Last week I traveled to Philadelphia to spend some time with friends and speak at FOSSCON. While I was there, I noticed a Philadelphia area Linux Users Group (PLUG) meeting would land during that week and decided to propose a talk on Ubuntu 16.04.
But first I happened to be out getting my nails done with a friend on Sunday before my talk. Since I was there, I decided to Ubuntu theme things up again. Drawing freehand, the manicurist gave me some lovely Ubuntu logos.
Girly nails aside, that’s how I ended up at The ATS Group on Monday evening for a PLUG West meeting. They had a very nice welcome sign for the group. Danita and I arrived shortly after 7PM for the Q&A portion of the meeting. This pre-presentation time gave me the opportunity to pass around my BQ Aquaris M10 tablet running Ubuntu. After the first unceremonious pass, I sent it around a second time with more of an introduction, and the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo so people could see convergence in action by switching between the tablet and desktop view. Unlike my previous presentations, I was traveling so I didn’t have my bag of laptops and extra tablet, so that was the extent of the demos.
The meeting was very well attended and the talk went well. It was nice to have folks chiming in on a few of the topics (like the transition to systemd) and there were good questions. I also was able to give away a copy of our The Official Ubuntu Book, 9th Edition to an attendee who was new to Ubuntu.
Keith C. Perry shared a video of the talk on G+ here. Slides are similar to past talks, but I added a couple since I was presenting on a Xubuntu system (rather than Ubuntu) and didn’t have pure Ubuntu demos available: slides (7.6M PDF, lots of screenshots).
After the meeting we all had an enjoyable time at The Office, which I hadn’t been to since moving away from Philadelphia almost seven years ago.
Thanks again to everyone who came out, it was nice to meet a few new folks and catch up with a bunch of people I haven’t seen in several years.
Saturday was FOSSCON! The Ubuntu Pennsylvania LoCo team showed up to have a booth, staffed by long time LoCo member Randy Gold.
They had Ubuntu demos, giveaways from the Ubuntu conference pack (lanyards, USB sticks, pins) and I dropped off a copy of the Ubuntu book for people to browse, along with some discount coupons for folks who wanted to buy it. My Ubuntu tablet also spent time at the table so people could play around with that.
Thanks to Randy for the booth photo!
At the conference closing, we had three Ubuntu books to raffle off! They seemed to go to people who appreciated them and since both José and I attended the conference, the raffle winners had 2/3 of the authors there to sign the books.
My co-author, José Antonio Rey, signing a copy of our book!