short
project-oriented volunteer descriptions. In the small group work, Eric,
somebody from http://www.peacegames.org/ and I created a slogan for the lab:

	Upload Opportunity, Download Skill.

Does this seem corny?

MVHUB
Felicia, Eric & I had a good meeting with consultants working for the
Youth Services Division of Unemployment Services. Chris Shannon of the
Merrimack Valley (Lawrence) WIB got us in the door.

The state is gathering information about mvhub-like options. One of the
consultants had already used mvhub in her daily work and liked it. They
seemed very sympathetic to a decentralized approach. They asked
questions like:

	"So, an agency doesn't have to be a paid up member
	 of the United Way Network, to be in mvhub.com ?"

It seems a dream, but if the work we are doing with for Chris Shannon
and the WIB goes well, we have a chance of being paid to take mvhub
state wide.

We should follow-up in another 2-3 weeks.

CASH FLOW
It is possible to have positive net worth and still be tight financially.

When your income exceeds your expenses, you have a net positive worth,
or in non-profit accounting argot, you have a "positive fund balance"

When your cash on hand is less than the bills you owe, you have a "cash
flow problem." David Siegal, The CTC-VISTA project and my lovely and
talented roommate are all creditors who were/are able to wait until our
money comes in.

Right now, we have $16,000 from a state agency committed to pay for
http://mvhub improvements. John is willing to do the work.

Coming off his VISTA term, he can't wait the 30-60 days it might take
the state to pay us.

By May 01, we need about $4,000 to keep John's paychecks flowing smoothly.

A past donor has generously made us a $1000 loan from May 01 2007 to May
01 2008.

I'm asking various people directly and personally for the remaining
$3,000, but if anyone out there in radio land is feeling generous or
sacrificial, we are accepting loans and donations [3] in a variety of
formats.

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

Donations of any size receive a beer and a friend to drink it with.
Loans of any size are rewarded with a muffin and coffee.

BUDGET
Eric Bryant took various quarterly budgets, categorized uncategorized
expenses in the checkbook register and created an annual budget [4] for
us and people we ask for grant money. When the budget was written we
were at $52,556. This feels like a high number until we realize most of
money flowing in it is flowing back out.

	[4] http://thecsl.org/sys/finance.d/budget-fy-2006-2007.xls

There are some updates to be made. Time has past and projections have
converted to reality (or not). I'll post an update in the next week or so.

ERIC BRYANT
We should have hired Eric, our VISTA fund-raising coordinator three
years ago. Joel explains why [5].

[5] http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html

I'm a half-empty glass, hair shirt, sucks less kind of guy but Eric is
great. Before he came along, all the stuff that wasn't system
administration or writing code was getting done by me, grudgingly and
half-assed.

In his short time with us so far, Eric applied for 4 grants, figured out
the IRS, went to a million meetings, brought in $1000, re-wrote our
brochure, fixed problems in our website and offered helpful criticism of
our marketing strategy. (like we need one)

He likes to work. He likes to figure things out. He's not perfect, he's
better than perfect because I can tell him when he's not perfect.

It's great having somebody below decks with me. I had the hope that when
Eric came on board, I'd be doing less of this stuff and more coding.

As it turns out I'm doing more of this stuff because Eric is here to
remind me it is important for our contribution to the revolution.

The only thing that scares me is that I suspect he's a closet tech. The
other day, I caught him writing raw HTML for an online grant application.

JOHN MILLER
If you look at our semi-updated people page [6], you'll notice John has
done a lot of work with us in the past 18 months. This doesn't count his
help at thecsl.org work or tutoring just generally doing what needs to be
done.

	[6] http://thecsl.org/go/about/people/

More people have sought me out to tell me how patient and helpful John
is than have sought me out for everyone else who has worked here put
together.

We're (the royal we anyway) really excited that he's off the root@ and
help@ lists and probably focused on mvhub.

KAMALA KALLURI
Kamala still chugging away on the downtime database. If it were not for
Kamala, we would not be able to make slow steady improvements to the
software we need to be a good ISP. When we have a control panel, it will
be because of Kamala.

In her spare time, Kamala has worked on getting wordpress [7]and
gallery[8] installed.

	[7] http://wordpress.com/
	[8] http://gallery.menalto.com/

SUZANNE KNAPP
Suzanne was with us in the beginning, one of the group of Saturday
volunteers along with Tim O'Conner and Dave McCabe, working on the
consortium site. [9] which ran on the first 200Mhz brave.cs.uml.edu

	[9] http://lctc.org/

It's been a couple years too long since we've worked together. As a
Boomer volunteer, Suzanne is working on a DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT web site for
the Renaissance Club. [10]

	[10] http://www.renclublowell.org/test-blog/

The whole thing is being done in WordPress. If things continue to go
well, The club be able to update their own site and we'll be able to
provide websites for groups that can't handle uploading files or getting
a PhD in Drupel.

JOHN MILLER
KAMALA KALLURI
SUZANNE KNAPP
MURIEL PARSEGHIAN
Mimi is the newest member of the board, She's got a solid marketing
background, is one of the stars of http://LeftInLowell.com and is (yay!)
the first board member not nominated by me.

Her lunch time conversation sparkles and we look forward to her
contributions to the board.

NILAM KAPASI
Nilam was accepted to the CS Dept's MS program next fall. She's not yet
legal to work in this country. She's is picking up some experience
working on the Boxes project. Boxes is Chris Sacca's first Perl project
Boxes has kept track of every server configuration change we've made for
the past 2 years.

I'm really excited about her work. There are relatively few people who
accept the Lama [11], sit down, read it and do the exercises at the end
of each chapter.

	[11] http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnperl4/

If things continue to go well, she'll polish off the rough edges of the
Boxes project now making a pearl in my oyster then move on to make a
solid contribution to mvhub.

JOHN MILLER
KAMALA KALLURI
SUZANNE KNAPP
MURIEL PARSEGHIAN
NILAM KAPASI
JOE GULBIKI
Joe is also a boomer volunteer. We've been chugging away @ Caleb
building whole boxes from parts. It's great working with somebody who
doesn't share my Linux centric view of the world.

LAST BOARD MEETING
The minutes [12] are complete.

[12]
http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/divinerightofkings/2007-February/000413.html

The big take-away (as I understand it) is that we charge $25/hr for work
  if:
	1) The work benefits only one organization

	2) The work is done by somebody collecting some sort
	    of wage or stipend.

CONFERENCE IN CALIFORNIA
We sat in a circle, held hands and sang. I loved it.

As I got a free ride (thanks to $500 from Felicia and $350 from
Aspiration Tech), I contributed these paragraphs to the conference
funder thanking blurbage:

	Before the Aspiration Tech Dev Summit, we sought
	funding to add features to http://mvhub.com. Now
	we are trying to build a community of developers
	around MVHub.

	Our thinking changed after the session on
	organizational software collaboration.
	I'd read the software culture chapters in
	Karl Fogal's CVS book but they'd not clicked.
	Things clicked when Brian Behlendorf noted
	that he'd funded only 20% of Subversion and
	recommended Karl Fogal's recent book on producing
	open source software.

	I arbitrarily define "community of developers"
	as a group of developers connected primarily
	as by their project (as apposed to a connected
	by a paycheck), who regularly contribute code
	to their project. By this definition there are
	apparently **NO** open source projects with a
	community of developers who are working toward
	solving non-profit problems.

	There are some more thoughts along these lines
	in our Google Summer of Code Application at:

	http://thecsl.org/go/vol/gsoc/2007/

Some time after thanking me, Gunner (Allen Gunn) noted that:
	
	"Brian Behlendorf has so much reputation from creating
	 Apache, that if he asked for somebody to run down
	to 7-11 to get him a Cherry Slurpe, he'd have 30 people
	begging for the job."

...but if we can teach a course around mvhub development...

CONFERENCE IN LOWELL
It is going to be 3 day festival of love. Thursday June 21 is grassroots
radio [13], Friday June 22 is Penguin Day [14] and Saturday June 23 is
grassroots technology day. Pay for one conference day and get 2 days free.

	[13] http://www.grassrootsradioxii.org/?page_id=4
	[14]
http://penguinday.aspirationtech.org/index.php/Lowell:Penguin_Day_Agenda
[15] http://organizerscollaborative.org/conference07/agenda

We're helping with Penguin Day.

CONFERENCE IN DC.
We (Kamala, John, Eric and I) went to NTEN. [16] It was a requirement of
the VISTA program. We won a $1000 prize, recognition in front of a
plenary and trophy that looks like an artifact from one of the first
season of the original star trek.

	[16] http://nten.org/ntc

The high point was somebody from wilderness technology [17] handing us
20 Xeon CPUs to use in any way we wanted except re-sale.

	[17] http://www.wildtech.org/mission.htm

The cheapest xeon, I could find on NewEgg was $153. One of their VISTAs
remembered John & I from the VISTA orientation. Apparently the blessed
virgin interceded on our behalf and made my rant:

	"Don't whine, most of the world lives on $2 per
	 day, suck it up, be humble, accept service."

