Tickets are on sale now for the April 26th Bay Area Derby Girls second bout of the season. This time we're back in Oakland at the Dry Ice Arena. Tickets are for sale only online, and they will sell out! Buy them now. This will be your last chance to see me skating with the Bay Area Derby Girls before my move to Seattle! The after party is guaranteed to rock.

Originally posted on lisa.vox.com

This weekend the BAD Girls co-hosted The Big One, a California derby tournament in Davis. I put off thinking about the event just long enough to get asked to be an announcer as part of my required volunteer shift. Two days of derby, several hours of talking in to a mic, not enough sleep, a lot of beer and ribs and hot dogs. And now I need a derby vacation.

I tried to focus more on explaining what was going on in the game, rather than color commentary. I used my old choral training for annunciation and my karaoke experience for speaking in to the mic, etc. The hardest part, by far, was knowing how I was planning to end a sentence before I started it. Turns out I almost never use that skill. I also had to try very hard not to give away too much of the game to the players, or to start telling the girls how they should be playing their game ;)

The Bad Girls cleaned house in the tournament, btw.

Every time I spend time with derby I'm reminded of how lucky I am to be a part of this.

Had a beautiful time on Caye Caulker. Got to see a full lunar eclipse, dance at a full moon bonfire, chase after a sea-turtle, jump off a diving board, got a tan, and see another beautiful sunset on a sailboat. The highlight of the trip was when Henry asked me to marry him, and I said yes!

( More of the story here... )



The rest of the sunset sail was full of smiles and congratulations. The mood was perfect as the full moon rose and the sky filled with stars. We danced and drank rum punch and began our plans for the ceremony...

I know we've been dating for a bazillion years but no time would feel more perfect. I'm so happy, guys!





Thanks to henrylyne for sharing his island again, and Maile for the photos!

The Six Apart Operations team is looking for a Senior Network Engineer to join the team. You should be in the Bay Area (or in to moving here) and awesome. You'll be working with the best operations teams supporting the sites you love. You wouldn't say no to the baby animals, would you?

If interested, send your resume to jobs@sixapart.com or contact me directly.

brad as Facebook and me as robot maid


I wore this costume (with skates) for a themed house party last month and I was so excited about wearing it again. I couldn't pull off the skates (Brad wouldn't allow it in his house, etc) for Halloween but I still loved it. I was originally shooting for Rosie from the Jetsons but things got a bit more, uh, modern. Full costume shot behind the cut.

( Read more... )

These photos taken by brad and more are here.

First of all I'd like to say congratulations and good luck to Brad Fitzpatrick on the decision to make the big change and move on from his first job! As a co-worker and friend of Brad's I know he's making the best decision for him right now. Nine years is a long time to work on a single project, any project, and I've always felt it showed a certain stubborn (or masochistic) side of him to have continued to be involved for as long as he has.

When I first met Brad (21st birthday I think?) there was no way I'd have guessed we'd end up where we are today. Over the years I've worked on Livejournal as a systems administrator, gone through acquisition with Six Apart, eventually moved to San Francisco to extend my role beyond just that of a systems administrator, to my current position of Director of Operations Engineering for Six Apart. I'm extremely thankful for everything he has taught me directly or indirectly, and I have a lot of gratitude toward him for making all this possible.

Brad has done a tremendous job creating Livejournal and growing it from nothing, with the support from his family, his friends, his community and his employees. The people at Six Apart may not all have been there for the first purchase of a server, the invention of mood icons, the first power outage, the partitioning to user clusters, the horribly painful early days of implementation of memcached but some of us have!

Brad has always worked with a team of capable individuals, a group that over time was able to take on more and more of the responsibility for the community and the site. This includes decisions regarding support, engineering, financial, marketing and operations. Sometimes these decisions haven't always been the best, and we've certainly had to learn from mistakes. I have felt lucky to have had the support from Brad to help in technical decisions or problems when needed, but it has honestly been a long time since he was in a position of responsibility regarding the technical infrastructure of LJ. I'm sure it has been frustrating for him at times to not have that role, but the site has continued to run, grow and improve, in ways that he and I could never have managed between just the two of us before we joined Six Apart.

The notion that Brad has been the only major contributing force to Livejournal over the last few years is misleading. Six Apart is host to a large pool of talent whose contributions are utilized across all of our products - and other sites! Features added to Perlbal originally to help block spam for Typepad is used to help throttle bots on LJ - allowing us to have the site crawled by spiders (good for search engines) but not impact performance. Ben Trott's work on TheSchwartz is used to implement such features as instant notifications and the return of birthday reminders. hachi is our resident MogileFS expert and contributor, which we use across all our sites for reliable data storage. groknaut has taken on the not so pretty task of wrangling an unruly collection of hardware gathered through the years and retrofitting our infrastructure to something more manageable and sane.


