I will be leaving Red Hat shortly for a new opportunity. In my opinion, Red Hat is at the forefront of open source and I think they are one of the best open source companies to work for. I enjoyed my time there working with the Eclipse and Fedora communities (I truly respect their open source mission). However, it’s time for me to seek new challenges and stretch myself in greater ways. I’m going to @JoinTheFlock by taking a position to kick-start and manage Twitter’s open source efforts.
Twitter uses a lot of open source code, from Ruby to Scala to many other projects from places like Apache. On top of that, Twitter contributes a bit to open source, checkout there GitHub page for some of Twitter’s work. I’m looking forward to representing Twitter, spreading the open source love and shaping open source policies with Twitter’s engineers and legal team. I have a lot of ideas of what Twitter could do in the open source arena and look forward to sharing those with you in the future.
How will this impact my involvement with the eclipse.org community? Not that much, I plan to remain involved with the eclipse.org community and even other open source communities. I find eclipse.org to be one of the most professional open source communities, I like the friction caused between commercial and open source interests, we are better because of it. Anyways, I look forward to shipping the Eclipse Indigo release with everyone next week and definitely the Juno release next year.
I’ll have more to say soon, if you’re interested you can follow me on Twitter as @caniszczyk.
In the past, I have blogged about travel tips (e.g., airline meals) so I figure I would continue the tradition but focusing on last minute hotels (although you can do this on a non-last minute basis). It’s not that I’m very frugal, I’m just not a fan of the price gouging that happens in the hotel industry. You may find this useful if you’re under tight travel budgets or there are times when a conference is in town and hotels raise their prices significantly.
This tip exploits mainly Hotwire and Priceline and focuses on North America (although I’ve had success with Hotwire in Europe). I’ll show you an example of how it works. For example, I need a hotel in Houston next weekend for a graudation party. I do a quick search on Hotwire (this would also work on Expedia’s Unpublished Last Minute Deals) and it shows me a bunch of options…
The downside is you don’t see the actual hotel you’ll stay at, but you do get access to some reviews and the star level. Here’s where the magic happens. I cross reference these examples with the forums from BetterBidding…
If I match up the star level and amenities, I can see that the second hotel listed in the Houston Galleria is going to be the Omni. From my experience, I’m almost always able to figure out the hotel from the star level amenities. From the twenty or so times that I have done this, only once it hasn’t come up with the hotel that I expected (it was another four star hotel so it was fine). If you prefer to use a bidding service like Priceline, you can check the BetterBidding forums on recent successful bids to get a good idea on what you should bid for…
In summary, Hotwire and Priceline in combination with BetterBidding work great if you need a reasonably price last minute hotel. The only downside you face is that you won’t earn loyalty points for your stay with the hotel. Other than that, I hope people find this useful.
This morning I had the pleasure to run the Silicon Labs Marathon relay in Austin, TX.
I had the second leg which was a 10K and finished it in about 41 minutes which isn’t that bad for me. It was also delightful to run as a ringer on the Austin Runners Club women’s team. Overall, I felt good and think I’ll be good for the Chicago marathon in a couple weeks… my right ankle showed no sign of pain!
Last weekend, I ran The Shoe (part of the Captn’ Karls trail series). The course was pretty challenging given the fact that my ankle isn’t 100 percent still and there were rocks everywhere…
And then it got dark which made it a bit worst when it comes to detecting rocks… so of course I managed to roll my bad ankle again…
I ended up finishing in roughly 3 hours and 20 minutes… which I’ll take given the course…
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to run in the Zilker Relays with a friend.
We went for two legs each as we had some trouble forming a last minute team.
We ended up finishing in 1:07:03 which isn’t that bad… I ran about 15:30 on average… meh…
This year I had the opportunity to participate in the Hood to Coast 2010 relay, that starts in beautiful Mt. Hood and ends at the beach in Seaside, Oregon.
I’m always a fan of doing relay races so I was ready to conquer the 197 miles. I started out with Leg 5 which wasn’t that bad…
…besides the hill climb in the end… but I ended up running it in 43:00 which isn’t that bad. After that, Leg 17 was up which was nice and flat 5.69 miles… it was a night run and I cruised in at 38:46 feeling pretty good.
