Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
You should go. It’s always a good time.
Southeast Linuxfest has always been a pretty casual event and everybody generally has a pretty good time.
Linux geeks are usually pretty creative at hacking together a solution. What do you do when you need to enhance wifi coverage? Stick a wireless router on a pole.
Computer geeks like coffee (generally), so the people at Sudo Make Coffee came up with some varieties.
What would a computer conference be without the requisite rats nest of Cat5?
Of course, everybody loves Dave “Sexy” Yates.
Tom Callaway’s opening for his keynote was pretty hilarious.
Usually it’s a wedding or wedding reception that gets party crashed. This time a wedding crashed the SELF party.
Tux was stolen…
and then returned
and then stolen again.
Check out my full set of SELF 2011 photos in the gallery.
Another successful Southeast LInuxfest in the bag.
This year’s event didn’t seem quite as busy as last year. No firm numbers yet, but I’d guess somewhere around 400 or so. Looked like somewhere around 200-300 for each of the keynote sessions. Both of the keynote sessions by Jon “maddog” Hall (phone rant) and Tom Callaway (Cloud cloud cloud) were very entertaining.
Most of my time was spent running around doing miscellaneous errands, taking photos and manning one of the video camera for recording sessions. Ended up with over close to 500 photos, that I’ve whittled down to around 350 after the first pass. Will go through them one or two more times to weed out a few more before posting them.
Highlights of SELF included the mingling of Linux geeks with a debutante ball, another awesome performance by Dual Core at the SELF party, the SELF party getting crashed by a wedding party. There were apparently many more drunken antics that I missed.
Tux was stolen, returned, then stolen again. A good session on regular expressions by Tom Good. Lots of great Drupal sessions at DrupalCampSC. Learned about a lot of neat things that I want to try out. Discovered sudo make coffee and brought home a couple bags to try out.
Already looking forward to next year.
The third edition of Southeast Linuxfest is coming June 10-12 once again to the Marriott Renaissance in Spartanburg, SC.
Organizers are busy working behind the scenes to put together another great event for this year. SELF is currently looking for vendors, sponsors and speakers and volunteers.
If you want to find out more about SELF, want to help or are interested in participating, contact us or come hang out in the SELF IRC channel.
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.
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.
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.
Looking forward to helping create another successful SELF for 2011.