SCALE!

Friday afternoon I set off up to Los Angeles to attend Southern California Linux Expo! Had a really amazing time. A good handful (or two) of Gentoo developers made the trip to LA for SCALE, some it was nice to see again, others it was cool to meet for the first time.

David (omp), Josh (nightmorph) + wife, Pete (latexer), Josh (tsunam), Mike (KingTaco), Matt (blackace), Daniel (dostrow), Steve (nerdboy), Stephanie (wormo); it was a great weekend! Primarily thanks to the company! Had a great time and I'm really glad I got to spend the weekend with you all.

Besides my mantourage of blue (as they have been dubbed by "Sven" and Jono), I also had DJ, Scott (numist) and James (linagee) with me up there for fun and pro..oh wait.

DJ was speaker hunting for FOSSCON and caught a whooping 25 talks! Bit more than the four I saw.

I went to see Jono Bacon of Ubuntu and LUGRADIO fame as he did his "How to herd cats and influence people" talk.

It was a really good talk and Jono is a great speaker, he is very intense and get a great interaction with his audience. It was also nice to see Jono again!

I did of course go to Alex Ionescu's ReactOS talk, which I believe people found to be really interesting.

I caught Howard Chu's talk on OpenLDAP, which was also good, but the best bit of his talk? The fifteen minutes of fiddle play prior to it!

Chris DiBona was down today, so played catch up all quickly and listened to his talk on Open Source Licenses. Chris did a good talk too and again, he interacts well with the crowd, albeit in a fashion somewhat different to Jono. It was nice to see him again also and I'll be keeping my eyes peeled at code.google.com on the 14th to look out for his special valentines day gift.

Today I had my very own community relations staffer for the entire day, which proved to be tremendous amounts of fun. Resulting in us thieving the red hat from the redhat booth (I'm sorry guys!) and putting a Gentoo sticker on the front of it.

Shortly after someone decided to add a Debian sticker to the mix and before long it was decorated with Ubuntu, Wikimedia and anti-DRM stickers from the FSF aswell.

The Novell / SuSE guys taped a Novell tux to the top of the hat and FreeBSD added some horns (they also gave me some very sexy FreeBSD boxers and CDs in exchange for a webcam stream of my ass^Wtattoo.

The hat certainly got some attention as I walked around with it, both from people asking if I was confused, whether I found it difficult to choose, whether this wasn't giving somewhat of a conflicting message.. and many amusing ideas for new distro names..

Among others FedebiuntooBSD with apt-rpmtage.

A couple of the KPLUG kids came up also, which was cool. And Declan and Robert from UCSD, I have some sort of plans for friday involving them, I have however forgotten what. (I sobered up, ok?) I shall e-mail and ask for a gentle reminder.

Also had a chance to hang out with a couple of the GNOME guys, one of which I've known online for some time as one of Daniel Robbins' former colleagues, Eitan Isaacson. Had the pleasure of meeting Cliff (Hawkwind) from Ulteo and OFTC, and a fair few freenode users.

Saturday also saw the first in person board meeting for the PDPC, had the pleasure of having David Levin up at SCALE for the conference. I believe he enjoyed it and it was great to put a face to the name.

I am sure there is like plenty of other people I should mention, I've met so many great people this weekend, some for the first time others not. Made a few great contacts for FOSSCON, discussed a few ideas, eaten nice food, had great conversation and consumed way too much vodka.

I think I shall head out for a really late dinner with Tracy now, then I shall sleep like a baby. Tomorrow I need to work a bit on my slides and finish my mini-talk for FOSDEM. I've also been asked to come speak at the Computer Science Society at Bristol University, so need to slot that into my diary soon.

Going to be on LUGRadio soon also, I'll make sure I let you know when so you can all listen to Jono et al mocking my choice of distribution.

According to use.perl.org I shall be in attendance at the San Diego Perl Mongers meeting tomorrow, I'm looking forward to that also. Yet another bunch of geeks to meet up with!