Sunday, 20 July 2008
Lug Radio Live - Day 2
I woke this morning feeling *AWFUL*. Once again, my body clock woke me early, at about 5:30, 6:00, 6:30, 6:45, 6:50, 7:00, 7:10, 7:30, 7:45. I finally gave up trying to reject the world and had a shower and finished the blog post I was writing last night. I went down to breakfast and met up with the guy from breakfast yesterday. We talked about the party last night and the states that various people got themselves into during the evening. I bought a bottle of water from the bar, scrounged a couple of ibruprofen from another LRL'er, settled my bill and left some luggage with reception, and then made my way to the venue. There was already a queue outside, but as I arrived it started to rain. The hordes approached the entrance and were let in! I noticed that Fab and Dan (from Linux Outlaws) failed to arrive at anything even vaguely approaching the right time!, but figured that they were big grown up boys and would probably manage :)
After we were played some intro out-takes and more people arrived, the LRL team started the show back up. I went first to Barbie's [1] talk on Inbox Malware. I feel pretty awful about this, but it's a subject I'm pretty aware about - albeit about 2 years out of date, so I half dozed through this talk.
I went from there to the Mass Debate. The panel consisted of Mr Ben (LugRadio Community), Jeremy Allison (Samba/Google), Matthew Garrett (Kernel/X.Org) and Max Spevack (Fedora). Let's be honest... Again, I'd prefer a more technical talk, but it's not a realistic hope given it was a debate rather than a technical forum. Some of the subjects discussed while I was there were:
1) GPLv2 vs GPLv3 - good thing, bad thing or apathy rules? What circumstances would people be recommended not to use GPLv3 if starting a new project today?
Of the hands raised, a VERY small proportion said it was a bad thing, and then the rest of the hands were 50/50 good thing/apathy. Slightly worrying, but Jeremy did say that most people don't care about the license, until they have to enforce it. The only circumstances where people would be encouraged to not license something under GPLv3 was if they were writing a kernel patch (as this is currently GPLv2 Only) or for integration into a project which is GPLv2 only. Jeremy also said that if this is the case, make sure the license says "GPLv2 or greater", to ensure you have the ability to roll on to GPL3 without needing to contact all the contributors to ask for their permission to upgrade the license.
2) Is anyone surprised that Hans Reiser did it? [2] and what is the future of ReiserFS, to which one member of the audience yelled out "It's fucked" while another said "It's an open source project - it doesn't matter, someone else can carry it on". The Hans Reiser issue was not discussed at length, except for Jeremy saying it was a shock to him as he had met Hans in the past.
3) What did the panel think of OOXML?
A brief summary was that Jeremy followed (and wrote a lot of) the Company Line - OOXML was always redundant as ODF fulfilled everything that OOXML was supposed to fix. Mr Ben said that he thought the issue will only benefit the Open Source community, and someone (I can't remember if it was Mr Ben again) said that the additional information provided by Microsoft allowed the OOo [3] project to fix some bugs in the legacy DOC and XLS formats as they are, in theory, backwards compatible. Jeremy finished by saying that he can only applaud the Microsoft Office team for taking the decision to integrate ODF into ongoing versions of Office. There was more discussion about this issue, but most of it generally re-iterated these views.
4) Should the major distributions try and work towards the goal suggested by Mark Shuttleworth and try to release at the same time. The discussion did prompt the question from Max that why would the major enterprise distributions agree to something that would help a non-enterprise distribution gain market share from the market leader? The rest of the views basically revolved around the Application people saying that it would be good to have a stable platform to work from, but wouldn't it be really boring doing bug fixes for 3 months and feature development for 3 months? The distro people, both on stage and in the audience said that most enterprise distributions release based on features rather than time, as these tend to have long support periods. Jeremy finished off by saying that even if the distros did get "in step" for one release, they'd be completely out within two more releases!
5) How do we get more "New blood" into Open Source?
All the board seemed to think that desktop development is now fairly boring and the fun stuff is online. Matthew said that people are now likely to develop a facebook application, then migrate to a wordpress install, to PHP and then to "something better", which brought a murmur from the floor. Mr Ben finished off by saying that, contrary to popular belief, geeks did actually procreate. Jono wrapped up the mass debate at that point!
