Come party in the Grotto with Grave Danger Friday night!

I wasn't able to skate in Saturday night's Rat City Rollergirl's game at Key Arena, but Sophia was!

The Seattle Derby Brats played mini-games during half time of the big girl games. Sophia was feeling under the weather and opted not to jam, but she went out there and did her best blocking to grab the flags of the opposing jammers.

Sophia has been skating as Feline Fury for over a year now for the Seattle Derby Brats, and watching her and her teammates skate in front of almost 5,000 people like it was nothing was really amazing. As a coach and a fan, it has been so exciting to watch them improve over time. As a derby player, seeing their dedication to the sport is humbling - they really are future of roller derby!

I consider it a good weekend if I do at least one thing I've never done before. Today, that was visiting Banya 5, a Russian "urban spa" in the developing South Lake Union area. I've visited Japanese and Korean bathhouses, and now having been to a Russian spa I'm glad to find more similarities than differences. They're all based on hydrotherapy - a wonderful experience of immersing yourself in different types of water of varying degrees in temperature, exposing your body to the elements for rejuvenation and a bit of adrenaline from the extreme temperatures. Banya has three pools - hot, really fucking cold, and tepid salt water. There is a (very hot) dry sauna and a eucalyptus steam room. Banya is co-ed and bathing suits are required, which isn't as enjoyable for me but means there is more conversation among guests and less of the shock of hanging out with people naked. At 11AM on a Sunday morning most visitors were Russian and obviously die-hard spa guests.

I was given the advice of enjoying the pools as following: dry sauna until I couldn't stand the heat, quick plunge in the cold water, then a soak in the tepid salt water. Every time I encounter a cold water plunge I think of a million things I'd rather do instead, but I took the advice and didn't regret it.

I got a salt scrub and Elisa did the deep tissue massage - both of which were excellent and I'm pleased with the softness of my skin. Despite what I consider to be kind of a pretentious looking entrance, it is very laid back and relaxing environment. There's also a Vodka bar next door that we'll have to try on our next (evening) trip.

If you're looking for a good way to get a break from the cold, gray Seattle winter, I highly recommend Banya!

Tickets are sold out for the Black Eyed Burlesque this weekend, but you can still dance with us Saturday night after our show!</a>

I FINALLY got to marry the beautiful and talented Ann Munition and RENEW my vows to Darcy Rant, Rettig to Rumble, and Edie Brickwall (in spirit). I'm a very lucky derby girl :)


also I think I married this bottle of champagne:

Come see a group of talented women try their best to wow you off skates. It's my first time performing burlesque!



Buy tickets now before they sell out!

Buy Tickets here

The first ever face-off between two Northwest heavy hitters, the Rat City Rollergirls All-Star Travel Team and the Rose City Rollers Wheels of Justice! This bout (held in Portland, so grab your keys or head to the train station) will be amazing! Both Rose City and Rat City are heading to Regionals in October, and with any luck, we'll both make it to Nationals (we're hosting 'em, but it sure would be nice to PLAY in them too!). How exciting! You won't want to miss it!

Important details: Tickets are EXTREMELY limited (only 400 total). Doors at 5:30pm, bout starts at 6:00pm.

There are still tickets left for the game this Saturday at Magnuson Park. This is my first game as a Rat City Rollergirl since 2005! Come cheer for my return!



When: This Saturday August 11th, 5:30PM
Where: Magnuson Park/Sand Point, Seattle

2nd Annual Rat City Rollergirls’ Poker Open
“You Hold Some, You Fold Some”
An Old West Style Poker Show Down!
Sunday, August 3, 2008

Time: 3:00 PM
Donation: $50
Location: Secret, West Seattle hideout to be revealed only to those Ace-high enough to gain entrance.

Proceeds from this private poker shindig go towards the Rat City Rollergirls travel and round up fund. It will take place Sunday afternoon in an exclusive West Seattle hideout. You getta know where it is when you getta ticket, cowboy.

Admission gets your saddle sore rear a seat in the Rat City Rollergirls’ Poker Open Tournament (thanks to our friends at Seattle Poker Open -- http://seattlepokeropen.com/). Plus, Cookie will be unloading all the chuck and medicinal elixirs your weary bones crave.

At the bare minimum you will: eat, bend an elbow, party, and best of all get to square off at the poker table with your favorite league skaters and Rat City All-Stars! We aint no tenderfoots now! If you're a card shaark, you'll also have a chance to win prize bundles galore from our generous sponsors.

Space is extremely limited. Be there, or be yella!

Buy tickets here!

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.