Heather Stern's Page

I am about to begin gainful employment at the moment. Why, if consulting is such fun, and bears a flexible schedule, did I choose to return to the corporate day-in and day-out? I enjoy the steady paycheck, the challenge, and colleagues that make me feel like I'm part of a good team.
 
I am only available for clients with open source work for me if it does not conflict with my day-to-day work.

No, I do not do consulting as a recruiter, and no, I can't hire you.

Still looking for me? Cool! Reach me on gmail via the account heather.starshine.stern and mention employment in the subject. You may also find my resumé handy.

Since my private life is pretty busy with computing and science fiction fandom, I don't get around to changing my personal pages a lot. For the record I'm enjoying a sunny afternoon with a proper Springlike demeanor on a cool and windy April day. Good weather for bike riding.

Together over the years, Jim and I have gathered a lot of resources. Let me know about any busted links...

I have a lot of experience you can benefit from, and an active interest in passing that knowledge to others. To this end, I am a consultant*, and also lead an active volunteerism life:

• I'm the captain of the 24th Century's open source user group, USS Augusta Ada NCC-55011. We're the techie trekkies; we run internet lounges at a number of science fiction conventions throughout the year (the largest was the WorldCon in our area, ConJosé). Occasionally we may do battle with the Klingons; mainly we get together for pizza in San Francisco once a month.
• If that wasn't enough science fiction in my life, I'm also a regular in the filk music community. I go to typically two conventions in this niche of fandom in a year; 2007 Coppercon invited my sister and me as the Music Guests of Honor and we had a great time.
• Though I now live a few hundred miles away I am the LASFS Librarian-at-arms, and on rare occasion make it to a meeting in North Hollywood.
• I'm an active graphics geek and themer for the Python based wiki app MoinMoin. Among interesting credits I helped the Ubuntu people come up with a well Balanced theme suited to their many varied sites, and provided wallpapers for a handful of themes I otherwise had no hand in. I'm currently looking at the CSS for the core themes as we crunch our way toward a new version.
• Not exactly a top coder but at least a little bit involved in the Bootable Business Card, www.lnx-bbc.net. No relation to British broadcasting, none, nada, zip. But yes, I do enjoy an occasional Dr. Who episode here and there. There now exist more linux based live-CDs than you can shake a stick at, and a few FreeBSD based ones too, but this was the first.
• If these weren't enough geeky things in my life I remain active with BayLISA (a local sysadmin's group) and enough local Linux activity I could probably use a map and a calendar. But I do have about a bazillion T-shirts.

  Some thoughts of mine. I can get quite chatty when I get rolling, so if any of these are too long for your tastes, or it's just getting to the good part and then you find I'm not done yet, well... sorry, but don't say I didn't warn you.

  The Origin of Starshine Technical Services

  role playing gamer

  - that's role, not roll - I don't play as much as I used to, but I still have a bunch of RPG characters I'm fond of.

  Windows Equivalence on Linux - well, okay, I never finished this, the world changes too fast. But let's just say as a starter, throwing Samba on a box is barely a step in the right direction...

  I have a garden, a cat, and a tendency towards staying up late. Too bad the local restaurants don't, for the most part. My husband thinks I'm just generally a cool nerdette.