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twittering on 2009-01-11

personal

select short_story from life limit 7;

Robert tagged me, and I’ve been procrastinating on a ‘stuff I did in 2008’ post, and this seems more fun anyway. Here goes:

  1. I’ve never seen the Grateful Dead in concert, despite graduating from the University of Oregon. Yes, I attended before Jerry died.
  2. I started college as a Chemistry major, intending to switch my major to musical performance.
  3. I competed in a Junior Miss pageant in high school. I wore spandex and danced a synchronized routine to ‘Tusk’, by Fleetwood Mac. I played a violin solo. I lost.
  4. The last time I played the violin publicly was about five years ago for my friend Amy’s orchestra, essentially a chamber orchestra that was a several-month experiment in improvisation with many musicians from the Portland area. The project was a collection of songs she wrote about eight artists and performers that inspired her. The performance was also a release party for the book DIY in PDX.
  5. I once unwillingly spent the night in a Venice convent.
  6. I made another ‘I am not a douchebag‘ bag for the family Christmas party gift. I’ve made three, one of which I was actually paid (“commissioned” hah!) to make.
  7. In 2008, I managed to increase my houseplant count from 0 to 4. All are still living as of this blog post. My chicken count went from 3 to 1.

Tagged:

  1. Gabrielle Roth, because she rules
  2. Mark Wong – since he started the P5 series last week!
  3. Emilie Steele, because we didn’t get a chance to talk nearly enough last year at PgCon
  4. Magnus Hagander, because he should blog more and he hasn’t responded to Robert’s tag yet
  5. Andy Lester, because his book rocks, and lots of people are going to need it this year
  6. Nikolay Samokhvalov, because I hear such great things about PostgreSQL.ru and want to visit him in Moscow someday for a Bruce-Momjian-Style tour
  7. Josh Berkus, just for fun and because he is blogging more these days! 🙂

the rules:

  1. Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
  2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
  3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.
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twittering on 2009-01-05

community, conference, international, open source, pgcon, postgres, postgresql , , , , , , 1 Comment

What are you waiting for? Get your PgCon talks in now!


Yes, that’s me, with Tom Lane. You, too, might be able to get your picture with Tom!

Like Josh Berkus said yesterday:

As of today, you have 2 weeks left to submit talk proposals to PGCon.

You know you want to. PGCon is the international conference for PostgreSQL hackers, sysadmins, application developers, SQL geeks and other Smart People. Submit your talk! Be a Smart Person too!

PGCon will be happening May 21-22 in Ottawa, Canada, with tutorials on May 19 and 20. Some financial help is often available for speakers, but none is available for non-speakers. So submit, submit!

We particularly could use some talks on the new 8.4 features, really creative PostgreSQL applications, massive Postgres scaling, PostGIS, BioPostgres, and a few case studies. This means you.

I attended PgCon last year for the first time. Not only were the presentations top notch, but Dan Langille‘s hospitality set the groundwork for yet another fantastic community-building experience PostgreSQL community members experienced during the 2006 Anniversary summit in Toronto, again in 2007 at the first PgCon.

We had plenty of outstanding socializing and hacking opportunities. Last year’s conference started with a gathering of committers that was fodder for great pub and hallway track conversation all week. Great talks I saw included Andrew Sullivan’s Idle thoughts on PostgreSQL Project Management, Greg Sabino Mullane’s Bucardo talk about this multi-master replication tool, and Magnus Hagander’s walk through how search.postgresql.org was implemented.

Ottawa was beautiful last year, and I can’t wait to go back this May!