With a history as long and exciting as Livejournal - 9 years is a long time in the tech world - it is hard to get beyond feeling that we're always trying to catch up. With the latest addition of dormando as our Mysql DBA I think we've got a better fighting chance. I'm at least glad to be rid of *one* of my many jobs. Livejournal had 700,000 users when I became the (only) Livejournal systems administrator in 2003. At that time we were struggling to keep up with unprecedented growth. Today our servers are supported by a team of more than ten very capable and motivated members of an operations team in a 24x7 environment. We've got a dedicated group of engineers on staff who use the site themselves, who care about the same subjects we hear from our users. Work continues on developing the core technologies Brad and the people working for Livejournal helped create (Memcached, Perlbal, MogileFS...) and we'll continue to use these technologies for *all* of our products. Livejournal ran with a skeleton crew of developers and systems administrators for years, and I'm glad to see that - even with Brad leaving - we're continuing to make positive changes.

There is an assumption made by many that Brad has been in a position of management for Livejournal, but as he's written, this has not been the case for awhile. In fact, long time employee Brad Whitaker has been the very capable Engineering Manager for Livejournal for some time now. Brad Whitaker started working on Livejournal a bit before me (and before he was paid for it), and remains one of the most dedicated individuals I work with. That Six Apart has continued to acknowledge his contributions to the site, and by keeping him in a key position of influence I know that they continue to trust his experience as a manager, a developer, an employee as well as a user.


So I wish you luck, Brad Fitzpatrick, in your future projects and a very sincere thank you for everything you've done, for Livejournal, for Six Apart, for the Open Source community, and for me. While your leaving is certainly symbolic of a change in the Livejournal life-cycle, I don't fear this change - and I know we'll be able to continue to grow regardless.

Have I got an update for you! But not now. For now, I want to say Happy Systems Administration Day to all you admins out there, and a huge shoutout to everyone on the Six Apart Operations team. You performed brilliantly this week.

Six Apart is looking to expand our team with another kick ass Mysql DBA. If you have experience working with Mysql in large scale systems with emphasis on high availability send me your resume please!

Job Description, etc.

You'll be working on the database infrastructure for Livejournal, Typepad.com and Vox.com in a bleeding edge technology environment. We make the infrastructure that makes Web2.0 go around.

Plus, you'll be working with me, and I'm pretty much awesome.

Me, in love (with the puppy and a man), tan, rested, at peace, HAPPY

We stayed on a small island about 45 minutes by water taxi off from Belize City, called Caye Caulker. Tickets ran from $600-$800 (depending on how far you bought them in advance) and Henry and I stayed in a small room for $15 a night.

The island itself is 5 miles long, but most businesses and hotels are within about a square mile. There are 3 unpaved "streets" - Front, Middle, Back - and most people walk, ride bikes or drive golf carts to get around. Belize is an independent country in Central America, English is the official language, and the local population is made up of people of Mayan, African, Mexican and Spanish descent. The most common non-english language to hear on the island was Creole.

Most of my days involved sleeping as long as I could with the sun on my face and roosters crowing outside (maybe to 9am), eating a slow breakfast at the Amore Cafe with fresh fruit and drinking locally grown organic coffee. If no activities were planned, the day involved wandering around the town, sitting on the front porch in a hammock reading, riding bikes to explore the southern part of the island (with crocodiles!), drinking Belican and rum punch, eating ceviche, tanning and swimming.

I went on two different snorkeling trips, the first with Tiffany by motor boat where I got to see eels, lobster, and swim with a school of sting rays for the first time. The second trip was a full day on a sail boat with Henry and Maile. We swam with more sting rays and nurse sharks (!), more eels, an eagle ray, and schools of barricuda. The water was extremely clear and the sand very white so visibility was fantastic.

In the evening we'd go to the Split for a beer and a dip in the ocean and watch the ball of the sun dissappear over the ocean like I've never seen before.

Night time was either for going to sleep early or for hitting up the local dive and disco. We went to Karaoke twice (first night I performed the same song twice in a row?? because the dj wanted?), and dancing a few times. I learned to dance the Punta and made new dance partner friends. Even scored some digits!

