PICC '12 planning committee needs YOU!
Interested in helping make PICC '12 happen?
The committee is the most fun group of people I've planned a conference with. If you live within 500 miles of New Brunswick, NJ we'd love for you to help out.
Commitment is about an hour a week plus a short phone conference call every other Monday at 8pm.
Here's some typical volunteer tasks: (we'll ask you to pick one)
- Forward our mailings to user groups' mailing lists (The hard part is making sure it actually went out!)
- Someone to maintain our Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter presences.
- Invent new ways to get the word out about the conference.
- Take meeting minutes so the chair can focus on running the meetings.
- Email famous people (or semi-famous computer geeks) and ask them to submit talk proposals.
- Pick a potential sponsor, reach out to them about being a sponsor.
- Website updates (we have a website, we just need occasional edits)
- Coordinate the people reaching out to sponsors.
- Design flyers, posters, etc. (Photoshop or The Gimp experience?)
- Sysadmin-like things like website account management.
As you can see, none of these tasks are difficult but it takes a lot of people all doing a little bit to make a conference. (Kind of like how a bit open source project works)
I like working on PICC because of all the people I meet. That's what makes it fun.
The Jan 16 meeting is our "Kick off" for the new year. It's a really good time to get involved.
Interested? If you are, send email to volunteer@picconf.org
Thanks! Tom
http://www.picconf.org/
LOPSA PICC 2012 Call For Participation
Call for Participation:
LOPSA-NJ Professional IT Community Conference 2012
This year's Theme:
"System Administration: Scaling, Security, and Saving Money"
PICC '12: 3rd Annual Professional IT Community Conference
May 11- 12, 2012 New Brunswick, NJ Hyatt Regency New Brunswick
The organizers of the LOPSA-NJ Professional IT Community Conference (PICC) invite you to submit proposals for papers and talks to be presented at PICC '12.
PICC12 is a gathering of professionals from the diverse IT (computer and network administration) community in New Jersey to learn, share ideas, and network. The conference includes invited speakers and keynotes, training by top-notch experts that is relevant, useful, and recession-friendly; plus an "unconference" track where attendees propose and host their own topics during the event. We expect attendance of 100 to 150 IT professionals from mid to large sized companies and academia from New Jersey/New York/Pennsylvania. We go by many titles but everyone is invited: system administrators, network administrators, network engineers, Windows, Linux, Unix, DBAs, etc
Presentation Topics
We strongly welcome topics on best practices, new developments in systems administration, and cutting edge techniques to better manage Linux, Unix, or Windows hosts and environments.
Papers should be of a technical nature and speakers should assume that members of the audience have at least a few years' experience in general IT, Linux/Unix, and/or Windows administration. The audience will primarily hail from businesses and academic institutions in the New Jersey/New York/Pennsylvania area.
Topics may include (but are not limited to):
- System Administration
- Backup
- Security
- Troubleshooting
- Buying
- Decision Making
- Virtualization
- Cloud computing
- Enterprise Monitoring and Management
- Identity Management
- Web and Email Management
- Spam and Virus Filtering
- Networking
- Wikis
- Clustering and High Availability
- Log Management
- VoIP
- Ticketing systems
- Bootstrapping and automated installation
- Configuration Management and packaging
Topics explicitly NOT requested:
- Sales presentations
- Vendor product demonstrations
- Proposals or vaporware
Here are some topics from our previous two conferences and some ideas for new talks:
- Internal Documentation for System Administrators.
- The Path to Senior SysAdmin
- A senior system administrator describes the 'lessons learned' from converting from one email system to another.
- Someone with recent experience in particular technology (cloud computing, backups, Windows 7, etc.) presents "10 things I wish I knew before I started with [name of product]"
- A Windows engineer describes how they manage their fleet of of desktops/laptops.
Presentation Format
We are actively seeking proposals for presentations at PICC'12. We have openings for:
- Papers: 5-10 page paper, published electronically to attendees at the conference, and publicly after the conference. Presentation at conference will be 30 minutes including Q&A.
- Talks: 20 minute presentation + 10 minute Q&A.
- Posters: One physical poster of a topic or work in progress, to be discussed with conference goers during a specified poster session
- Panels: 45-minute panel discussion
Submit your Presentation
If your presentation is selected you will get a complimentary registration for Saturday May 12. If you want to attend the training on Friday or Saturday you will only pay the difference for the classes. Submissions and questions should be sent to: submissions@picconf.org
Dates and Deadlines
To encourage early submissions, priority (both for inclusion and scheduling) will be given to presentations submitted before the 1st of March.
- January 30, 2012 - Deadline for submissions
- February 14, 2012 - Final program confirmation
- May 11, 2012- Start of conference
Contact and Questions
Please see our website at http://www.picconf.org/ for more information on PICC '12 and presenting at this great event.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email the organizers at: submissions@picconf.org
Tom @ LOPSA-NYC, 7pm, June 14, 2011 speaking about The Ganeti Project
I'll be speaking at LOPSA-NYC Tuesday, June 14, 7pm. Please pre-register to speed your way through security.
Come here me speak about the Ganeti open source project. Think virtualization clusters have to cost big bucks? Think virtualization isn't useful for a small site? Come and find out why a person that usually talks about Time Management thinks virtualization is his new favorite time management trick.