I went to Subway for lunch at this point and got talking to a couple from Aberdeen about the work they do and what, if any, other podcasts they listen to (none). We talked for about half an hour and then went back to LRL.
I went to the Telepathy talk in the afternoon (and plan on trying to figure out how to make it all work!) watched some of the talk on Second Life, and then made a point of attending the lightning talk on "Terminator". The project looks REALLY cool, and I'll be installing it on my laptop when I get back to a reliable and fast network service. He also talked about turning a weekend hack into a project. He said some stuff that I already do, but also mentioned that the main problem I tend to have (I'm a magpie when it comes to scratching itches) is fixed by getting users who adopt your project. He's right, I've just not got around to getting a project that's actually usable yet!
I went to the closing speech, and it was really great. I caught a penguin and the RedHat mini mouse :)
I said my goodbyes to Jono, Aq, Chris and Adam, to Dan and Fab and to the various other peoples that I'd spoken to over the weekend, then walked back to the hotel, retrieving my luggage and chatted with one of the Jaiku lot until about 10 minutes before my train was due to leave. I walked to the station and caught the train home.
I'm exhausted, very disappointed this was my first LRL, and desperate to find a replacement for my LugRadio loss.
I'm glad I got to meet all of the people I spoke to this weekend. I've had some really cool discussions with people, and made friends with people I'd never have experienced otherwise.
All in all. Bloody good fun.
Oh, and those looking for a new podcast to listen to; I can strongly recommend LinuxOutlaws if you like LugRadio. It mixes the irreverence of LugRadio, with actual content. Who would have thought it eh? :)
[1] Barbie is a guy. It threw me. There you go.
[2] He killed his wife, in case you didn't already know.
[3] OpenOffice.org
After we were played some intro out-takes and more people arrived, the LRL team started the show back up. I went first to Barbie's [1] talk on Inbox Malware. I feel pretty awful about this, but it's a subject I'm pretty aware about - albeit about 2 years out of date, so I half dozed through this talk.
I went from there to the Mass Debate. The panel consisted of Mr Ben (LugRadio Community), Jeremy Allison (Samba/Google), Matthew Garrett (Kernel/X.Org) and Max Spevack (Fedora). Let's be honest... Again, I'd prefer a more technical talk, but it's not a realistic hope given it was a debate rather than a technical forum. Some of the subjects discussed while I was there were:
1) GPLv2 vs GPLv3 - good thing, bad thing or apathy rules? What circumstances would people be recommended not to use GPLv3 if starting a new project today?
Of the hands raised, a VERY small proportion said it was a bad thing, and then the rest of the hands were 50/50 good thing/apathy. Slightly worrying, but Jeremy did say that most people don't care about the license, until they have to enforce it. The only circumstances where people would be encouraged to not license something under GPLv3 was if they were writing a kernel patch (as this is currently GPLv2 Only) or for integration into a project which is GPLv2 only. Jeremy also said that if this is the case, make sure the license says "GPLv2 or greater", to ensure you have the ability to roll on to GPL3 without needing to contact all the contributors to ask for their permission to upgrade the license.
2) Is anyone surprised that Hans Reiser did it? [2] and what is the future of ReiserFS, to which one member of the audience yelled out "It's fucked" while another said "It's an open source project - it doesn't matter, someone else can carry it on". The Hans Reiser issue was not discussed at length, except for Jeremy saying it was a shock to him as he had met Hans in the past.
3) What did the panel think of OOXML?
A brief summary was that Jeremy followed (and wrote a lot of) the Company Line - OOXML was always redundant as ODF fulfilled everything that OOXML was supposed to fix. Mr Ben said that he thought the issue will only benefit the Open Source community, and someone (I can't remember if it was Mr Ben again) said that the additional information provided by Microsoft allowed the OOo [3] project to fix some bugs in the legacy DOC and XLS formats as they are, in theory, backwards compatible. Jeremy finished by saying that he can only applaud the Microsoft Office team for taking the decision to integrate ODF into ongoing versions of Office. There was more discussion about this issue, but most of it generally re-iterated these views.
4) Should the major distributions try and work towards the goal suggested by Mark Shuttleworth and try to release at the same time. The discussion did prompt the question from Max that why would the major enterprise distributions agree to something that would help a non-enterprise distribution gain market share from the market leader? The rest of the views basically revolved around the Application people saying that it would be good to have a stable platform to work from, but wouldn't it be really boring doing bug fixes for 3 months and feature development for 3 months? The distro people, both on stage and in the audience said that most enterprise distributions release based on features rather than time, as these tend to have long support periods. Jeremy finished off by saying that even if the distros did get "in step" for one release, they'd be completely out within two more releases!
