Just because I should rejoin the land of the living, doesn’t mean I will. In addition to just going out with friends, I have been involved in some local Linux stuff in February (I know, I’m a 3rd of the way into March already!).
First was the PLUG meeting on February 6th. Peter Bailey, a “Linux Technologist” from Dell flew in from Texas and was able to schedule his trip to coincide with the meeting. His talk was split about halfway between server and desktop/laptop offerings, leaning toward servers a bit simply because there were more questions in that direction. I was pleased with the talk, and gave me a lot to think about with regard to Dell’s Open Source initiatives. The talk had a great turnout, about 45 people! No doubt some were drawn by the promise of free pizza ;) and we really lucked out by having a very unseasonably warm February evening so were able to take advantage of the outdoor seating at the tiny corner pizzeria we go to after meetings – about 25 people came along for pizza. Huge thanks to the HostMySite.com guy, Tim Dodd, who I worked with to make this meeting a reality. Photos: attendees and Peter presenting.
On the 16th I threw an Ubuntu Pennsylvania LAN Party. Pretty much everyone brought some sort of alcohol along with their computer, and we ended up having a blast. 2PM was when people started showing up and we got a couple servers up with games. We ended up primarily playing Armagetron (not really my thing), Open Arena (oooh, it’s like UT! Deathmatch and Capture the Flag!) and Urban Terror (oh this was fun!). Pizza, chips, cookies, beer, liquor, gaming, oh my! It was getting pretty late when the laptop running Urban Terror crashed and we declared it time to drink more. It went “downhill” from there :) Most of us got properly smashed, and one party attendee decided the next day that he never wanted to see an Irish Carbomb ever again, after getting very sick as the night wore down (I sure had a nice time with them though). Somewhere along the way Michael thought it would be funny to take a video of the drunk people (OK, I uploaded it, I thought it was funny too), and as much as I hate to admit it… the influence of horrible flash movies on drunk people causes us to do odd things, like “THIS IS SPARTA!” (the sober people chose not to participate) oh dear me. OK, so the party wasn’t all roses. One of the attendees got into a car accident(!) on the way over – no injuries but he did a number on the car he was driving… and still came to the LAN party. And I already mentioned the one person getting pretty sick, poor guy …and poor the rest of us, the house only has one bathroom! And the next day was spent cleaning the house – most of which Michael did since obviously I wasn’t feeling fantastic ;) All the rest of the party photos are here.
The Monday after the party was a PLUG North meeting which I swung by to catch up with some people and see Walt Mankowski’s Natural Language Processing with Perl talk again (not the first time I’ve seen a talk at Central and suburbs… the venues are quite different and make for enough of a difference in the talks that it’s actually worthwhile, for me anyway, to see the same talk in both places sometimes).
And now I’m going to get showered and dressed for real…
Sunday, Mar 9th, 2008 at 22:19
I would love to attend the next linux party!
Saturday, Mar 15th, 2008 at 13:51
I would just to say that it, in fact, was a stroke that caused all of that…