Sunday, 20 July 2008
Lug Radio Live Day 1
Today started like any other recovering-from-a-hangover day... wake up too early, try and figure out why that was, go back to sleep, wake up, shower, have breakfast... except the next part was slightly unusual.
Because I had a 2-or-so wait until LRL started, I figured I'd try and get some coding done, but I decided... why go back to my room, when I can maybe meet up with some other geeks, so I fired up my laptop on the sofa at the bottom of the lifts at the Wolverhampton Novetel hotel. I'd just succeeded in connecting to the SSHd at home, when some guy came up and asked me if I was here for LRL. I said yes, and promptly put away my laptop. Coding... Fail.
We talked for about an hour and then decided to go and find this place. The guy I was there with also needed Ibruprofen, so we went on a mission for pain relief.
Finally, we found the venue, and discovered that we were 2nd and 3rd in line. The first guy had travelled down *THAT DAY* from Aberdeen for the show. Very dedicated! We waited for the show to get ready (and I took a about an hour or so) by which time the queue had started to go around the corner. I'd planned to take some photos of that, but frankly, couldn't get a decent shot. The music was loud and pretty good, and I recognised some of the exhibitors pushing past us to get into the show.
At about 10:30, (may have been closer to 11:00), we were all invited to "come on in then!", where we paid for our tickets, picked up a "Nutsack" and then filed in further to the Atrium.
In the Atrium were all the stall-exhibitors, and I spent most of the first couple of hours talking to the Open Rights Group, the Neuros OSD community guys and the Linux Outlaws.
The ORG had a pretty cool image on their laptop machine which was of the "Now, that's what I call music" CD case, showing "Now, that's what I call personal data - 25 million records lost". It looks pretty cool, and I want to send that to some mates. Sadly, it looks like there might be licensing issues and I'll need to fix them first, but yehr, that was cool :).
The Neuros OSD community guys were pimping the OSD device, but also had a pre-release OSD-2 to show off. If I hadn't just invested the time in the PS3 and Mythbox solution at home... well, I'd have bought one yesterday! (Oh, that and I didn't really have the money to blow on it!).
Besides it being LugRadioLive - you know, the thing that made me listen to podcasts in the first place, I also wanted to meet the podcasters who do Linux Outlaws. These guys have a really slick podcast and are the natural successor to the Linux Podcast throne - in my humble opinion :) I'd hoped to talk to them at the pre-show party on Friday Night, but they'd had their own pre-show party in Liverpool, which sounds like it might have been just as drunken as the LRL pre-show party!
So, yehr, I talked to Dan and Fab (Linux Outlaws) for a bit, and even took a few pics, although they're on my phone right now. They were really nice guys, but they were pretty busy with people talking to them a lot, so I figured I'd give them some space.
I showed off my EEE with the Ubuntu Netbooks Release on it, and shoed the devs for the fact that the icons were into the file browsing section... until I realised I'd had an update a couple of days back and it fixed it. Miracle of Miracle! :) Please forgive me Ubuntu Netbook Team and the Ume-Launcher Team.
The show started with a rousing welcome from the LugRadio Guys, who let us know what was going on and then... on to the talks.
I went first to the GroupHug presentation, which was billed as "Clustering with an evil twist". Basically the guy has figured out a job scheduling environment for Bash on multiple machines which all report back to a common core. He did a presentation, but I don't think it went down well. Someone said to me "This was an I Did It presentation." If I could figure out where I'd use it, I'd look at it again, especially as the clustering projects I have looked at all seem to have failed.
I didn't really fancy the OpenStreetMap talk, so I went to the cafe and considered having a soft drink or two. Ordered my first one and decided I couldn't really afford the second one, so I mooched around the stalls again, and had a good chat with a guy from 64Studio who was showing off an example of where his project has worked well, which is this Samsung touch panel device. It's been adopted by loads of rappers in the states, as something to do their mixing on while out and about. It was pretty cool, and if I had any musical talent beyond being able to whistle a (practically) perfect sine wave and a little bit of singing, I'd be very much up for some of that little device.
Another stall was a "Collaborative Art" project. Basically people were encoraged to put their mark on an A1 sheet of paper. Being the un-original guy I am, the stall next to this one was the Debian stall, so I copied their logo into the top left quarter of the sheet. For fairness, I then did the same for the Fedora project. Again, I have a photo.
