Archive for December 30th, 2008

Posted on December 30, 2008 - by jono

The Macy’s Gipsy King

I just wanted to share with you an interesting little story that happened to us the other day.

A few days back my wife and I were in Macy’s in Union Square shopping. We were lined up to pay for a jacket when nature came knock knock knocking on my door. When I returned she was chatting to another guy (called David) who was also lined up. Apparently the guy asked her about me being English and they got chatting. When I returned he said “are you a rock star?“. Somewhat amused I jokingly said yes and laughed it off. He then told us that he was one of the managers for the Gipsy Kings and pointed to the lead guitarist who was buying a stack of clothes at the checkout.

We carried on chatting about music and he told us that the Gipsy Kings were playing the following night in San Francisco. He then asked me to call him the next day and he would try to hook us up with some free tickets. The following day, not expecting anything, I called him and told him that I was “the english guy from Macy’s“. It turned out he had managed to bag us some free tickets and to pick them up at the box office before the show.

We headed into the city, parked and went to pick up the tickets. Lo and behold there were were two tickets for us, complete with passes to the aftershow party. Not only that, he had got us reserved seats at a table in the venue. We were stunned. I saw some other folks buying the tickets on the door and the cheapest ticket was $70. Wow x 2.

We got into the venue and sat down. A little later David walked over to say hi and we shook his hand and thanked him for the tickets. The show kicked off and we had a great time. Although, I was little surprised at one point when he come over and asked if I wanted to get up and play bass on a tune. I smiled and said that it would probably not be such a good idea. I am pretty sure that the Gipsy Kings are not familiar with Angel Of Death by Slayer.

Towards the end of the show we were chatting with him and a few other guests of his from The Four Seasons hotel (where the band was staying). We went backstage to chat some more.

What a strange and bizarre evening. David, if you somehow manage to stumble over this: thanks for your incredible generosity. And the moral of this story? Shop at Macy’s!!

Posted on December 30, 2008 - by jono

Making LoCo Teams Rock

A few weeks ago at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View we had many interesting discussions around Ubuntu LoCo Teams. We have so much potential with our LoCo community, and much of the discussions were based around improving our current roster of teams and how they work together.

Today we have 67 Approved and 112 New teams and these teams span the entire planet. LoCo teams participate in a range of activities including advocacy, support, organising events and get-togethers and much more. They are our eyes and ears. They are our troops on the ground helping to spread the word of Ubuntu. In my travels I met a number of LoCo Teams and the energy is always electrifying, whatever the size, location or experience.

In 2009 I want to help improve our LoCo Teams story. Although we have this incredible backbone of teams, we have some challenges to face in making the most of our teams. I see three primary challenges as the center-point of our focus:

• Teams List – today we have a big list of LoCo teams available on this page. It is essentially a wiki table with one team per row. This method of listing our teams is suboptimal: we really need to store our teams in a database and make use of the data in a web application. This opens up all kinds of opportunities when it comes to data mining, keeping a current perspective on the LoCo community and making it easier for new members to find their nearest team to join. At UDS we discussed this problem and the conclusion was to build a database and make it open enough to allow our community to build a number of mash-up applications to explore what we can do with the database. Rich Johnson (nixternal) has started on the database and I am going to schedule a call with him soon to discuss progress and to get this ball rolling.
• Education – we need to improve how great teams can better educate new teams. We have so much great experience, insight and best practise available in our community, and we need to figure out how to better channel it. An idea proposed at UDS was to have an Open Week style event in a number of concurrent languages. This is something I am keen for us to organise in this cycle. At UDS we had buy-in from the French, Romanian, German, Spanish and Italian teams, so there is some real potential here.
• Better Messaging – right now the primary avenue in which LoCo teams get in touch with each other is the loco-contacts list. I am keen for us to bring more focus to this list. It is an ideal platform in which we can all share experience and perspective and to help each other succeed. But messaging is not just about using a mailing list: it is about the wider picture of LoCo Teams. We need to share more stories, more experiences and more tips on making our respective teams rock and roll. This needs to happen on blogs, in articles, on YouTube and anywhere else we can attract eyeballs.

For us to achieve these goals we are going to need to work together and share our ideas and efforts to make progress. I am really keen to hear from existing LoCo leaders and members to hear about where you would like to see our LoCo Community move forward. Expect some follow up posts soon as some of this work kicks off.

Posted on December 30, 2008 - by jono

Website Updates

Today I flipped the switch on some changes I have made over the Christmas holiday to jonobacon.org. Hopefully these changes should make using the site much nicer.

A few notes:

• I have installed a new theme. I still have some small CSS tweaks to make here and there, so do let me know what you feel needs to be adjusted to make the site easier to read.
• The site now supports gravatars. Go and set up a gravatar so you can share your hotness with the world.
• You can now get email updates for posts by using the Feedburner link in the top right-hand corner of the page.
• The middle pane of the site will pull out the most recent longer articles and essays so they stick around a little longer on the front page.
• Search results are much nicer.
• I am now using more friendly permalinks.
• I will be refreshing some of the old content over the coming weeks when I can find some time.
• Threaded comment support is on the way and will be implemented soon.

Of course, there will be some bugs over the next few weeks. Do let me know if anything seems amiss. Thanks folks.

UPDATE: Threaded comments now work.