Khaos

Karaoke Queens

On Friday evening we took my two sisters and Ashleigh, our current house guests, out to sing karaoke. Both Christine and Sarah have done this before but it was Ashleigh’s first time.  There is no doubt that karaoke in Japan is all about having fun and we spent a lot of our time laughing.  Sarah and Ashleigh have no idea of the difficulty of any song and I think they were a bit surprised by how difficult it is to sing like Lady Gaga.

Ashleigh and Sarah at Karaoke

My sister Christine has a beautiful voice, but we ended up laughing over her song choices. It’s true that sometimes I pick ridiculous songs for the humour value, but Christine actually likes Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me”.  And it appears to sing it correctly you have to stand up and make large sweeping gestures with your arms…  She did manage to sing one song that was released this century, Katie Melua’s “The Closest Thing to Crazy”.

Christine, singing about being crazy...

4 Responses to “Karaoke Queens”

  1. Hails Says:
    July 14th, 2010 at 12:43 am

    Ha ha! I’m with Christine. The other week I had people in real despair because I sang not one, but two Connie Francis songs. I can’t help myself. And they were all superior and scornful during Lipstick On Your Collar, but I’m telling you, they fairly started singing along by the end of Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool… 🙂

    I can’t recall singing any songs from this century at karaoke – other than Korean pop songs, because they’re the only Korean ones I know!

  2. karen Says:
    July 14th, 2010 at 9:01 am

    I had to go and look up one of those songs, and I can just hear my sister singing them 🙂

    I do sing some quite new Japanese songs, but also try to sing songs by other recent recording artists. But I do enjoy singing Dionne Warwick’s, “I Say A Little Prayer”.

  3. José Castro Says:
    July 15th, 2010 at 7:27 pm

    How miss karaoking with you guys… 🙂

  4. karen Says:
    July 18th, 2010 at 5:55 am

    We miss you too 🙂 And your singing about “teeth”!

A Week in the Life of a Perl Community Volunteer

I’m involved with a couple of Perl organisations and from time to time I am asked to blog about the things that I am doing. The problem though is that a lot of what I do isn’t overly interesting and can simply be incredibly dull administration.   This week I decided to make some notes on what I have been doing, but I don’t plan to do this every week.  At the minute I am trying to fit my volunteer work around doing fun things with my house guests and I’m having to schedule in the time, which means I’ve a much better idea of how long everything is taking.

I’m on the YEF venue committee and at this time of the year we work on choosing the venue for next year’s YAPC::EU.  We have two proposals this year and I spent an hour or so on each, going through them to see if I had any queries about the proposals.

I’m working on a legal matter for TPF that I unfortunately I can’t discuss the details of yet.  I spent about 4 hours on this on Sunday, 1 hour on Monday, 1 hour on Tuesday, 3o minutes on Wednesday, 30 minutes on Thursday, 1 hour on Friday, and 1 hour on Saturday.  It’s exceptional for me to spend quite so much time on one thing but it looks like I will be spending quite a bit of time on this matter throughout the summer.

I’m the TPF grant manager for Dave Mitchell’s grant and I spent around an hour on this.

I spend a lot of time reading and responding to email.  This week I have sent 61 emails either as responses to queries or initiating new conversations.  If I take out the emails that are related to tasks that I already mentioned this took up about 7 hours.  The main categories of emails at the minute seem to be Hague Grants, general administration, volunteers, and YAPC. I have also spent time chatting to people about projects and dealing with blogs.

All in all this week I spent around 20 hours, which is about usual for me.

2 Responses to “A Week in the Life of a Perl Community Volunteer”

  1. Gabor Szabo Says:
    July 12th, 2010 at 7:19 am

    I am very grateful to you for all the time and energy you invest in the Perl community and thank you for this post too. I think it is very important that you keep the community informed on what kind of things you spend your time.

    Especially if you feel that these aren’t interesting tasks. Especially if these tasks are otherwise not visible to the rest of us.

    I think if you decide to write these entries once a week you will soon, within a few weeks, will see that you can point out areas where people might help you. I am sure there are many people in the Perl community who would be ready to help in some of those tasks. That in turn will either let you reduce your workload or allow you to attend other tasks as well.

    Thank you!

  2. karen Says:
    July 13th, 2010 at 12:45 am

    Thank you.

    Many of the day-to-day tasks are not interesting as they are contacting people for updates or chasing up things that have not yet been done. I have very long “follow-up” and “waiting-for” queues. But then as TPF President is really a general manager it is not shocking that I have so many of these management tasks.

    At the minute it is not my aim to reduce my workload, but as you suggested I want to pass on certain tasks so that I can attend to other things. I will continue to work on that!

Busy, Busy, Busy

I just glanced at my blog and noticed that I haven’t written anything at all this month.  July is a really busy month for me as I have house guests.  And as two of them are only 16 years old they need quite a bit of supervision.  I spent a couple of weeks in June travelling and really only found the time to write whilst sitting in airports, so it wasn’t a great month for blogging either.   I’m hoping that things calm down but that may not be a very realistic hope!