FUDCon 3: Learning the difference

between 'Publish' and 'Save Now'. I sent the previous post a little early :). The move is going to deal with a lot of new ips, routing and things so its time to clean up a bit and work on some items... of course with all the students here at Senaca@York today.. networking has become a bit more problematic ... I think we are warring with the animation group down the hall for packets.

FUDCon Day 3

Spent the evening in the FUDCon hacker room going over with other hackers on the mystique that is Paul Frields.. what was his background, why does he always wear black turtle necks, was he licensed to kill?

Today has been drinking Tim Hortons tea, and trying to get ready for the move on Friday.

FUDCon Day 2: Hackfests

Day 1 ended with the announcement of the Fedora 13 release being Goddard (after the Rocket scientist yeah!). Most people went to the Fud Pub crawl afterwards but I just had a small dinner and watched a Chinese martial arts soap opera before crashing.. and crash I did.

I slept in way too late to get the pygtk talk that Paul Frields gave earlier. When I got there it was wrapping up and everyone else was now a professional GUI developer with laurels handed out by Paul himself. Anyway, I spent the rest of the morning getting the travel planned for our move next week in Phoenix... so I will be there from Friday til Wednesday (in case something goes wrong).

Now I am going to talk with Mo about a secret project...

FUDCon Day 1: Talks

Wow... Canada is nice. The Hotel TV has 2 children channels with educational shows on all the time.. first hotel/motel I have ever seen that. The people were very friendly getting us on the bus system that took us from the hotel to the school, and the school is like wow really nice (and clean yes I am making the stereotypical comment about how nice and clean canada is compared to other places). Anyway, got some coffee from Tim Hortons and then spent the day logging user sessions that had been bar camp voted. It seemed to go pretty well. I liked the one on Inkscape usage but missed the one for GUI layout I wanted to see (and the packaging one and the python one but there are lots of notes) The notes are courtesy of a bunch of volunteers that Yakkov organized. (and there are also videos from Clint's guys.. ) so all cool.

Going to listen to Paul's end of the day speech on the State of Fedora.

FudCon day 0:FUDbus

Ok it turns out that the bus we were looking forward to didn't get done in time. [It was held up due to a sub-contractor not getting the parts for wireless and power done in time.] Instead got a larger 50 seat bus so everyone was able to get their own seat. Lots of talking for the first part and after lunch we all got to watch the highwater film of 2009: Zombieland. A little too gorey at parts for me. However it was very funny to watch the rest of it.. poor Bill Murray.. he deserved a better end. Anyway.. after that was done lots of people slept until the border.

Got off the bus at the border around 8pm and had a great time with the border guards. They were very friendly and only wanted to make sure us Americans were going to leave versus get stuck there. Got to the hotel around 9pm and had a huge checkin party. I pretty much crashed in the room after that. The networking at the Hilton was very bad (too many hackers.. too little cable connections.) so I didn't get to check email til Saturday.

FudCon day -1

Flew from Albuquerque to Chicago.. and got a flu shot at the airport. They didn't have H1N1 but will have it on my way back. Thankfully the plane flights were nice and fast due to tail winds. Got into Boston early and found that it had been a record warm day at 68 degrees (versus the heavy snow the weather people had said.)

Got picked up by my host, David Malcolm, and spent the evening watching Brit TV on the Netflix machine.. real cool. Going to have to get one for the family. [And watching the IT Crowd was funny and painful at the same time.. I know those people too well.]

On the way to FUDcon

Where we put the U back into FUDcon! or something like that. My main jobs are going to be a few things:

1. Make sure people don't party too hard on the bus to Toronto. And have their passports.
2. Listen to users A LOT.
   • Who are they?
   • What do they want?
   • Why are they here?
   • Where do they want to go
3. Learn to be a user again. Most of my habits are formed from when I was in college in the late 1980's. It was a big push in my habits to move from tvtwm to fvwm2 and then to metacity. What would a new user use and why? How does one IM, blog or this identi.ca thing?
4. Make sure people don't party too hard on the bus from Toronto. And have their passports.

Thats about it.. hope to update daily (so the family knows I am alive :)).