I watched Bruno's talk on "Baguette on Snails" - a mocutation (is that the right word for a mocking presentation? Probably not) about the fact that to program, or use most of the Internet, you need to know English, and that not enough projects put the efford into I18n (Internationalization). Oh, and it got a few (slightly cheap) laughs from the audience when he "created objects" representing the presenters of Lug Radio as Cows.
The guy I met in the hotel in the morning and I went looking for lunch, and having walked around about three streets, we decided to get "Pork in a bun". It was very nice. We went back and waited for the afternoon shows.
I went to see the talk given by Jeremy Allison about the Samba project, which sadly was stuff I'd heard before, so it wasn't really that interesting. I'd have preferred to see a talk about reverse engineering the Microsoft Protocols, or how you deal with stuff when your user base is as big as it is. Never mind, he was an engaging speaker and I guess there must have been some people in the audience who hadn't heard the story before.
I went to see "The Gong-a-Thong", presented by no less than the Community Hero for years running - Mr Ben. Let's just say, you have to have massive balls to present the Gong-a-thong, but it must be pretty cold, as they weren't on show! The topics weren't very good for the most part. Basically, you have 5 minutes per talk, and they fit as many in as they can. Sadly, the bulk of them hadn't really planned what they were going to say, and the one guy who did (that I really enjoyed, but seemed to fall flat for the rest of the audience) was talking about safely getting from one pub to another using routing protocols. The best part of that talk was when he said "to identify the TTL, you had to set up a loop between two pubs and visit each one, consume a drink there and carry on to the next pub. The TTL was set when the traffic stopped, and that it wasn't user specifiable!"
Once Mr Ben had reclothed himself, he did a talk on "Supporting World Domination", where he had some really great ideas, that I'm eager to be involved in implementing. I'll not talk about these too much until the end of day 2, but yehr... that was a good talk.
Lastly, we had.... LUGRADIO LIVE & UNLEASHED.
It's an hour or so of talking, and I shouted stuff from the back a couple of times that they heard and responded to. I'm hoping I'll be audible on the recording, but if not, it was still great feeling. You should listen to the show as there's no way I can describe it beyond saying it was really good to be there, be an active participant in a show rather than just a consumer of it. The really good news that came out of it was that these guys wanted to carry on with the Live shows, so they'll probably be doing that next year. I hope that even if they don't do it (hey, a year is a long time for life to change things) that they might still recognise me at the Combined UK Podcasts tour instead :)
I went back to the hotel, sorted out some stuff and then headed out to go to the evening party, when guess who was behind me... Dan and Fab from the Linux Outlaws show, plus a group of their friends who met on Jaiku. As I'd spoken to both Dan and Fab earlier, they recognised me (although it might have had something to do with me saying Hi to them!), and as I knew where I was going, we went off into the centre together. We all had something to eat together, and it was a really nice feeling being able to just sit and talk with them all... I'd definately do that again (given the chance). We went on to the LRL venue again, and I bought some of the Jaiku lot a drink - I'd have bought them all a drink, but they'd already bought their own by this point. I was feeling good... I was drinking with these online-heroes of mine, and then Jono walked past, and I bought him a drink... and he was there with Dan and Fab and me for about half an hour... Rock On!
Then, the Karoke started up. Well, what a mixed bunch were there! Some people were really good, and then others... well, weren't so good. Jono Bacon and "Sarah", an Irish girl who I should probably know from the way everyone else was treating her were excellent examples of Karoke done *right*. There were a group of three interlopers who really couldn't sing and I just couldn't stop laughing which didn't go down so well with them. After a few songs and feeling more than a little drunk, I went for a sit down somewhere quiet, and discovered Bruno sitting by himself. He and I talked for more than an hour about all sorts of stuff, and it was really cool. This is one of the nicest guys I've met at LRL, and I've met quite a few this year.
I suddenly realised that even though I'd not had a drink for more than an hour I was still feeling incredibly drunk, so I decided that it was time to head back to the hotel. I bought a bottle of water at the hotel bar (which was surprisingly still open at gone 1AM) and retired to my room to try and flood out my hangover with pure water. Sad to report, it hasn't worked!
