Posts published in “Community”
A while back, my globe trotting niece Niki Starks made the drive out to our place in Taylor. We spent most of the afternoon categorizing some of the old family pictures I had haphazardly thrown into a box. There were a lot of pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. Pictures of my great grandmother, a woman I barely remember from my childhood.
I remember, at that moment, thinking just how old she looked, and she was old…94 years old. I remember attending her funeral as a young boy. My family has the custom of open casket funerals. Me? I think that practice is grotesque, but that’s just me. I’d rather my last mental image of a person be one of laughing and joy. I remember looking down on my great grandmother’s corpse and thinking she looked better laying there dead than she did the last time I saw her alive.
And that’s the thing…
The things we remember and the way we remember them. The four hours that Niki and I spent at our dining room table was probably the most important four hours I’ll spend for the rest of my life.
Often, I think of myself as a 61 year old orphan. Silly really…thinking of yourself like that when you are in your 60s. What solidifies that in my mind is that fact that I am the only one left alive in my direct family.
Both my parents died from various cancers and heart/liver disease. That didn’t take a psychic to see coming, given they both smoked and drank like they were in training for an Olympic event. My kid brother died in a nasty head-on truck wreck at 3:44 in the morning less than a mile from his home. I’m fairly sure that’s the time he died, because that’s the time the cracked and bent face of his watch bore when it was given to me. My sister dropped from sight shortly after receiving her share of our brother’s estate. Addicted to heroin and crack cocaine, there’s little doubt why she cannot be found. Odds favored her dying in an alley somewhere or in a cheap motel room that one of her “friends” paid for. I am still scouring the Internet for her death certificate. My older half brother Bill, Niki’s dad…he died in the hospital from heart failure. He was my boyhood hero.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
It’s been one of those years, and with 2015 being the 13th year for the Southern California Linux Expo — hence SCALE 13x — you might expect that superstition would be rearing its ugly head.
I can say that, knock on wood, we have already had what I hope is going to be the only “black-cat-walking-under-the-ladder” glitch-of-the-show moment a couple of weeks ago when the idiot serving as the publicity chair — okay, that would be me — pulled the wrong list of speakers (the ones not chosen) to start doing speaker interviews with the Publicity Team. Thankfully, I found the error before any interviews were done, but it was a considerable amount of orchestrated work that was thrown out the window and redone with the right list.
As we get closer to the Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 13x for those of you keeping score at home — it bears mentioning that the largest community-run Linux/FOSS show in North America has grown to host a lot of other sub-events during the course of the four-day expo.
In years past, Ubuntu, Fedora, PostgreSQL and Chef held their own sessions at SCALE — Ubucon, Fedora Activity Day, PostgreSQL Days and Intro to Chef respectively — and they’ll be back this year. Highlighting the “event within an event” lineup at SCALE 13x are also a few others.
Most prominently, Puppet Labs is holding its Puppet Camp at SCALE 13x on Thursday, February 19. Puppet Camps are one-day, regional events held around the world for people who are currently using or interested in using Puppet. Attendees have the opportunity to talk to a diverse group of Puppet users, benefit from presentations delivered by prominent community members, share experiences, and discuss potential implementations of Puppet with their peers. There is a separate registration for this all-day event, and more information can be found at the link above.
Ken Is Back!
Years ago I learned something from my social psychology professor, but it took me a long time to grasp the concept, not to mention putting it to use in my life. I say I learned it. Mostly, however, I only remembered it. Understanding it was a whole new game. A game that lasted 31 years.
“Butcher, baker, candlestick maker, it doesn’t matter. Gaining your sense of self, derived from what you do professionally, will ultimately end badly for you. Without exception and without mercy.”
Wow…really? How do you not do that, when the prevailing questions asked upon meeting is often, “So hey there Ken, what do you do for a living?” The question is so pervasive that it seems to echo over and over throughout every day. “What do you do for a living…What do you do for a living?…What do you do for a living?” And convention dictates that the next 10-15 minutes of conversation gets intertwined around the answer.
What took me so long to understand is that I am not what I do. What I do only allows me to live well enough to be who I really am.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue