Search Results: "lalo"

26 July 2016

Rhonda D'Vine: Debian LGBTIQA+

I have a long overdue blog entry about what happened in recent times. People that follow my tweets did catch some things. Most noteworthy there was the Trans*Inter*Congress in Munich at the start of May. It was an absolute blast. I met so many nice and great people, talked and experienced so many great things there that I'm still having a great motivational push from it every time I think back. It was also the time when I realized that I in fact do have body dysphoria even though I thought I'm fine with my body in general: Being tall is a huge issue for me. Realizing that I have a huge issue (yes, pun intended) with my length was quite relieving, even though it doesn't make it go away. It's something that makes passing and transitioning for me harder. I'm well aware that there are tall women, and that there are dedicated shops for lengthy women, but that's not the only thing that I have trouble with. What bothers me most is what people read into tall people: that they are always someone they can lean on for comfort, that tall people are always considered to be self confident and standing up for themselves (another pun, I know ... my bad). And while I'm fine with people coming to me for leaning on to, I rarely get the chance to do so myself. And people don't even consider it. When I was there in Munich, talking with another great (... pun?) trans woman who was as tall as me I finally had the possibility to just rest my head on her shoulder and finally feel the comfort I need just as much as everyone else out there, too. Probably that's also the reason why I'm so touchy and do go Free Hugging as often as possible. But being tall also means that you are usually only the big spoon when cuddling up. Having a small mental breakdown because of realizing that didn't change the feeling directly but definitely helped with looking for what I could change to fix that for myself. Then, at the end of may, the movie FtWTF - female to what the fuck came to cinema. It's a documentary about six people who got assigned female at birth. And it's absolutely charming, and has great food for thoughts in it. If you ever get the chance to watch it you definitely should. And then came debconf16 in Capetown. The flight to there was canceled and we had to get rebooked. The first offer was to go through Dubai, and gladly a colleague did point out to the person behind the desk that that wouldn't be safe for myself and thus out of scope. In the end we managed to get to Capetown quite nice, and even though it was winter when the sun was shining it was quite nice. Besides the cold nights that is. Or being stuck on the way up to table mountain because a colleague had cramps in his lags and we had to call mountain rescue. Gladly the night was clear, and when the mountain rescue finally got us to top and it was night already we had one of the nicest views from up there most people probably never will experience. And then ... I got invited to a trans meetup in Capetown. I was both excited and nervous about it, what to expect there. But it was simply great. The group there was simply outstandingly great. The host gave update information on progress on clinical support within south Africa, from what I took with me is that there is only one clinic there for SRS which manages only two people a year which is simply ... yuck. Guess you can guess how many years (yes, decades) the waiting line is ... I was blown away though by the diversity of the group, on so many levels, most notably on the age spectrum. It was a charm to meet you all there! If you ever stop by in Capetown and you are part of the LGBTIQ community, make sure you get in contact with the Triangle Project. But, about the real reason to write this entry: I was approached at Debconf by at least two people who asked me what I thought about creating an LGBTIQA+ group within Debian, and if I'd like to push for that. Actually I think it would be a good idea to have some sort of exchange between people on the queer spectrum (and I hope I don't offend anyone with just saying queer for LGBTIQA+ people). Given that I'm quite outspoken people approach me every now and then so I'm aware that there is a fair amount of people that would fall into that category. On the other hand some of them wouldn't want to have it publicly known because it shouldn't matter and isn't really the business of others. So I'm uncertain. If we follow that path I guess something that is closed or at least offers the possibility to have a closed communication would be needed to not out someone by just joining in the discussion. It's was easier with Debian Women where it was (somewhat) clear that male participants are allies supporting the cause and not considered being women themselves, but often enough (mostly cis hetero male) people are afraid to join a dedicated LGBTIQA+ group because they have the fear of having their identity judged. These things should be considered before creating such a place so that people can feel comfortable when joining and know what to expect beforehand. For the time being I created #debian-diversity on irc.debian.org to discuss how to move forward. Please bear in mind that even the channel name is up for discussion. Acronyms might not be the way to go in my opinion, just read back up the discussion that lead to the Diversity Statement of Debian where the original approach was to start listing groups for inclusiveness but it was quickly clear that it can get outdated too easily. I am willing to be part of that effort, but right now I have some personal things to deal which eat up a fair amount of my time. My kid starts school in September (yes, it's that long already, time flies ...). And it looks like I'll have to move a second time in the near future: I'll have to leave my current flat by the end of the year and the Que[e]rbau I'm moving into won't be ready by that time to host me yet ... F*ck. :(

