Last week while Amber and Pete Graner were attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida, they received some very bad news. Lightning had struck their home and it had caught fire, burning to the ground.
Luckily, no one was injured – their family and their pets are fine, but their house is now gone.
I met and hung out with Amber last May when we were both at UDS-M in Belgium planning the Maverick Meerkat release. Amber is an awesome long standing contributor to Ubuntu, with significant contributions to her LoCo team, the Ubuntu Women project and she is one of the driving forces behind the Ubuntu News team responsible for the weekly newsletter and ubuntu-news.org.
Pete Graner works for Canonical on the Kernel team, and is responsible for keeping your system stable and fast, among many other things. Together they’re an very valuable part of the Ubuntu community.
As far as I’m concerned, such a terrible and unfortunate accident couldn’t happen to nicer people. The insurance will take a while to process, and in the meantime they have nothing. To help them buy things like clothes, food and temporary accommodation, Amber’s friend Rikki Kite set up a chip in page to help.
Please help Amber and Pete rebuild their house, if you can spare a few dollars then I’m sure they would appreciate it.