[Novalug] Re: Nick's FOSE Reflections

Roger W. Broseus rogerb@bronord.com
Fri Apr 4 11:21:02 EDT 2008


Nick: thanks for organizing.

Yes: I got 100 blanks and the Microtec guy duplicated for me. I had a 
pretty big stack a bit after noon so I had him stop at about 85. He was 
cranking out about 35 per hour and took great pains to do a good job, 
reading the master at slow speed (20 minutes of processing) to create a 
good image. Well, we ran out - should have had him do the whole lot.

Running out of distros to dispense led to less interest and less ability 
to get people on the hook. For the future, it would be nice to have more 
copies of more distros for balance.

I also got some sleeves and scanned the cover of a Ubuntu CD cover; 
printed them 3-up and cut those up to have "covers" to slip into the 
sleeves so people knew what they had.

The $$ out-lay I had was small but is there a way to get an 
acknowledgment from TUX for my tax return?

The booth turned into an "XO-site:" three of them in action drew a lot 
of attention and interest.

The electricity disappeared - I guess they cut us off . . . I didn't 
trace the cord to the source to check to see if it was still plugged-in: 
it was "lost" in the clutter behind the display.

/roger

Roger W. Broseus - Linux User
    Email: RogerB@bronord.com
    Web Site: www.bronord.com

[snip]
>    7. My personal FOSE wrap up / tues and wed (nick@hackermonkey.com)
>   
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Thu,  3 Apr 2008 21:16:49 -0400
> From: nick@hackermonkey.com
> Subject: [Novalug] My personal FOSE wrap up / tues and wed
> To: novalug@calypso.tux.org
> Message-ID: <1207271809.47f581817ced0@mail.hackermonkey.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> I always forget how much I liked DC, NoVA and the Linux guys down there. I had a
> great time at the booth. I love talking to people at the booth, both the workers
> and the people visiting. A few notes about things.
>
> 1) The visitors seemed more polarized this year. Usually we have a huge spectrum
> of people from experts to beginners, and people that want to try, people that
> refuse to try and maybe a few swag-baggers. This year seemed much more extreme.
> The experts seemed more expert, the haters more so, and the swag baggers even
> more blatent.
>
> 2) The longer I spend in the booth talking to people, the dumber I feel. Not bad
> dumb, I leave with a list of more things I need to learn and read up about. So
> its a good thing, a nice personal growth thing :-) I still dont quite understand
> 64bit HW vs 32bit HW, but then I have all old HW and nothing remotely close to
> 64 bit anyway.
>
> 3) I have a doppleganger that works for a VT based scanning company!
>
> 4) My personal low moment of the show was when I gentleman came up and asked
> "Which one of these is for Windows XP?" I explained what they were and he said
> no way he needed to "remain compatible. Goodbye" and waved off. I yelled
> something after him about "compatible with what?" and then I felt real bad
> about it, I should have been more polite. The more I think about it, the worse
> off I think the poor guy is. Not because he didn't listen to me, but simply
> because here is he running a horribly vulnerable OS and he wanted "the XP
> compatible" cd from me before he even knew what it is I had. So who knows what
> sort of condition his PC is even in.
>
> 5) We should have done something post show, gone to Fado or something? I would
> have liked to 'debrief' after each night. I dont think the wife cared much
> about my ramblings of the show and who I talked to about geeky things. (Did I
> know there was a DC chess group? NO! Wish I knew then, I STINK and would love
> to play with people and learn to play well!)
>
> 6) One of the USB encrypted key people told me their product worked with Windows
> and no plans for OSX or Linux, yet, but maybe. "We had to go after the biggest
> market." Ok, no problem. Thats a good company plan, but no plans for Linux yet?
> I actually said "if I buy one, and get drivers written for it, would you want
> them?" and he goes "No."  Fast foward to the other side of the show floor and I
> find IronKey. They were working on Linux drivers, I read about it. Not only are
> they excited that Im from tux.org and know about their product, they want me to
> review it and hand me a 1GB key. Unfortunately it had the old code and wasn't
> Linux ready, so they are sending me a new one in the mail. I can't wait to try
> it on every system I have (CentOS, Ubuntu, RedHat EL, Linux Mint and for the
> hell of it, OpenBSD :-) and just see what happens! I don't know why but lately
> I've been very crypto concious.
>
> I think thats all I have for now, other then a HUUUGE thanks to everyone that
> showed up. If you helped or just stopped, you made the day go great and I can't
> wait to do it again. Next time I'll do the whole show, and show up for
> setup/breakdown, I forgot those were a fun time as well. Yes, Im weird like
> that...
>
> Did anyone ever get the CDs burned on Thursday? We ran out sometime Wednesday
> afternoon and I know we had made some arrangements with MicroTech (?) to get
> some extras for Thursday. Looks like 300 just isn't enough. We could probably
> make due with 600 or so.
> Nick
>   



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