There are some trips that are clearly travel, some clearly vacation, and many more that are a mix. While I've loved many places I've travelled, this was the best vacation yet. I'm still amazed at how relaxed, content and happy I was during the trip, and about how much I loved having Henry there doing the things together we love - exploring, meeting new people, trying new things, eating, relaxing. And all without computers!

( Pictures taken by Henry )

I've been brain-deep in work for the past couple of days, but Jeremy Cole made my night by showing me his latest patch for Mysql - a progress indicator!

The Progress_rows number indicates progress within a given step of executing the query. For instance, if you run a SELECT with a GROUP BY that can’t be done using an index, you will see two cycles of Progress_rows: once with a State of “Copying to tmp table” and once with “Sending data”.

Read more about it on Jeremy's blog

I'm here in Tokyo for work, but the second most frequent activity is eating! We've had pizza a couple of times in the office during busy days from the Pizza Hut across the street. While the name is the same, that's about where the similiarties end. Oh, except they have the cheesy puffy crust which I vaguely remember being marketed in the states. So far I've had tastes of: Shrimp and Broccoli with a mayonaise-y sauce, Meat with a gravy sauce, Vegetables with corn and red sauce, "Korean" style pizza with hot dogs in the crust(!!) and shaved pepper on top, Pizza Carbonara which is similiar to the italian pasta dish: bacon and cheese with an egg + cream sauce. None of them were spectacular - it is Pizza Hut, afterall - but they weren't awful at all as long as I didn't think about the ingredients (especially the egg sauce). We were given packets of green chili sauce and maple honey to put on the pizza. As sides, we had fries and sweet potato fries.

The McGriddle is being advertised everywhere in the trains. One man told me he thought it was a japanese invention and was surprised I'd heard of it. I can see why he'd believe that, since it sounds more like something invented here.

Garth (my travel partner for this trip) and I made a day trip on shinkansen to another coworker's family home in Hakone, which is famous for onsen (hot springs). The hot springs are literally running down the street! We're stopping our eating and walking for a bit of work, and later on are going to be enjoying some nabe. I just got a CNN breaking alert that said "-- Tsunami warning issued for Japan and surrounding areas after quake east of Kuril Islands, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center says" which was pretty alarming until I realized I'm up in mountains and nowhere near Hokkaido. I've been on edge about earthquakes the whole time I've been here and have prioritized learning japanese that might help in the event of an emergency. Now I've just got to add "shark, bear, vomit" and "plane" to the list and I've got most of my irrational fears covered.

I'm trying to fight a cold that's been coming on since I arrived. These are very fashionable in Tokyo this time of year, and there's an added benefit of the trains not smelling so awful during rush hour.

You probably wouldn't know it from looking at me, but I've been in a relationship with the same man for the last five and a half years. We're not married, have never lived together, and currently I live about 1,000 miles away from him.

This is surprising to me for several reasons. I didn't grow up dreaming of weddings, I've got a long line of broken marriages above me, I'm scared of any type of long term committment, and believe it or not I'm not the easiest person to date. I don't self-identify as a girlfriend or part of a couple, it doesn't bring me comfort to know that I'm completed by someone else, and I get itchy at the thought of settling. But, I'm happy with him, he's happy with me, and somehow it works... it helps that he also seems to have the tolerance of some kind of masochist.

To be honest, the years haven't been without a few breaks. We've tried quitting, we've taken breaks, we've discussed futures without each other, and every time we've come back stronger than the time before.

Somehow, we've ended up here. We're long distance, but we talk every day. We miss everyday physical companionship, but we make all attempts to see each other at least once a month. Things aren't always spectacular, but they are often enough to make them seem that much more. I've been told more times than I can count that we should break up. I've moved from talking to people who understand to running out of examples to compare us to. We've gone from rocky to smooth and rocky again, but we've also got ourselves in a nice position where we each live our own individual lives and still want to make the time to share with each other.


Five and a half years isn't really anything, really, but it is enough to have learned a few things. I don't want to make it sound easy. Or perfect. Or even better than any other relationship. But, what's the point of growing if you can't share with others?

And so, you didn't ask for it, but I'm presenting my readers with my 2007 list of How to Make it Last According to Lisa, Or At Least What Worked For Me (including a few pointers from Henry) In No Particular Order

( Read more... )

At least, that's what I think we do. What works for you?

Buy tickets online, or for those of you in SF you can get tickets directly from me.

Come see me for my first bout as an Oakland Outlaw on the Bay Area Derby Girls league
Buy Tickets Now!
April 1st
Doors open at 8:30, bout starts at 9:30

If any of you have any contacts with hotmail (msn) postmaster please contact me! They like to block livejournal mail as well.