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21 August 2015

Rhonda D'Vine: DebConf15

I tried to start to write this blog entry like I usually do: Type along what goes through my mind and see where I'm heading. This won't work out right now for various reasons, mostly because there is so much going on that I don't have the time to finish that in a reasonable time and I want to publish this today still. So please excuse me for being way more brief than I usually am, and hopefully I'll find the time to expand some things when asked or come back to that later. Part of the reason of me being short on time is different stuff going on in my private life which requires additional attention. A small part of this is also something that I hinted in a former blog entry: I switched my job in June. I really was looking forward to this. I made them aware of what the name Rhonda means to me and it's definitely extremely nice to be addressed with female pronouns at work. And also I'm back in a system administration job which means there is an interest overlap with my work on Debian, so a win-win situation on sooo many levels! I'm at DebConf15 since almost two weeks now. On my way here I was complimented on my outfit by a security guard at the Vienna airport which surprised me but definitely made my day. I was wearing one of these baggy hippie pants (which was sent to me by a fine lady I met at MiniDebConf Bucharest) but pulled up the leg parts to the knees so it could be perceived as a skirt instead. Since I came here I was pretty busy with taking care of DCschedule bot adjustments (like, changing topic and twittering from @DebConf at the start of the talks), helping out with the video team when I noticed there was a lack of people (which is a hint for that you might want to help with the video team in the future too, it's important for remote people but also for yourself because you can't attend multiple sessions at the same time). And I have to repeat myself, this is the place I feel home amongst my extended family, even though I it still is sometimes for me to get to speak up in certain groups. I though believe it's more an issue of certain individuals taking up a lot of space in discussions without giving (more shy) people in the round the space to also join in. I guess it might be the time that we need a session on dominant talking patterns for next year and how to work against them. I absolutely enjoyed such a session during last year's FemCamp in Vienna which set the tone for the rest of the conference, and it was simply great. And then there was the DebConf Poetry Night. I'm kinda disappointed with the outcome this year. It wasn't able to attract as much people anticipated, which I to some degree account to me not making people aware of it well enough, overlapping with a really great band playing at the same time in competition, and even though the place where we did it sounded like a good idea at first, it didn't had enough light for someone to read something from a book (but that was solved through smartphone lights). I know that most people did enjoy it, so it was good to do it, but I'm still a fair bit disappointed with the outcome and will try to work on improving on that grounds for next year. :) With all this going on there unfortunately wasn't as much time as I would have liked to spend with people I haven't seen for a long time, or new people I haven't met yet. Given that this year's DebConf had an height in attendees (526 being here at certain times during the two weeks, and just today someone new arrived too, so that doesn't even have to be the final number) it makes it a bit painful to have picked up so many tasks and thus lost some chances to socialize as much as I would have liked to. So, if you are still here and have the feeling we should have talked more, please look for me. As Bdale pointed out correctly in the New to DebConf BoF (paraphrased): When you see us DebConf old timers speaking to someone else and you feel like you don't want to disturb, please do disturb and speak to us. I always enjoyed to get to know new people. This for me always is one of the important aspects of DebConf. Also, I am very very happy to have received feedback from different people about both my tweets and my blog, thank you a lot of that. It is really motivating to keep going. So, lets enjoy the last few hours of DebConf! Another last side notice: While my old name in the Debian LDAP did manage to find some wrongly displayed names in the DebConf website, like for speakers, or volunteers, it was clear to me that having it exposed through SSO.debian.org isn't really something I appreciate. So I took the chance and spoke to Luca from the DSA team right here today, and ... got it fixed. I love it! Next step is getting my gpg key exchanged, RT ticket is coming up. :)

