Both Sparks and I suffered from Bill Gates Syndrome in that I could not get F8 to recognize my CDROM drive and Sparks wireless wouldn't cooperate. His problem was surprising as it's both a recent system and a recent wireless card (which worked when we tested it in Virginia). My issue wasn't that surprising as the laptop a Sony that's over five years old. Getting a distro up and running on it, when it was brand new, was a headache and a half.
Luckily, I had the N800 with me. I was able to visit some of the sites that were talked about and I managed to grab a few photos (I'll post them when I have the change to sort through them). I think that, next time, we'll spend the weekend before building/testing systems, vice on-the-fly.
All in all, it was a good time. We sat in on a few of the talks. FedoraTV, open source GIS, and Asterisk were memorable. When we first got there, I fired up Kismet on the N800 to see what was available (RedHat provided a wireless connection). To our suprise, we detected 5 OLPC computers. We didn't see them at first but did get to touch one of three later in the day. (Hint: they show up as ad-hoc probes for "olpc-mesh".)
The one sour note of the evening (which irks me more and more as I think about it) was a particularly rude comment by Jared Smith, at the end of his talk. He'd given a copy of his book, "Asterisk: The Future of Telephone," to a young woman sitting in the row in front of me. She was actually quite happy to have received it. I suggested that she get Jared to autograph it, which she did. As I was leaving, I overheard him say something along the lines of "How would you like it signed? Best of luck to my favorite E-Bay bidder?"
Grr... What an ass ego ass!
(Note to Jared: Some people cherish their autographed books. I have a number of them, even some published by O'Reilly. Besides, you aren't worth that much.)
Regardless of one poorly thought out comment, I highly recommend FUDCon and BarCamp. Even if you only learn one or two new things while attending, you get to meet people from various circles and you'll probably pick up a few new ideas about some of the programs you've been using for years. Heck, you might even end up talking about one of your passions.
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