A bit sore, but still good. My last leg was 29 and it was 6.11 miles full of terrible…
… the first 3.5 miles were essentially up hill with a nice steep grade climb to finish things off. After that, the downhill was probably the most enjoyable running I had the whole relay… I felt like I was floating. On average, I ran about a 7 minute mile pace the whole relay which isn’t bad given the status of my injured ankle. I think once my ankle recovers I’ll be back to my 6 minute mile pace. In the end, my team ended up finishing in 26 hours and 11 minutes (faster than last year!) which put is at 181th out of 1023 teams and in the 54th Open Men’s division.
‘Til next year where sub 26 hours should be in our future!
Last weekend, I experienced Capt’n Karls The Falls in beautiful Pedernales Falls State Park.
The best way I can describe the course is that it was freakn’ hot outside… it was about 105F during the day and cooled down a bit in the evening… but it was definitely toasty. I also sprained my ankle pretty bad about half way through the course which wasn’t that fun… this is me smiling just about before it got dark and my ankle slipped on some rocks…
I initially planned to do the full 60km but settled for 30km after spraining my ankle and due to the heat. I finished in about 3:25 which is slow for me… I normally would have finished under 3 hours but hey, you don’t always have your best days. This week, I’m looking to heal up and get ready for next weekend’s XTerra half marathon trail race!
Last weekend I head the pleasure of running the San Diego Rock n’ Roll Half Marathon with some buddies. The weather was gorgeous, the 6:15am half marathon start time, not so much.
I believe there were about 40,000 runners doing the race. It’s always nice to know when you start in corral 1 and turn around and just see a wave of people behind you (I think there were about 40 corrals total).
I somehow managed to have a great run given the little training I’ve been doing as of late. I think my results mostly have to do with me doing CrossFit and heat acclimatization runs during the hottest part of the day in Austin. Anyways, I managed to cross the finish line at Sea World in 1:28:05 which is a new half marathon PR for me! When I first started the race, I was chilling with the 1:30 pace group but after a few miles, I felt pretty good and picked up my pace. The course was mostly flat with some hills and some surprising highway running! My results ended up putting me 65th out of 13561 runners overall and 11th out of 601 runners in my age group. My splits were as follows…
5K: 20:54
6.3M: 42:35
11M: 1:16:07
I’m looking at doing sub 1:25 next, it should be easily reachable if I start doing more track workouts. On a side note, I got to spend some time in La Jolla, CA after the race which was nice. There’s nothing like a little post-race brunching and noshing in La Jolla. On top of that, it managed to bring back some great and interesting memories from last year. But alas, life’s too short for regrets, right?
Last weekend, I had an opportunity with some friends to hit up San Diego for a mancation which included brewery tours and running a half marathon. The genesis of the trip was when a lot of us realized our summer was going to be busy as hell so we better get a quick vacation in before things get hellish again. To have a proper mancation, you need to have an attention grabbing colored Mustang.
The first stop on our brewery tour was Green Flash Brewing.
I’ll have to say, this is one of the most pleasant and unpretentious breweries I’ve ever been to. It also has one of my favorite beers, Le Freak, which is a Belgian Style IPA. All you have to imagine is a ménage à trois between an American IPA, a Belgian Trippel and some extra hops… so delicious. After spending $6 for 10 or so generously poured 2oz samples of all their beers, we were ready to move on. The next stop on the brewery tour was Stone Brewing which I almost confused for a winery given how nice it was. On top of that, the restaurant inside the brewery is top notch.
I’m a fan of Stone’s Ruination IPA and their selection of beers on draft was impressive… I mean they had Piny the Elder on draft which made me a bit jealous and salivate…
After awhile, we decided to stop the brewery tour a bit short because the lack of a designated driver and the desire to run a half marathon the next morning at 6:15am. So the obvious next choice was to stop at Trader Joes (since we don’t have one in Austin) and shamelessly fill up on chocolate…
In the end, I always enjoy my time in the San Diego area.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to cycle the Real Ale Ride 2010 with friends.
The ride takes place in beautiful Blanco, TX which makes for picture perfect Texas hill country cycling. What I did forget about Blanco is that the terrain is pretty hilly. There were several times throughout the ride where you saw signs about steep grade ahead… they weren’t lying. In the end, we went for the 65 mile route and finished in under 4 hours.
My personal highlight of the race was devouring a delicious ice cream cookie by KoolKones…
So good! I hope these cookies appear at other races in Austin!
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