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19 April 2009

Andreas Metzler: snowboarding season 08/09

Due to the later date of easter this year we had a rather long season this year. I started snowboarding on 2008-12-06 and stopped today 2009-04-19. Following up on previous entries here is the balance sheet:
2005/062006/072007/082008/09
number of (partial) days25172937
Dam ls1010510
Diedamskopf1542423
Warth/Schr cken0304
total meters of altitude12463474096219936226774
highscore10247m8321m12108m11272m
# of runs309189503551
In the second half of the season we actually had a lot of snow, up two 130 cm down at 800m above sealevel. Complete snow cover lasted from December until mid of April. Riding was good, I did not have any major injury, my skills did not increase though. The addition of a snowboard, a SG Speed 173 to my quiver worked out well. Loads of fun and less danger in slushy conditions (nose-in) compared to the shorter slalom board. Now the waiting starts. ;-)

11 December 2008

Andrew Pollock: [tech] My SSH Tip Of The Day

There seems to be a bit of a meme here... I have a set of computers that I frequently reinstall for testing purposes. The "zomg! The host key has changed!" gets very tiresome very quickly.
Host reinstallalot
        UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
        StrictHostKeyChecking no

13 January 2008

Christian Perrier: [sports] Lauberhorn

Russisprung, Hundschopf, Minsch-Kante, Canadian Corner, Kernen-S, Wasserstation, Hanneggschuss, Silberhornsprung, sterreicherloch, Ziel-S. If that rings a bell, you know what I'm talking about. Today was *the* ski downhill race of the season, namely Lauberhorn in Wengen, Switzerland. The longest (2'30") and fastest (sometimes up to 160km/h) downhill races of the season. Wengen's scenery is among my favourite ones, with the Eigerwand, M nch and Jungfraujoch dominating the entire race (the image of racers in the S curve before the Hundshopf jump, with Eiger, M nch and Jungfrau at the back is usually the image of the year when it comes at ski competitions. And, this year again, the sun was brilliantly shining over Wengen so we spent a great time watching this (on TV...going there to see it live is one of my dreams). And, for this non standard downhill race, we again had a non standard winner with Mr Bode Miller, winning it for the second time in a row. Next week is the Hahnenkamm downhill in Kitzb hel, the ski Mekkah of Austria, on the Streif. Also coming, the Schladming night slalom, Chamonix downhill, Val d'Is re downhill.....January is always busy for those who enjoy competition ski. (and, as I do not only watch sports on TV, I also ran my second longest distance today, with 19.5km in just 2 hours. Yay)

5 April 2007

Christian Perrier: Proyecto Gotan

Yesterday night, Elisabeth planned a surprise for me (birthday time) and had tickets for the concert of Gotan Project at Le Grand Rex, Paris. It was indeed the fFirst time I ever went in that concert hall, which is indeed a huge old-style movie theater with comfortable seats, room for legs, nice art-deco decoration. Great after a normal work day..:-) The music of Gotan Project is a nice and elegant mix of electronic music and argentinian tango influence, featuring French, Swiss, Argentinian and Franco-Argentinian artists. Something I enjoy since it was started by Philippe Cohen-Solal a few years ago. The "band" made it well for a music that is mostly a studio music. Ten arsists on stage and the proeminent and warn voice of Cristina Villalonga. The artists were "home" mostly as the band born very close to the Grands Boulevards and, therefore, the atmosphere was friendly, with artists clearly being happy to be there. And, as a surprise, the closure featured Saian Supa Crew as guest artists for a great mix of French rap and the GP electrotango. Overall amazing experience and I hope this won't be the one and only concert we attend for 2007. After all, Peter Gabriel should be touring over Europe and I always try not missing his concerts since 1977. For those interested, the Lunatico tour dates for Gotan Project are available here.

19 May 2006

Sam Hocevar: Best dinner ever!

Holy crap, thanks to the great Tlaloc, eighth ruler of the days, ninth lord of the nights, almighty god of the rain and the lightning, supreme mariachi soaker, we had the best Debconf dinner ever. They even had my favourite Mexican dish.