FUDCon at t=(7.77e8 ms)

I arrived at FUDCon Toronto approximate 7.77 x 10⁸ milliseconds ago (as of the starting time of this post’s composition), and I felt like that’s about long enough to wait before doing a final recap.

This past FUDCon was my first, and I’m really glad I ended up going. To be honest, I didn’t think it would even be possible for me to go, so I brushed it off – until someone suggested that I apply for financial aid. I can’t thank those people enough who determined that I was “worthy” to be sent to the conference. I wish I’d gotten my user track class aligned earlier, but I feel I did my part between helping out with some of them and transcribing three other sessions.

Turns out that this was the first time I’d left the country alone (I have been to England a few times, but always with my family), so that was an exciting personal achievement. But as for the conference, I have to take a little bit of pride in finishing my first package: Xinha, a JS module that turns <textarea>’s into rich text formatting areas; try it out on Fedora Insight when that site goes live! (Or try it at the project website: www.xinha.org.) It might have taken me a while to get there with this package, but now that I know how to do it I plan on taking on a few more packages over winter break.

Another big plus for FUDCon was being able to assign names to IRC nicks and faces to names (and faces to IRC nicks, by transitivity). Among those I feel like I made some connection with (in the style of a Perl hash):

# Nicks to names: ntonm

%ntonm = (

mchua => ‘Mel Chua’, # “We need Dennis to press the shiny button!”

biertie => ‘Bert Desmet’, # “Beer for breakfast…”

none_that_I_know_of => ‘Matthew from Toronto; Last name forgotten…’, # Pool game improves with glasses.

simon => ‘Simon Birtwistle, whose nick I can never remember’, # Runs Windows, but uses PuTTY, which is cool with me

# Et cetera… I can’t name them all here.

};

Something like that.

Anyway, this is my second blog post tonight (EST) and I’ll probably write one more (but I’ll schedule it to release later). Have a pleasant day or night (depending on where you are). Also note that I have three other FUDCon related posts:

1. Saturday morning
2. Saturday afternoon
3. Day 1 = Saturday recap

Now that I see that list, I realize that I never blogged anything from Sunday… but that’s okay. I was hackfesting for most of the conference day. Toshio helped me push my Xinha package into Pending (and eventually Testing) for RHEL-5 and Fedora-1{0,1}. I also looked on as the other Zikula hackers worked on content and logical layout. That night? Ice skating and the “Et cetera”, a sampling of four different house brews from the Three Brewers in Toronto.

Recapping FUDCon, day -exp(pi*i)

Let’s recap what happened yesterday at FUDCon:

• We assumed spherical ponies of uniform density
• We had healthy lunches
• The sysadmins and developers actually got along at their panel
• <Insert lots of great talks here>
• Transcribed some talks
• The Fearless Leader spoke
• Dave & Busters = Food + Beer + Pool

We’ll have to see how well the hackfests can stand up to that. I’m looking forward to it. I think I’ll be attending the Fedora Insight hackfest at the very least. Still need to check the wiki to find out what else there is.

And if you missed any of yesterday’s talks, be sure to go to the schedule page to find the IRC transcripts. I’ve proudly written the one on education with OSS, the one on Inkscape, and the one on UI design (even though my internet cut out for a bit in the middle of that one).
Also, I’ve recieved a few comments (IRL) about my previously posted “spy” pictures. I want to let everyone know that I am not, in fact, taking casual pictures with my phone and calling them spy pictures because I feel sneaky using that little camera. In reality, I do have spy cameras setup at various strategically chosen locations around the hotel and campus so that I know exactly where everyone and everything is.

Always.

…
Protip: Don’t get black tea at the hotel. They don’t give you boiling water so it comes out poorly; the earl grey just tastes like bergamot oil with no tea.

FUDCon: 1320/Saturday

I attended Bert’s Installing Fedora session in block 1; I think it went pretty well, although I probably would have prefered a less technical and more end-user/hands-on approach, but that’s probably the User-Guide-”Writer” coming out in me.

BarCamp was fun too, and full of ponies…

Voting at Barcamp

And what lunch lacks in choice it makes up in the quaint cuteness of brown bags, along with some pretty tasty treats. I’ve arranged them here in golden sprial style.

Fibonacci lunch

FUDCon: 0835/Saturday

FUDCon’s here! I’m sitting in the lobby of the Hilton Garden Inn in Vaughn.

The busses come every 30 minutes, Seth tells me; I guess I’ll catch the 8:5x one (?x in {0..9}). I’ve taken some spy pictures with my phone of the lobby and such…

Main lobby

Other part of the main lobby

So apparently I need to go buy a bus ticket; will check in again… with more spy pictures.