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Bay Area Lucid Release Parties and Bay Area Geeknic #1

What an exciting few days!

Thursday night over 60 (maybe more, the RSVP list was longer and it was difficult to count!) Ubuntu fans poured into Thirsty Bear for a Lucid release party! This turnout was unexpectedly large (maybe reserve the room upstairs next time?) and wonderfully exciting! I was able to meet a whole bunch of interesting people, catch up with others, and a few people from out of town even dropped by to mingle and take part in some Ubuntu partying.

Mark Terranova posted several photos in the West Coast Ubuntu Flickr Group:

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I forgot to bring my camera, but luckily Sameer Verma had one that he passed around and got lots of great shots, which he posted here: Facebook.com: Sameer Verma’s Photos – Ubuntu Lucid release party

And I shamelessly borrowed a few for this post (thanks Sameer!):



It was also really fun to be able to give out some Ubuntu California T-Shirts (Jono is sporting one in the photo above) to some of our more active team members. Thanks again to Neal Bussett down in SoCal for sending the boxes of shirts up north, I’ll be shipping out several in the coming weeks.

Friday evening was the Diablo Valley Linux Users Group Lucid release party – plus celebration of Grant Bowman‘s birthday (and apparently celebrating the ascension to the throne of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands? Grant wore orange). So I took a BART train out to Walnut Creek and walked down to Caffe La Scala to meet up with a few people for the DVLUG release itself. Compared to the night before it was very, very low key, but it was nice meeting up with some folks over in the East Bay and La Scala makes a mean white mocha. From there we headed over to meet up with some more folks at The Cheesecake Factory, where this photo was taken out front by Mark:

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Dinner was great, the food, the company, the atmosphere. Once it was wrapped up I was even fortunate enough to get a ride home back to SF so I didn’t need to wait for a train (thanks again Daniel!).

Saturday was the first Bay Area Geeknic! We tossed this one together within just a few weeks and didn’t publicize it as well as we could have – figured this would be a trial one to events we’d have throughout the coming months, get a feel for what worked and what didn’t, get some idea of how we could do better next time. In reality? It turned out to be quite a successful event, I counted about 30 attendees at the height of it, we weren’t wanting for any necessities (and there was a grocery store pretty close when we did need to run out for a few things), there was plenty of food, beautiful weather, awesome geeky conversations, volleyball, frisbees! All I actually learned from this is that I need to wear sunscreen in the sun, I got a little toasted.




I put more of my photos over in a Flickr set: May 1st 2010 Bay Area Geeknic

And there are also Mark Terranova’s Geeknic Photos

It really was amazing how well everything came together for this. I can’t wait for the next one! Which we’re already planning (ok, we’re also planning a third, in July!).

Unfortunately today I’m missing the SF-LUG release event where Grant is presenting on the new release (just like he did at Felton LUG yesterday!) in favor of boring things like running errands and getting prepared for the trip to Brussels for UDS next week. OK, I’m pretty excited for Brussels so even getting prepared for the trip isn’t that boring. Passport? Check. Power converters? Check…

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 1:18 pm and is filed under events, tech, ubuntu planet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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