A few days ago techtarget published a short interview about the OSU Open Source Lab, where I worked while studying at OSU:
“Lance Albertson, architect and systems administrator at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, uses a sys admin staff of 18-21-year-old undergrads to manage servers for some high-profile, open-source projects (Linux Master Kernel, Linux Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, and Drupal to name a few). In this Q&A, Albertson talks about the challenges of using young sys admins and the lab’s plans to move from Cfengine to Puppet for systems management.”
I must say, the work I’ve seen student sys admins do at the OSL is outstanding, and I’ve met some of the sharpest people there I’ve ever worked with. Glad to hear they are still going strong.
If you are an American expat, or something along those lines, and are in the mood for some Christmas music, you might have already taken a look at “iTunes Radio”, and had a hard time to find any, because even the ones carrying Christmas in their name don’t quite cut it…
A good trick is to go for the Adult Contemporary section:
… and select a soft rock station, such as “Soft Rock from St. Louis”, which is what we listened to today. These stations have a tendency to switch to Christmas music during the season, and should serve all your Christmas music needs, even if there’s no way you can receive it on your local radio tuner.
While stumbling across the net, I found this, The New Yorker’s Thanksgiving cover from 2006:
The illustration feels a little sad, though I am not sure what I am sadder about: That they can watch football and I don’t Or that digital distractions take away from the traditional family gathering called Thanksgiving.
Over 600 people was way more than the previous (student) record:
The previous college record was set at the College of William and Mary in Richmond, Va., where 242 people participated in the dance routine that student Kevin Dua organized. Dua’s group beat the previous record of 147 people in an event at a British secondary school.
Here is the official footage of the event:
Of course, this has not been the first attempt to spectacularly perform this music video. Here’s another video of a group of prisoners doing the same thing:
Update: As a commenter points out, the OSU admissions blog has blogged the whole thing too, and provided some HD-quality video of the event, which I have replaced the old video with.
This is — hands-down — the best summary I have seen so far on the US health care dilemma:
I must say, even though our German health care system is f-ed up in many ways, and even though it is a “fat pig” (like the example in the video) as well, it is still a million times better than the US’s. I don’t know why the US don’t finally get that straight: in this respect, they are the laughing-stock of the countries…
Today, Mozilla Corporation moved into new headquarters, across town, in Mountain View, California. The new place, which I have only seen as a building site so far, is bound to be awesome, judging by the photos that are slowly showing up on the web.
Google Calendar has a new feature that many international Mozillians may like: It can now display more than one time zone at a time. In my case, lining up the Central European and Pacific time zones next to each other comes in quite handy:
Of course, when entering a new event, it does not seem to allow selecting the time zone this refers to quite yet, let’s hope that’ll be fixed in a future iteration.
Or that digital distractions take away from the traditional family gathering called Thanksgiving.
