Rhonda's Blog

On Finding Words

Rhonda — Fri, 31 May 2013 12:38:00

There is still a lot of things going on inside me and turning, and I'd like to share two words that I grow attached to, one a fair amount longer now than the other, but both are terms that I seem to had lacking in my vocabulary which I tried to explain in a different way. After finding out about them, I noticed that both what I felt and believed were actual things that were not totally uncommon concepts, even though most people wouldn't know about them.

The first term that I stumbled upon years ago was the term of pansexuality. (Do not dare to read the German Wikipedia article. It's ridiculous wrong, insulting and shows that they don't understand the topic at all.) I always had issues to explain my intimate preference to others. Especially after they found out about me being female on the inside. Questions arose (if they understood that I'm open about these things when I post the poem publicly) along the lines of "what are you now: gay, lesbian, hetero—and if the latter, what does that mean?". My usual answer was that I fall in love with people, not with their bodies, and that things will eventually work out if meant to be. And thus even though I love my "Bi" shirt, it doesn't really describe properly how I swing, so to say.

The latter term I discovered just recently. A friend of mine with whom I chat every now and then told me about it, and when we met again last autumn, they wore a button of the Italian community for Polyamory (I so much prefer the Italian logo to the "widely used symbol", to be honest). It was an eye opening moment for me. I often mentioned to people that I felt like I have a big heart, being able to store multiple people in it. It always puzzled me that when I'm together with someone (and I always was faithful) why I should feel bad and especially keep it a secret when there is someone else who touches my heart, too. Society seems to see this already as a breach of trust, no matter whether it gets pursued or not, just the thought is enough. But it never changed anything with respect to the person I was together with, so what's the deal? Finding out about this term explained so much to me and made a lot of sense. It is about honesty and communication, which I see lagging in a lot of relationships these days...

So here you are, getting another inside view on me. And I'm sure that there will be again the one or the other person who considers to use this as ammunition against me, but you know, being open about it acts as a shield. It's not embarrassing for me, never was. And like always, I hope that I can help others feeling similar being lost for words or an understanding that it's not as weird as it might feel.

Enjoy!

/personal | permanent link | Comments: 9 |

Pentatonix

Rhonda — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:01:00

I know it's been ages since I last blogged anything at all. To some degree I had a down phase, but I hope to get out of it. It's nice to see that there are people out there who give me a prod every now and then, and don't let me drown. Thanks, most of you probably know that I mean exactly you, and in case you are uncertain, you probably are meant if you contact me every now and then.

Anyway, if you remember that I blogged about Lindsey Stirling last year and you started to follow her you might have already stumbled upon the next band I'd like to present. I'm speaking of Pentatonix. These five humans have terrific voices that they use in a very special way that is quite unique.

I don't want to delay the songs I want to present to you any longer, so here they are:

Somebody That I Used To Know (Gotye cover): The song in itself is already great, but this version definitely gives me goosebumps.
Thrift Shop (Macklemore & Ryan Lewis cover): Avi has the perfect bass voice, and I totally have to agree with the chorus, this is freaking awesome.
Carol of the Bells: I know it's not this time of the year, but the song shows another great facet of their work.

Like always, enjoy! And hopefully read me again more regularly again.

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Backports Integrated Into The Main Archive

Rhonda — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:40:00

Dear users and supporters of the backports service!

The Backports Team is pleased to announce the next important step on getting backports more integrated. People who are reading debian-infrastructure-announce will have seen that there was an archive maintenance last weekend: starting with wheezy-backports the packages will be accessible from the regular pool instead of a separate one, and all backports uploads will be processed through the regular upload queue (including those for squeeze-backports and squeeze-backports-sloppy).

For Users

What exactly does that mean for you? For users of wheezy, the sources.list entry will be different, a simple substitute of squeeze for wheezy won't work. The new format is:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main

So it is debian instead of debian-backports, and offered through the regular mirror network. Feel invited to check your regular mirror if it carries backports and pull from there.

For Contributers

What does it mean for contributing developers? Uploads for backports are no longer to be pushed to backports-master but to ftp.upload.debian.org, like any other regular package. Also, given that the packages are served from the same archive install there is no need to include the original tarball in the upload any longer because the archive knows it (Squeeze and beyond).

Also, given that the upload goes to the same upload queue, there is only one keyring used anymore, so no more pain with expired or replaced keys. We though still keep the rule of adding your UID to an ACL list (this also includes DM additions). This is mostly only to give us the chance to remind you that uploads to backports are directly available for installation onto stable systems and you thus should take special care there. We carefully tried to take over the old ACLs, in case you can't upload anymore, please tell us so we can look into the issue.

I've mentioned wheezy-backports (and squeeze-backports-sloppy) a few times here already, and you might wonder when it will be available. Technically, it is available from now on. Practically, while you could already upload to it, the set up of the buildd network is more painful than expected, so please allow the Buildd Team some days for setting them up.

The upload rules for wheezy-backports are the same: packages that are in the next suite are accepted. Given that Jessie isn't created yet, we want you to think about whether the package you want to upload will go into Jessie final, and that you are taking a closer look once Jessie is created and the package entered there about the upgradeability. For the time until the suite is available, you can see this as relaxed upload rule.

The same goes for squeeze-backports-sloppy: packages from two suites after Squeeze are acceptable, which turns it into the same relaxed rule as wheezy-backports above. Please also keep in mind that uploads to squeeze-backports-sloppy usually should be accompanied by uploads to wheezy-backports so people are able to upgrade from squeeze-backports-sloppy to wheezy with wheezy-backports.

Thanks

Finally, we want to thank the FTP-Master Team for their fine work on making this happen.

The documentation on backports-master has been updated, and in case of any doubt or question, feel free to ask them on either the debian-backports mailinglist, or in case of sensitive topics ask us directly.

Enjoy!
Rhonda for the Backports Team

/debian | permanent link | Comments: 3 |

BSP Essen November 2012, Report

Rhonda — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 09:24:00

So it happened: the Bug Squashing Party in Essen is done. And depending on your point of view at least I would call it a success.

We had in total fourteen participants. The number of release-critical bugreports touched and processed is not clear, but over 100 bugreports were looked at and either got comments added for clearification, maintainer pinged, unblock requests filed or already filed ones noted down, or NMUed. Given that we are in freeze since a while now and many easy bugreports already squashed by those who aim for a daily fix, I consider this impressive.

There is also the point that we managed to get some people involved that didn't consider themself techy enough to be of help. On the contrary, they were a great help on checking these bugreports with analyzing the discussions in some lengthy bugreports and upstream bug trackers, or trying to reproduce some issues. I can just hope that the weekend left an impression deep enough to keep them in the boat.

All in all, I'm quite pleased of the outcome, especially in the light of several other events catching the interest of potential participants which were going on at the same weekend. Thanks to all the people that stumbled by, and I am looking forward to maybe having another BSP at some point, but then I hope to not clash with so many other events. Thanks!

/debian | permanent link | Comments: 1 |

Lindsey Stirling

Rhonda — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:37:00

Sometimes one stumbles upon artists by accident and immediately falls in love with them. A link to a video from Lindsey Stirling was dropped in a chat I was paying attention to at that time, and it immediately touched me. She's got style, and she's got great videos.

Speaking of videos, here they are:

Electric Daisy Violin: This was the song that was dropped. And it touched me, especially her dressing style. Maybe her legs will also catch your attention like they did to me. :)
Crystallize: The subtitle Dubstep Violin of this video is what describes her style best. Great play.
Shadows: Another great song with terrific video.

I hope her plans to come to europe might work out soonish. Enjoy!

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