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I don’t usually blog about personal matters, but a close friend of the family, a civil rights lawyer named Ashley, has been diagnosed with a fairly aggressive form of inoperable cancer. This is especially painful since she successfully fought off ovarian cancer not quite a year ago. I’m out of the country right now so that’s about as much detail as I know, which is handy since that’s about as much detail as I feel comfortable sharing.

If you find it appropriate to pray, please do so. If there’s some other personal practice that you do when a wonderful family falls on hard times, please do that. I’ve known Ashley since I was 12, and she’s consistently been a simultaneously well-grounded and inspirational voice helping me do what I needed a little nudge to take on. She’s more brave and brazen than anyone I know, and I hope you’ll take a moment to ask yourself what awesome things you’ll do with your life, because without Ashley at least 20 of us are going to have to step it up. She’s been working to make the world a better place and she’s been having an awesome time doing it.

If you’ll excuse me I think I’m going to go enjoy the hell out of my vacation, since that’s what she told me to do.

I got un-lazy and built wordpress 2.5.1-5 from the Intrepid sources on a Hardy Heron system for Hardy target install. The package is here. If you’re familiar with pbuilder and have already used it to build packages from universe/multiverse, then you’ll have just a few easy steps to build this package yourself:

dget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/wordpress/2.5.1-5ubuntu1/+files/wordpress_2.5.1-5ubuntu1.dsc # you may get a key warning
sudo pbuilder --update
sudo pbuilder --build wordpress_2.5.1-5ubuntu1.dsc

via.

Just got this from gdk:

The engineers at OLPC are busy building an educational experience for the
kids of the world.  They are basing their excellent work on Fedora.

Their time is stretched perilously thin.  Every hour an overworked OLPC
engineer spends doing Fedora work is an hour they could be spending doing
something else.  We in the Fedora community can therefore have a huge,
direct, and immediate impact on the success of the OLPC project.

Thus, I am proud to announce the formation of the Fedora OLPC Special
Interest Group.  Our mission: to provide the OLPC project with a strong,
sustainable, scalable, community-driven base platform for innovation.

Immediate Goals:

1. To identify and take responsible ownership of as many OLPC base
packages as possible.

2. To maintain an excellent Sugar environment for Fedora, including a
dedicated Sugar spin.

3. To identify useful opportunities for collaboration (infrastructure,
localization, etc.)

We should convene our first meeting as soon as possible.  If you are
interested in participating, please join the Fedora OLPC mailing list here
and introduce yourself:

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-olpc-list

Gonna have to sign up. You should, too!

Did anybody else notice the strong anti-wiretapping note that Morgan Freeman’s character hits in Dark Knight? I thought it was an interesting moment in a vigilante movie. I won’t spoil the scene for those of you who haven’t seen the movie yet, but Freeman’s character basically says he won’t stay as long as …. stuff … is being done. I’d love to chat with those of you who have seen the movie about this.

In case you missed it, IndyMac got taken over by the FDIC yesterday, and the bank’s failure will likely cost taxpayers between $4B and $8B. Yes, B as in Billion. Nation of whiners indeed.

We had a brown bag lunch where we talked about who we are and why we’re interested in Open Stuff. Google videos (approx 30 min each):

1st half:

2nd half (after replacing batteries ;):

Also see the wikipage Paul started on his wiki.

This sort of stunt is why I’ll still vote for Obama in November despite his disappointing FISA vote.

A 61-year-old woman, Carol Kreck, holding a sign that simply said “McCain=Bush” in large letters was standing in line to get into a McCain “town hall meeting” event. The line was outside the meeting space, in a plaza that is not technically city property but is largely funded by the public. In the video Ms. Kreck has been made to understand (and the local police officer acknowledges) that she is on city property. The woman was told that she could leave, lose the sign, or be arrested. After being told this several times and arguing that she should be allowed to stay and hold her sign, she was given a citation (ticket) and a court date by a local police officer. She was then escorted off the premises by four (!?) police officers. Here’s a youtube video about the ordeal:

If you want to help her pay her legal bills, these people are helping her out.