Here is the official announcement.
- Topic: Ganeti: Open source virtualization (like VMWare ESX + VMotion but open source)
- Speaker: Tom Limoncelli, Google, Inc
When: Tuesday, June 14, 7pm - 9:30pm
Description: Ganeti is a cluster virtual server management software tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies such as Xen or KVM and other Open Source software. Ganeti takes care of disk creation, migration, OS installation, shutdown, startup, and can be used to preemptively move a virtual machine off a physical machine that is starting to get sick. It doesn't require a big expensive SAN, complicated networking, or a lot of money. The project is used around the world by many organizations; it is sponsored by Google and hosted at http://code.google.com/p/ganeti
Registration: http://lopsanyc.eventbrite.com/
Please make sure to register on the page to avoid any issues with DE Shaw security and entering the building.
Tonight at LOPSA-NYC! Ganeti open source virtualization
As previously mentioned, I'll be the speaker at LOPSA-NYC.
Come here me speak about the Ganeti open source project. Think virtualization clusters have to cost big bucks? Think virtualization isn't useful for a small site? Come and find out why a person that usually talks about Time Management thinks virtualization is his new favorite time management trick.
Hope to see you there!
(Please pre-register so you can get through security quickly.)
My thoughts on the LOPSA Board election
LOPSA board elections are upon us. The candidate statements are being published and before I read any of them I want to make this statement of my own:*
It is my experience with volunteer organizations that people that have achieved tangible results are more likely to produce more tangible results. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Everyone has ideas. They pour in from everywhere. Don't worry about electing "idea people"; a group of LOPSA's size only needs 1-2 "vision" people but a lot of "do'ers". Elect people that have a track record of getting things done.
Years ago when I was in college there was a student government election. At the "debate night" the two candidates for president had an interesting exchange. The first candidate listed his vast experience: his list of accomplishments was a list of committees he had served on. The other candidate asked him, "But what have you DONE? What on this campus can you point at and say, 'I did that'? You know how there weren't soda machines in the dorm buildings until last year? That was me. I went door to door in the administration building, got everyone to approve it, helped pick a vendor, and so on. When I walk around campus I can point to those machines and say, 'I did that.' What can you point to?" The other candidate had nothing to point to except the chair he had filled in all those various committee meetings. The soda machine guy won the election. He was the best damn student government president we had in years.
This is not to say that idea people aren't friendly, wonderful people. I'm just saying that as a new-ish organization LOPSA kind of knows what needs to be done: it's the "doing" that is important.
I'm not endorsing anyone. I'm not telling you who to vote for. I'm simply saying that this is my formula. You can consider it open source. You can use it, modify it or even ignore it. Just remember that it was pretty damn nice to have soda machines finally in the dorm buildings.
Tom Limoncelli
- Damn, I read one... kind of by mistake. ..but it won't change my vote.
Sysadmin of the Year 2006: Michael Beck
Michael Beck of Emerging Technologies Group Wins Top Honor as One of IT's Unsung Heroes; Sean Thomas of True Prism Technologies Wins First Prize.
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Splunk, creators of the search engine for logs and IT data, in conjunction with SourceForge.net, Digg, NaSPA (the Network and Systems Professionals Association), LOPSA (the League of Professional System Administrators), USENIX/SAGE, and Bawls Guarana, today announced that Michael Beck of Emerging Technology Group has won the grand prize 2006 Sysadmin of the Year (SAOTY) contest. He was chosen out of nearly five thousand nominations. Michael has been awarded a $2,500 Splunk professional license, a lifetime membership to NaSPA and a trip to Washington, D.C. to attend the LISA Conference, December 3-7, 2006. Michael will be honored with a presentation at LISA on December 6.
Happy Birthday, LOPSA!
Happy Birthday, LOPSA!
You are one year old and look how far you've come! Like most births you were born amid a lot of shouting and confusion, but look how far you've grown! You've formed the organization, build a web site, and had your first regional conference. Congrats! Now you are truly defining yourself, growing up, and becoming your own person.
For those of you that don't know, LOPSA is the League of Professional System Administrators. The goal is to become like the AMA is to doctors, or the APA is to shrinks. That is, work on building the professionalism of our community. If you aren't a member, I highly recommend that you join. Heck, it's free to just register.
Two weeks ago I attended the first LOPSA regional conference in Phoenix, Arizona. I taught a full-day version of my Time Management for System Administrators class. What impressed me about this event was how different it was. Because it was regional most of the speakers were local. There are experts everywhere (not just in California) and seeing them get some spotlight really made me happy. The fact that it was small also meant that it could be at a less expensive hotel, who was more hungry for LOPSA's business. They had a lot of creative ideas that I haven't seen at big hotels. For example, one of the snack-breaks had cookies and milk! I was psyched!
At night we had a lot of deep discussions about the future of system administration, professionalism, and the future of LOPSA. I consulted with some board members about how to get to the next milestone now that the organization is running. I hope to see more regional conferences announced soon. I also brainstormed on ways to reach out to the segments of the IT world that are currently unaddressed.
Why not celebrate the 1st birthday by buying a gift for yourself? The LOPSA CafePress store is ready to fulfill your need for swag, and raises money for a good cause. And if you haven't registered, do that too. They have some extremely useful mailing lists.