... sound positive and supportive.

Thanks to Ken Kleiner, who rebooted the mail server and limited downtime
to an hour instead of 3 days.

Thanks also to Eric Bryant for putting a $1000 hotel bill on his credit
card. The lab doesn't have a credit card and the debit card can only be
charged $1000 per day.

Really the only downside was sleeping in a room with 4 other people who
snored. (Jeff Blakely and Rich Cowen crashed with us)

JOHN MILLER
KAMALA KALLURI
SUZANNE KNAPP
MURIEL PARSEGHIAN
NILAM KAPASI
JOE GULBIKI
LAST BOARD MEETING
CONFERENCE IN CALIFORNIA
CONFERENCE IN LOWELL
CONFERENCE IN DC.
MATT OUELLETTE

Matt, the guy that brought us Mon and Xen has a good job [18] and it
couldn't happen to a more worthy guy.

	[18] http://www.netnumber.com/

JOSH BONNETT & ALIYA ABBASI
When I was in California for the developer's summit I ran into our old
friend Nodus. He noticed my whining about the BART on cadre-politics and
figured I must be in his neighborhood.

VISTA leader, Aliya Abbasi was kind enough to invited me to pizza with
the local CTC-VISTAs and Josh was my date.  At dinner, Josh confessed to
working in Lowell for 5 months at below VISTA wages. After dinner Josh
picked up way more than his share of the dinner tab, because right now
now he's working for a good bit more than VISTA wages.

At the post-conference trivia contest, the three of us did relatively
well. We were getting whomped with questions like:

	"What is the name of the yellow dog owned by
	Allen Gunn's best friend who attended a previous
	conference."

...Until we realized the trick was to submit questions we could answer
and other people couldn't.

Once we started on questions like:

	"What port does DNS run on?"

...We did pretty well as the competition were predominantly software
developers without much arcane sys admin knowledge. We finished in the
middle.

MANUEL CASTILLO
I've not IM'd Manny in the past few weeks, but at least a few weeks ago,
he seemed to be doing ok in Dubai. He's taking "Arabic As a Second
Language", "Intro to Arabic Culture" and "Intro to Arabic History" and I
think "Cooking Arabic Style"

Once, he cut the conversation short as it was raining. Apparently it
rains only twice a year and when it does everyone runs outside.

JOHN MILLER
KAMALA KALLURI
SUZANNE KNAPP
MURIEL PARSEGHIAN
NILAM KAPASI
JOE GULBIKI
LAST BOARD MEETING
CONFERENCE IN CALIFORNIA
CONFERENCE IN LOWELL
CONFERENCE IN DC.
MATT OUELLETTE
JOSH BONNETT & ALIYA ABBASI
MANUEL CASTILLO
STEPHANE ALNET
The last time I emailed with Stephane, he'd just gotten the first round
of venture capital for his company.[19]  If anyone is looking to make
money, I'd invest it with Stephane.

	[19] http://carrierclass.net/
TIM DEERING
Tim's got some good windows sys admin / support chops. He's been coming
in on Thursday nights after his day job and after dropping his 16 year
old son off at play rehearsal.

He's using Perl to parse the samba part of LDAP so was to create a
batch/VBA file that will automatically mount the shares for people in BSM

NOTABLE MISTAKE
Even after your organization closes the doors, pay $10 a year for a few
years so the domain name fade away. For a time Saint Julie's domain was
returning a porno site.


JOHN MILLER
KAMALA KALLURI
SUZANNE KNAPP
MURIEL PARSEGHIAN
NILAM KAPASI
JOE GULBIKI
LAST BOARD MEETING
CONFERENCE IN CALIFORNIA
CONFERENCE IN LOWELL
CONFERENCE IN DC.
MATT OUELLETTE
JOSH BONNETT & ALIYA ABBASI
MANUEL CASTILLO
STEPHANE ALNET
TIM DEERING
NOTABLE TRIUMPH
We had problems with csl-dns-03.thecsl.org

We have csl-dns-01 and csl-dns-02, in different physical locations than
csl-dns-03. Instead of blowing off the training on Friday, I just turned
csl-dns-03 off until it could be fixed.

Thanks to the work of bunch of people including but not limited to
Stephane Alnet, Ivan Poon, John Miller, Eric Adum and Chris Sacca.

HEALTH, SLEEP, ETC
I'm mostly feeling smug about sleep. I've got through a couple 2 week
periods without touching the Gym. I had a big break-through when I
realized that I didn't have to go at 8:00am on weekdays.

John's been biking in.

I've seen Kamala going round the track on a couple Saturday afternoons.