5) How do we get more "New blood" into Open Source?
All the board seemed to think that desktop development is now fairly boring and the fun stuff is online. Matthew said that people are now likely to develop a facebook application, then migrate to a wordpress install, to PHP and then to "something better", which brought a murmur from the floor. Mr Ben finished off by saying that, contrary to popular belief, geeks did actually procreate. Jono wrapped up the mass debate at that point!
I went to Subway for lunch at this point and got talking to a couple from Aberdeen about the work they do and what, if any, other podcasts they listen to (none). We talked for about half an hour and then went back to LRL.
I went to the Telepathy talk in the afternoon (and plan on trying to figure out how to make it all work!) watched some of the talk on Second Life, and then made a point of attending the lightning talk on "Terminator". The project looks REALLY cool, and I'll be installing it on my laptop when I get back to a reliable and fast network service. He also talked about turning a weekend hack into a project. He said some stuff that I already do, but also mentioned that the main problem I tend to have (I'm a magpie when it comes to scratching itches) is fixed by getting users who adopt your project. He's right, I've just not got around to getting a project that's actually usable yet!
I went to the closing speech, and it was really great. I caught a penguin and the RedHat mini mouse :)
I said my goodbyes to Jono, Aq, Chris and Adam, to Dan and Fab and to the various other peoples that I'd spoken to over the weekend, then walked back to the hotel, retrieving my luggage and chatted with one of the Jaiku lot until about 10 minutes before my train was due to leave. I walked to the station and caught the train home.
I'm exhausted, very disappointed this was my first LRL, and desperate to find a replacement for my LugRadio loss.
I'm glad I got to meet all of the people I spoke to this weekend. I've had some really cool discussions with people, and made friends with people I'd never have experienced otherwise.
All in all. Bloody good fun.
Oh, and those looking for a new podcast to listen to; I can strongly recommend LinuxOutlaws if you like LugRadio. It mixes the irreverence of LugRadio, with actual content. Who would have thought it eh? :)
[1] Barbie is a guy. It threw me. There you go.
[2] He killed his wife, in case you didn't already know.
[3] OpenOffice.org
Labels: LRL08, LugRadio, LugRadioLive, LugRadioLive08
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
Saturday, 19 July 2008
LugRadio Live 2008 - the Pre-Event Party
Today was the first time I'd ever really been in the presence of heroes in my eyes (except Alan Cox at my first ever Linux Expo UK - without realising that was who it was!). Today, not only did I get to meet Daviey and "Cied" (Ciemon Dunville), but I also got to offer Aq a pint. I'd have actually bought him one, but I was actually in the middle of a conversation with Daviey at the time, and wanted to continue the chat!
For those who don't know, Aq, Jono, Adam and Chris are the presenters of the famous-amongst-linux-peoples podcast LugRadio. Aq and Jono started the podcast four years ago, and this year they decided to close up shop - a sad day for all of us who love to chuckle in public at audio via headphones.
Having had a fairly quiet journey (as far as Stafford) from Manchester and checked into a nice-ish hotel (except for the people in the room next door) I decided to check out the pre-show party, as mentioned repeatedly on the LugRadio podcast, at the Hogs Head in Wolverhampton.
For those who have never been to Wolverhampton, let's just say that it's not exactly a large place. I walked from the outskirts to the centre in about 10 minutes, and even then most of that was wandering in circles making sure I'd actually not gone too far for the junction I was looking for!
The venue was packed (as it would be on a Friday Night), and my first order of the day was to charge my mobile. I turned on my laptop, turned off the power saving and plugged in the mobile.
Now, in a normal pub, this might have turned heads, but on this occasion, I think there might have been too many mobiles and laptops to phase anyone, so having put my laptop back in the bag and confirmed I was still charging my phone, I made my way to the bar.
The queue was rather heavy, but I managed to get close to the bar and order what soon became my usual - two Blue WKDs, and then made my way back to where I'd been charging my laptop.