Because I had a 2-or-so wait until LRL started, I figured I'd try and get some coding done, but I decided... why go back to my room, when I can maybe meet up with some other geeks, so I fired up my laptop on the sofa at the bottom of the lifts at the Wolverhampton Novetel hotel. I'd just succeeded in connecting to the SSHd at home, when some guy came up and asked me if I was here for LRL. I said yes, and promptly put away my laptop. Coding... Fail.
We talked for about an hour and then decided to go and find this place. The guy I was there with also needed Ibruprofen, so we went on a mission for pain relief.
Finally, we found the venue, and discovered that we were 2nd and 3rd in line. The first guy had travelled down *THAT DAY* from Aberdeen for the show. Very dedicated! We waited for the show to get ready (and I took a about an hour or so) by which time the queue had started to go around the corner. I'd planned to take some photos of that, but frankly, couldn't get a decent shot. The music was loud and pretty good, and I recognised some of the exhibitors pushing past us to get into the show.
At about 10:30, (may have been closer to 11:00), we were all invited to "come on in then!", where we paid for our tickets, picked up a "Nutsack" and then filed in further to the Atrium.
In the Atrium were all the stall-exhibitors, and I spent most of the first couple of hours talking to the Open Rights Group, the Neuros OSD community guys and the Linux Outlaws.
The ORG had a pretty cool image on their laptop machine which was of the "Now, that's what I call music" CD case, showing "Now, that's what I call personal data - 25 million records lost". It looks pretty cool, and I want to send that to some mates. Sadly, it looks like there might be licensing issues and I'll need to fix them first, but yehr, that was cool :).
The Neuros OSD community guys were pimping the OSD device, but also had a pre-release OSD-2 to show off. If I hadn't just invested the time in the PS3 and Mythbox solution at home... well, I'd have bought one yesterday! (Oh, that and I didn't really have the money to blow on it!).
Besides it being LugRadioLive - you know, the thing that made me listen to podcasts in the first place, I also wanted to meet the podcasters who do Linux Outlaws. These guys have a really slick podcast and are the natural successor to the Linux Podcast throne - in my humble opinion :) I'd hoped to talk to them at the pre-show party on Friday Night, but they'd had their own pre-show party in Liverpool, which sounds like it might have been just as drunken as the LRL pre-show party!
So, yehr, I talked to Dan and Fab (Linux Outlaws) for a bit, and even took a few pics, although they're on my phone right now. They were really nice guys, but they were pretty busy with people talking to them a lot, so I figured I'd give them some space.
I showed off my EEE with the Ubuntu Netbooks Release on it, and shoed the devs for the fact that the icons were into the file browsing section... until I realised I'd had an update a couple of days back and it fixed it. Miracle of Miracle! :) Please forgive me Ubuntu Netbook Team and the Ume-Launcher Team.
The show started with a rousing welcome from the LugRadio Guys, who let us know what was going on and then... on to the talks.
I went first to the GroupHug presentation, which was billed as "Clustering with an evil twist". Basically the guy has figured out a job scheduling environment for Bash on multiple machines which all report back to a common core. He did a presentation, but I don't think it went down well. Someone said to me "This was an I Did It presentation." If I could figure out where I'd use it, I'd look at it again, especially as the clustering projects I have looked at all seem to have failed.
I didn't really fancy the OpenStreetMap talk, so I went to the cafe and considered having a soft drink or two. Ordered my first one and decided I couldn't really afford the second one, so I mooched around the stalls again, and had a good chat with a guy from 64Studio who was showing off an example of where his project has worked well, which is this Samsung touch panel device. It's been adopted by loads of rappers in the states, as something to do their mixing on while out and about. It was pretty cool, and if I had any musical talent beyond being able to whistle a (practically) perfect sine wave and a little bit of singing, I'd be very much up for some of that little device.
Another stall was a "Collaborative Art" project. Basically people were encoraged to put their mark on an A1 sheet of paper. Being the un-original guy I am, the stall next to this one was the Debian stall, so I copied their logo into the top left quarter of the sheet. For fairness, I then did the same for the Fedora project. Again, I have a photo.
