From dan at thecsl.org Thu Mar 6 03:23:52 2008 From: dan at thecsl.org (Dan MacNeil) Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:23:52 -0500 Subject: [Cadre-politics] status: finished Message-ID: <47CFAA18.3080006@thecsl.org> 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? From dan at thecsl.org Mon Mar 17 09:50:30 2008 From: dan at thecsl.org (Dan MacNeil) Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:50:30 -0400 Subject: [Cadre-politics] One Lowell / school committee Message-ID: <47DE7726.9050203@thecsl.org> Below is a note from Victoria Fahlberg of One Lowell, if you care for the quality of Lowell Schools, it is worth reading. I'm planning to be @ the school committee meeting on Wednesday and would welcome company. ############ ############ You may have heard about a recent motion of the High School subcommittee of the Lowell School Committee to suspend ONE Lowell's highly praised truancy prevention program from operating in the High School for failing to provide reports. Although the subject of detailed, weekly, narrative reports on every student was discussed during a meeting with the High School in 2006, it was decided that e-mails, phone conversations, and in-school meetings, (the reporting method employed by our liaisons) would be sufficient so that everyone could focus their time on the students. We always aspire to regular, open, and mutual communication with our partners in order to ensure the best interest of the student and their family. In the four years since we started work ing with the Lowell Public Schools, we have never heard a single complaint regarding lack of communication until the report at the subcommittee meeting on Feb. 27, 2008. The ONE Lowell Truancy Prevention Program is provided at no cost to the Lowell Public Schools and addresses a major problem faced by school systems across the state: the large number of young people failing to graduate. Last year, about 27% of students who had enrolled as freshman in 2003 at Lowell High School failed to graduate in 2007. In Lowell, many of those students come from families where English is a second language. ONE Lowell's liaisons are culturally and linguistically equipped to reach these students and families when others cannot. The program is straightforward and effective. When a pattern of truancy is identified by school personnel, ONE Lowell intervenes, working with the student, family and school system to improve attendance before the downward spiral results in the student dropping out of school. We ended the school year last year having helped 70% of those students on our caseload to improve their attendance. This year we are currently at 71%. *_On Wednesday, March 19th, 7:00pm at City Hall,_* the School Committee will be discussing the subcommittee's recommendation. The stakes are high and it is critical that people like you, who believe in our work, show your support for this critical and highly effective program for students from the immigrant and refugee communities. _If you believe that immigrant and refugee students at Lowell High deserve the opportunity we provide them, please come and voice your support._ Victoria Fahlberg Executive Director One Lowell From dan at thecsl.org Fri Mar 21 15:53:56 2008 From: dan at thecsl.org (Dan MacNeil) Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:53:56 -0400 Subject: [Cadre-politics] no money from Mabel Message-ID: <47E41254.6060101@thecsl.org> The Riley foundation didn't fund us for 50K for bloated overhead, an MVHUb coder and a MVHUb marketing VISTA this round. http://www.rileyfoundation.com/ Thanks to Eric for his work and John Maguire for his critique. We'll ask them for feedback and give it another go. Eric's goal for April 16 is 4 more grants to similar groups. (I'd be happy w/ May 01) Because I like Rocky I : http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19760101/REVIEWS/601010307/1023 ...and not Triumph of the Will: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19940624/REVIEWS/406240302/1023 ...I'm ok w/ this. Eric may be a little down about this. It probably doesn't help being almost homeless and all. If you see him buy him a beer. From dan at thecsl.org Mon Mar 31 12:14:30 2008 From: dan at thecsl.org (Dan MacNeil) Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:14:30 -0400 Subject: [Cadre-politics] side jobs Message-ID: <47F10DE6.9050902@thecsl.org> I have sudden new debt of a few thousand dollars Eventually the lab will pay it's fearless leader a salary because not everyone can be married to Laura. In the short term, I could use a few side jobs. Ideally for for-profit groups as competing with the Lab for non-profit work would might present the appearance of be a conflict of interest Resume at: http://thecsl.org/go/board/dan_macneil_resume.doc Strong Skills: windoze / Linux sys admin Usable skills: Perl / PHP / SQL / Bash coding , tech planning. I can justify $50/hr for Linux sys admin as I can probably accomplish in a few hours what might take people starting out some days. For the coding and windowze, I can justify $35/hr, though I have know people who know less to be paid more. I'm not looking for permanent or full time work.