[Cadre-politics] status: finished

[Dan MacNeil]

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?