Another Southeast Linuxfest over

Judging from the response from most people, this year’s Southeast Linuxfest was another hugely successful event. There was a snafu with getting decent Internet access to the meeting (big AT&T fail), but it seemed like most people put up with the hotel internet, worked around it with cell phone tethering or cell phone wifi, or just lived without it for a couple of days. Overall things went off without too many major incidents and there was a lot of positive feedback from the attendees. Things seemed a little chaotic at times but it was all good.

Not sure about the exact attendance numbers yet, but there were almost 540 people that registered online. It definitely felt like there were more people here than there were at SELF 2009. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear final attendance numbers close to 700.

Learned a lot of new things to look into at DrupalCamp. Excited about learning how to do more with Drupal. Problem will be finding the time to play with it.

Managed to score a bunch of geeky t-shirts this year. Came back from SELF with 9 more t-shirts than I left with. A couple of them I bought, while the rest were freebies from various exhibitors.

SELFShirt.JPG

Even managed to go out and do some photowalking with Michael DeHaan of Puppet Labs and Ian Weller. We hit a shut down Krispy Kreme and got some interesting photos there using the neon red glow from the DOUGHNUT sign that was still lit up. Then we spent some time taking photos at an interesting fountain. Had a good time.

Fountain.JPG

KKWall.JPG

Also came back with around 2.6GB worth of photos, including a few videos from Dual Core‘s performance Saturday night. After making a first pass to weed through the obvious rejects, there are close to 550 photos still to go through.

By late Sunday, most of the volunteers and organizers were pretty wiped out.

KJNap.JPG

Looking forward to helping create another successful SELF for 2011.

Idiot tolerance

Leonard: How is it my fault?
Penny: You have destroyed my ability to tolerate idiots! Now come with me!
Leonard: Where are we going?
Penny: We’re going to have sex!
Leonard: Wha, I mean, ok
Sheldon: What’s going on?
Penny: Put on your noise cancelling headphones, ‘cuz it’s gonna get loud!
Sheldon: Oh not this again!

Big Bang Theory

Photowalking

The 2010 edition of the Worldwide Photowalk is coming up soon (July 24) to a location near you. Helping to organize last year’s photo walk was a lot of fun. This year there will be two photowalks happening in the Charleston area.

The Charleston photowalk is meeting downtown at the Powder Magazine in the morning and is being lead by Adam Barret.

Later on in the afternoon, I’ll be leading the North Charleston photo walk starting at the North Charleston Riverfront Park and then wandering through the old Navy base.
Feel free to join one or both photowalks!

Politicking

The thought occurred to me today.

US politics isn’t about politicians representing their people.

It’s about politicians trying to convince the people that his/her beliefs are their beliefs.

Missy the Ball Fiend

I’ve had Missy out at the dog park a couple of times now, and she is a huge ball fiend. She can barely sit still waiting for you to throw the ball and takes off like a rocket after it. She’s a lot of fun to watch chasing after the ball.

She even brings it back to me, unlike some dogs I know (Nala and Simba, I’m looking at you…)

This makes it easy to tire her out. She also doesn’t know when to stop and take a break. Now that it’s getting hotter out, it’s easy for her to run herself into heat exhaustion or worse, which is bad, especially being a black dog and smaller than the others, who do have the sense to stop when they get too hot. That means rationing the ball throwing and making her take breaks, even though she looks like she doesn’t want to.