I'd already spotted an 802.11 detecting T-Shirt, and suddenly realised that I'd made a fashion faux pas... I had exactly the *SAME* t-shirt. What was I to do? I couldn't arrange a wardrobe replacement overnight. Oh well, at least I was fairly unique in my lego-style "I love it when a plan comes together" A-Team T-Shirt, and maybe by Sunday the batteries in his T-Shirt would have run out and mine would still be fresh... plus I have a Transformers shirt, and no-one else there did... HA!
I slid over to where the Wifi-T-Shirt guy was standing and asked him if he was anything to do with LRL. He said yes, and directed me towards the beer garden. Oh my. What a lot of geeks.
I tried to take a photo, but sadly, as all I had with me was my dodgy mobile, the photos look like crap. They are tagged at the dashwire LRL08-pre-party tags page.
Fortunately, after about half an hour of standing around like an idiot, I saw someone I knew from GeekUp Manchester, and talked to him for half an hour. I know *who he is* but not his name. It's very bad of me. Hopefully, he'll post my picture on Flickr and I can tag it, and get his name as a result!
I went and bought some drinks (two Blue WKDs and a guiness for GeekUp Guy) and then headed back into the fray. I'd seen a Ubuntu-UK Podcast jacket and was looking for Dan and Fab of LinuxOutlaws fame. Sadly I didn't spot Fabs dreadlocks, so I couldn't lurk, and instead went and spoke to Daviey from UUPC. We talked for a while and eventually offered him a drink, and, while I was at the bar, recognised the dulcit tones of one Stuart "Aq" Langridge. I offered him a drink, but when the bar staff weren't damn quick enough for me, suggested I'd give him the money and come back to talk to him later. He declined and suggested I could offer him yet another drink tomorrow night. Oh why not I thought, and pocketed the about £1.80 in change I had!
I went back to talk to Daviey and Cied (also from UUPC) about Amateur Radio - a hobby that Cied and I have in common, and one that Daviey seems to have missed by the skin of his IRC virginity. After a while talking (where I seemed to volunteer for a speaking part on the UUPC cast to be recorded during LRL), Daviey misunderstood the universal sign language for "It's your round", thinking it meant "Drink up, I need a kebab", so went around for about half an hour saying goodbye to people, and then carried on talking once he'd bought his round (although I should note, he didn't bloody buy me a drink. Damnit). Meanwhile, I was introduced to Jon, dubbed "The Nasty Guy", after I mentioned my usual Web2.0 nickname and he protested that he was the only Jon in the room, hence he got given the bad name :)
After Daviey and Cied wandered off, Jon and I discussed life feeds, and how you should be able to tailor the feeds into "all photos of X", "All microblogs of X", "all work stuff from X", etc. I think I'm going to write it, and friendfeed be damned.
I bought another pair of bottles and realised that actually I was rather drunk, and was starting to not make any sense, so voluntarily returned to the hotel, met Gordon JCP in the lift after having admired his t-shirt from afar most of the night, and stumbled to my room (where my noisy neighbour has either gone to bed or left! Woot!) and figured I should probably write up what has happened thus far.
The only downside thus far has been that I've eaten only marshmallows and drunk only Blue WKDs since arriving at Manchester Piccadilly, so tomorrow I am likely to either be suffering from a sugar hangover, or worse a real hangover. Not so good. Sadly, when the bar closed at the hotel, they stopped doing room service, so I can't even have something greasy to sober me up.
Never mind, I'll learn for tomorrow night... take advantage of the Kebab house en-route, and damnit, Wolverhampton is small enough that you can go down every street to get back to the hotel, and you'll still not take more than 20 minutes to do it :)
Good Night all :)
For those who don't know, Aq, Jono, Adam and Chris are the presenters of the famous-amongst-linux-peoples podcast LugRadio. Aq and Jono started the podcast four years ago, and this year they decided to close up shop - a sad day for all of us who love to chuckle in public at audio via headphones.
Having had a fairly quiet journey (as far as Stafford) from Manchester and checked into a nice-ish hotel (except for the people in the room next door) I decided to check out the pre-show party, as mentioned repeatedly on the LugRadio podcast, at the Hogs Head in Wolverhampton.
For those who have never been to Wolverhampton, let's just say that it's not exactly a large place. I walked from the outskirts to the centre in about 10 minutes, and even then most of that was wandering in circles making sure I'd actually not gone too far for the junction I was looking for!
