| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| Months | ||
|---|---|---|
| Jan | Feb | Mar |
| Apr | May | Jun |
| Jul | Aug | Sep |
| Oct | Nov | Dec |
Tue, 15 Apr 2008
[11:37] LUGRadio Live USA 2008 - Wrap-Up
Wow! What an awesome weekend. We headed up on Friday to set up the venue and it was pretty full on from 11:00 Friday morning through to 23:00 on Sunday! I did a fair bit of work co-ordinating the logistics of this event, assisting the lovely ladies of Open Source at Google (Cat Allman and Leslie Hawthorne), and I've learned that organising an event (especially in the US) has a little more to it than just throwing some tables in a room. Last few months of venue searching, service provider searching and screening, plan drawing and logistics puzzling aside I had an excitingly educational weekend learning how to erect and configure stage lights, screens and projectors, how to cable a large venue, (in)appropriate application of mascara and lipstick, REALLY Packing a Car 101, oh, and there was some linux and open source stuff in there too :)
I met heaps of awesome people (like Tony Whitmore without whom there would have been considerably less success), Theron Conrey from Dice (without whom there'd have been significantly less cool), Tedd St Rain (without whom the world would be a less interesting and informed place), the O'Reilly folks who happily chatted to me for far longer than they wanted to I suspect, there are more, but if I keep going I'm going to end up listing everyone who went. Many thanks to everyone who came and contributed something to the inaugural LUGRadio Live USA event!
When I wasn't running around like a blue-arsed fly I did manage to catch a couple of talks, Ian Murdock on OpenSolaris, Benjamin Mako Hill was Revealing Errors, Kristen Accardi (ably assisted by Val Henson) did an excellent talk showing that it's just as easy to bake a cookie as it is to write a device driver for linux and I missed so many others. Luckily Tedd was there recording a lot of the talks (pretty much single-handedly) so you can check out the schedule and watch the ones that you missed. Apart from the talks there were also some interesting vendors/exhibitors showing off their shiny wares, the ones that really caught my eye were Frets on Fire - TOTALLY AWESOME. I'm not a Guitar Hero fan but playing Jack's Playing Ball on Frets on Fire with a practically-unmodded keyboard (it had a guitar strap cable tied to the feet) was very cool. Magnatune, a music distributor who provides all their music under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (I'm listening to music off of their website as I put this post together, go check it out). O'Reilly were there and I spent way too much time drooling over the up-and-coming new books including HackerTeen, a graphic novel aimed at tech-savvy teens with a website tie-in (looks promising), the Essential Silverlight manual, not so much because I care about Silverlight but because of the interesting new O'Reilly book type: Up-to-Date. It's basically a wee ring-binder with some conent and some blank pages that you can update when the book gets updated. The second edition of Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (I didn't know that O'Reilly distributed No Starch Press books). I was really excited about this one, so much so that Marsee from O'Reilly let me walk off with it!
So, in a nutshell, awesome event! If you were unlucky enough to miss the event (I assume because both of your legs were broken) then, as I mentioned, some of the talks are available on Google Video (thanks to Tedd), check out the schedule. If you just want to see what happened then there appear to be some photos on Flikr, tagged as lugradioliveusa. Thanks to The Four Large Gents for coming over, all of the crew who pitched in to make the event happen and everyone who came to check it out. See you next year!
PS Yes, that is me in the photo up there, no, I'm not telling you what happened. You should have been there ;)
[Posted at: 11:37 15/04/2008]
category: /life | permalink | Comments suspended due to spamwhores
Thu, 03 Apr 2008
[16:25] LUGRadio Live _USA_ - the L10n-version
After being incredibly upset at missing the awesomeness that was LUGRadio Live 2007 (due to being in the wrong country), I joined the campaining to make sure I wouldn't miss the 2008 event. Thus, with considerable cajoling, effort and exertion by myself and a whole bunch of awesomely motivated and useful people, I'm very excited to say that I will be able to attend LUGRadio Live 2008 here in the USA!
I'm really looking forward to this (and to my shiny, shiny crew t-shirt), there's a whole lot of really interesting speakers and meeting up with the afficianados here in the US will be most interesting :) If you're already doing something next weekend (Saturday and Sunday the 12th and 13th of April) then you should cancel and come to this. See you all there!
[Posted at: 16:25 03/04/2008]
category: /life | permalink | Comments suspended due to spamwhores