I watched Bruno's talk on "Baguette on Snails" - a mocutation (is that the right word for a mocking presentation? Probably not) about the fact that to program, or use most of the Internet, you need to know English, and that not enough projects put the efford into I18n (Internationalization). Oh, and it got a few (slightly cheap) laughs from the audience when he "created objects" representing the presenters of Lug Radio as Cows.
The guy I met in the hotel in the morning and I went looking for lunch, and having walked around about three streets, we decided to get "Pork in a bun". It was very nice. We went back and waited for the afternoon shows.
I went to see the talk given by Jeremy Allison about the Samba project, which sadly was stuff I'd heard before, so it wasn't really that interesting. I'd have preferred to see a talk about reverse engineering the Microsoft Protocols, or how you deal with stuff when your user base is as big as it is. Never mind, he was an engaging speaker and I guess there must have been some people in the audience who hadn't heard the story before.
I went to see "The Gong-a-Thong", presented by no less than the Community Hero for years running - Mr Ben. Let's just say, you have to have massive balls to present the Gong-a-thong, but it must be pretty cold, as they weren't on show! The topics weren't very good for the most part. Basically, you have 5 minutes per talk, and they fit as many in as they can. Sadly, the bulk of them hadn't really planned what they were going to say, and the one guy who did (that I really enjoyed, but seemed to fall flat for the rest of the audience) was talking about safely getting from one pub to another using routing protocols. The best part of that talk was when he said "to identify the TTL, you had to set up a loop between two pubs and visit each one, consume a drink there and carry on to the next pub. The TTL was set when the traffic stopped, and that it wasn't user specifiable!"
Once Mr Ben had reclothed himself, he did a talk on "Supporting World Domination", where he had some really great ideas, that I'm eager to be involved in implementing. I'll not talk about these too much until the end of day 2, but yehr... that was a good talk.
Lastly, we had.... LUGRADIO LIVE & UNLEASHED.
It's an hour or so of talking, and I shouted stuff from the back a couple of times that they heard and responded to. I'm hoping I'll be audible on the recording, but if not, it was still great feeling. You should listen to the show as there's no way I can describe it beyond saying it was really good to be there, be an active participant in a show rather than just a consumer of it. The really good news that came out of it was that these guys wanted to carry on with the Live shows, so they'll probably be doing that next year. I hope that even if they don't do it (hey, a year is a long time for life to change things) that they might still recognise me at the Combined UK Podcasts tour instead :)
I went back to the hotel, sorted out some stuff and then headed out to go to the evening party, when guess who was behind me... Dan and Fab from the Linux Outlaws show, plus a group of their friends who met on Jaiku. As I'd spoken to both Dan and Fab earlier, they recognised me (although it might have had something to do with me saying Hi to them!), and as I knew where I was going, we went off into the centre together. We all had something to eat together, and it was a really nice feeling being able to just sit and talk with them all... I'd definately do that again (given the chance). We went on to the LRL venue again, and I bought some of the Jaiku lot a drink - I'd have bought them all a drink, but they'd already bought their own by this point. I was feeling good... I was drinking with these online-heroes of mine, and then Jono walked past, and I bought him a drink... and he was there with Dan and Fab and me for about half an hour... Rock On!
Then, the Karoke started up. Well, what a mixed bunch were there! Some people were really good, and then others... well, weren't so good. Jono Bacon and "Sarah", an Irish girl who I should probably know from the way everyone else was treating her were excellent examples of Karoke done *right*. There were a group of three interlopers who really couldn't sing and I just couldn't stop laughing which didn't go down so well with them. After a few songs and feeling more than a little drunk, I went for a sit down somewhere quiet, and discovered Bruno sitting by himself. He and I talked for more than an hour about all sorts of stuff, and it was really cool. This is one of the nicest guys I've met at LRL, and I've met quite a few this year.
I suddenly realised that even though I'd not had a drink for more than an hour I was still feeling incredibly drunk, so I decided that it was time to head back to the hotel. I bought a bottle of water at the hotel bar (which was surprisingly still open at gone 1AM) and retired to my room to try and flood out my hangover with pure water. Sad to report, it hasn't worked!
Labels: LRL08, LugRadio, LugRadioLive, LugRadioLive08
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