[ubuntu-us-in] IU LinuxFest Decompression

[Simon Ruiz]

Well, all-in-all it was quite the exciting day.

I had a lovely ride up and back with one of the USSG folks, Dick. We chatted the whole time about all manner of stuff.

I had a lot of fun manning the booth for the BLUG and the LoCo Team, talking to folks about Linux, Ubuntu, the Bloomington LUG, the Indiana Ubuntu LoCo Team, and various other randomness. We handed out 31 of the 60 bookmarks, so maybe we'll see some new people show up on the mailing list or in the IRC channel. I trust we'll make them feel welcome. We also managed to move quite a few stickers.

Note: Next time have something similar with the contact information for the BLUG...wait, next time I won't be in BLUG...

Note: Don't make the bookmarks at Kinko's next time. They ended up being about $0.25/bookmark. Though I really liked the glossy cardstock.

I was sorely over-optimistic making 50 Install CDs, and left probably 20-30 Edgy Install CD-Rs in the care of CINLUG, to be used as coasters and/or 
frisbees as Feisty comes out in two weeks.

Note: Feisty CDs are now available for pre-order through shipit. Yay!

We had a couple of demo laptops with plain vanilla Ubuntu install (courtesy of my employer) set up, and Michael had one computer with a big monitor, huge resolution, and Beryl effects.

The booths were neat. There was an 8-LCD screen (4x2) setup using Mac hardware with 4 dual-head nVidia graphics cards. It was cool to see Google Maps spread out over that area. Jeremy, at the Fedora stand, brought in a computer built to look like a prop plane, but for SOME reason the exposed components didn't like getting drizzled on on the way in ;-) so it wasn't on, just on display (I hope it didn't die on you, Jeremy!). The USSG had a few boxes running Beryl, and I guess they were also demonstrating how easy it was to install Linux, but I must admit I didn't leave our booth much.

More important than how neat the booths were, I got some good loot! ;-) A stuffed penguin from Novell (I recognized the guy there from working with Indiana ACCESS, and we chatted for a bit) and a stress penguin from the USSG folks were among my prizes (I really should have nabbed some more of those, as they had a ton and I know quite a few people at my work who would dig them, and it'd be a good way to promote the USSG, who are talking about maybe offering some classes or workshops or something to educate the people I'm leaving behind at North about Linux. That would have been VERY useful when I was starting out. Hey Matt, do you think I could grab some more of those?). I also got a shirt from the LinuxFest staff at the end of the day; I'm not sure if that was for presenting, or working the booth, or both.

My presentation went fantastically, from what I could tell. Much better than I was dreading.

I didn't have slides, just a couple of sheets of notes to keep me on track, but I barely turned to them except to make sure I covered everything I'd planned to. All in all I think I talked for a little under 45 minutes. People seemed to be interested (I didn't notice anyone nodding off or anything), and asked some really good questions at the end. Though, when I first finished, there was a long silence before the first brave soul asked a question and I was afraid maybe I'd bored everyone catatonic. 

One of the audience members asked me to sign the book he'd received as a door prize, which was unexpected; I felt like a rock star. :-)

I did manage to video record my presentation on the Mustek DV-5500 I got at HECC this year, and I'm wondering how to convert and compress the .ASF file into something more universally accessible than a 215MB file in a Microsoft proprietary format (though the case on the thing says "MPEG4"). In case anyone would find it interesting, I'd like to make it available to people.

I had fun.

And now I'm going to go try to catch up on the sleep I did not get last night. Goodnight!

Hope this finds you all doing well!

Simón

P.S. Of course the Conference Pack from Canonical was in my mailbox when I got home. Figures.