ABLEconf

So today was the day I have been blagging, denting, talking, thinking and eating for the last three months, the Arizona Business and Liberty Experience. It was the reason I became a Fedora Ambassador, it’s the reason I got to meet a ton of amazing people, and it’s the reason I got a bunch of cool free stuff 😉

I got there nice and early (Read: Before anyone else showed up, even before TrendyHuerta was awake) and was basically wandering aimlessly for an hour or so before everyone we needed and our set up supplies arrived. But, I learned that our event host, UAT, had dorms on campus, and given the place’s tiny size, situated roughly between a 7/11 and a hotel, that was pretty surprising.

So, set up set up set up, and I have my Fedora table set up, complete with tee shirts, media and temporary tattoos. A major huge awesome thanks to Clint Savage (herlo) for having this stuff for ABLEconf, letting me be his manatee — er, mentoree 🙂 –, and making sure the goodies made it from UTOSC to ABLEconf. Judging from some of the stuff that TrendyHuerta brought down, they have a heck of a conference after so few years they have been holding the event, and with any luck we will be as successful soon.

We opened up with a cool presentation from Aaron Seigo, who is a KDE core developer and head of the plasma project, and has done a whole bunch of other things that I can’t remember. I was set up to help him demo the remote plasmoids feature of KDE 4.4 in a live show, but unfortunately my Avahi mDNS was misbehaving. The second I told Kevin Kofler about it when i got home, I felt like a complete fool. I had forgotten to disable my firewall blocking mDNS. :< There was also a Konversation developer in attendance of Aaron’s Presentation, so KDE got at least some representation at ABLEconf, and it was cool to meet someone who I may soon be working with on Konvi. Hi Travis 🙂 Aaron’s presentation will be available on blip.tv semi-soon, along with a few other presentations, for anyone and everyone who is interested.

At this point, I staffed our booth for about an hour, with many people stopping by to check out the Fedora media and swag. We were situated next to the Ubuntu Arizona LoCo table, so we had a nice fun explaining the differences, in tandem, between our two distributions. I started the day with a full box of media, tons of buttons, pens and a few shirts, and at the end of the day about half the media, mostly install DVDs, were gone, and basically all the swag except the buttons had been snapped up by our attendees.

After lunch I attended, for at least a few minutes, a pair of talks by Red Hat’s Rick Spurgeon, one of which was presented by Fedora Project head Paul Frields, entitled The Fedora Project. Unfortuantely I had to leave early to head upstairs to my presentation, conviently enough entitled The Fedora Project. 🙂 The presentations were, thankfully, not the same — my presentation was given by A. Mani for Software Freedom Day in Calcutta, India. My presentation went off very well, if I must say so, except for my friends harassing me with choqoK twitter notifications 🙂 Btw, for anyone reading this, in honor of David Huerta (@huertanix on identi.ca and twitter, that’s where you can complain) you just lost the game.[1]

So afterwards, we had our party at Boulders on Broadway, a pretty cool bar and grill type setting, where I got absolutely schooled by Aaron and just about everyone else at pool, even though I was the only sober person there, being too young to drink. I heard a lot of bad jokes, a few good jokes and had some pretty cool jokes, and heard some cool ideas I had never heard of with regards to economics and national policy. All while enjoying some nice pizza and caffiene. As far as I know, those guys made it much later into the night than I did. I was at home asleep about midnight.

Today was supposed to be the FOSS gaming day, however we only had a few guys show up, and none of them had the games installed. Beside that, UAT’s networking setup is awkward to say the least, and it was about noon when we actually got to any gaming, and at about the same time David rolled out of bed after Saturday’ night on the town. At this point, we just sat around, enjoying Hedgewars, World of Padman, Nexuiz and other little fun games, and generally talking about Free Software.

…

These two days have been really amazing, and the last few months have definitely paid off in full. Hopefully I’ll be able to attend many more events in the future, both as a Fedora ambassador, and as a simple GNU/Linux geek 🙂 I have begun to make plans to attend Camp KDE in January at UCSD in San Diego, so hopefully I can catch some of you there 😉

[1]: for those who don’t know, “the game” is simply an internet/real world meme which basically exists simply to make people as angry as possible 🙂 http://ilostthegame.org/

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~ by Ryan Rix on 25 October 2009.