The venue was packed (as it would be on a Friday Night), and my first order of the day was to charge my mobile. I turned on my laptop, turned off the power saving and plugged in the mobile.
Now, in a normal pub, this might have turned heads, but on this occasion, I think there might have been too many mobiles and laptops to phase anyone, so having put my laptop back in the bag and confirmed I was still charging my phone, I made my way to the bar.
The queue was rather heavy, but I managed to get close to the bar and order what soon became my usual - two Blue WKDs, and then made my way back to where I'd been charging my laptop.
I'd already spotted an 802.11 detecting T-Shirt, and suddenly realised that I'd made a fashion faux pas... I had exactly the *SAME* t-shirt. What was I to do? I couldn't arrange a wardrobe replacement overnight. Oh well, at least I was fairly unique in my lego-style "I love it when a plan comes together" A-Team T-Shirt, and maybe by Sunday the batteries in his T-Shirt would have run out and mine would still be fresh... plus I have a Transformers shirt, and no-one else there did... HA!
I slid over to where the Wifi-T-Shirt guy was standing and asked him if he was anything to do with LRL. He said yes, and directed me towards the beer garden. Oh my. What a lot of geeks.
I tried to take a photo, but sadly, as all I had with me was my dodgy mobile, the photos look like crap. They are tagged at the dashwire LRL08-pre-party tags page.
Fortunately, after about half an hour of standing around like an idiot, I saw someone I knew from GeekUp Manchester, and talked to him for half an hour. I know *who he is* but not his name. It's very bad of me. Hopefully, he'll post my picture on Flickr and I can tag it, and get his name as a result!
I went and bought some drinks (two Blue WKDs and a guiness for GeekUp Guy) and then headed back into the fray. I'd seen a Ubuntu-UK Podcast jacket and was looking for Dan and Fab of LinuxOutlaws fame. Sadly I didn't spot Fabs dreadlocks, so I couldn't lurk, and instead went and spoke to Daviey from UUPC. We talked for a while and eventually offered him a drink, and, while I was at the bar, recognised the dulcit tones of one Stuart "Aq" Langridge. I offered him a drink, but when the bar staff weren't damn quick enough for me, suggested I'd give him the money and come back to talk to him later. He declined and suggested I could offer him yet another drink tomorrow night. Oh why not I thought, and pocketed the about £1.80 in change I had!
I went back to talk to Daviey and Cied (also from UUPC) about Amateur Radio - a hobby that Cied and I have in common, and one that Daviey seems to have missed by the skin of his IRC virginity. After a while talking (where I seemed to volunteer for a speaking part on the UUPC cast to be recorded during LRL), Daviey misunderstood the universal sign language for "It's your round", thinking it meant "Drink up, I need a kebab", so went around for about half an hour saying goodbye to people, and then carried on talking once he'd bought his round (although I should note, he didn't bloody buy me a drink. Damnit). Meanwhile, I was introduced to Jon, dubbed "The Nasty Guy", after I mentioned my usual Web2.0 nickname and he protested that he was the only Jon in the room, hence he got given the bad name :)
After Daviey and Cied wandered off, Jon and I discussed life feeds, and how you should be able to tailor the feeds into "all photos of X", "All microblogs of X", "all work stuff from X", etc. I think I'm going to write it, and friendfeed be damned.
I bought another pair of bottles and realised that actually I was rather drunk, and was starting to not make any sense, so voluntarily returned to the hotel, met Gordon JCP in the lift after having admired his t-shirt from afar most of the night, and stumbled to my room (where my noisy neighbour has either gone to bed or left! Woot!) and figured I should probably write up what has happened thus far.
The only downside thus far has been that I've eaten only marshmallows and drunk only Blue WKDs since arriving at Manchester Piccadilly, so tomorrow I am likely to either be suffering from a sugar hangover, or worse a real hangover. Not so good. Sadly, when the bar closed at the hotel, they stopped doing room service, so I can't even have something greasy to sober me up.
Never mind, I'll learn for tomorrow night... take advantage of the Kebab house en-route, and damnit, Wolverhampton is small enough that you can go down every street to get back to the hotel, and you'll still not take more than 20 minutes to do it :)
Good Night all :)
Labels: LRL08, LugRadio, LugRadioLive, LugRadioLive08
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