DrBacchus' Journal

In the last few days, I've received my itineraries for travels in May, and it's suddenly seeming very close.

The last week of April I'll be leaving for Apachecon in Amsterdam. I'm still frantically trying to get my tutorial notes done so that I can have them in by the deadline on Friday. I was dumb enough to submit a brand new tutorial for this ApacheCon, after giving the same tutorial every ApacheCon since 2000 in Orlando (with one exception - I was just so sick of it that I didn't do it in Austin.) and now I have to actually prepare it. Just an enormous amount of time involved in putting together a half-day tutorial.

Two weeks after that, I'll be speaking at PHP|Tek in Chicago - one of the few places in the world that I can fly to without changing planes. I've never been to a PHP conference before, and it's a great honor to be asked. I'll be giving my "intro to mod_rewrite" talk, and then I'll get to hang out with all those cool PHP people for a few days. I'm really looking forward to that.

So, if you're going to be in either Amsterdam or Chicago in May, do drop by and see me. And if you're not, well, you should make plans to be. They'll both be great conferences, and there will be interesting people there.

Ohio LinuxFest was great, as usual.

There were 5 of us there from Asbury, as well as two other folks (that I knew) from the Lexington area. And, in addition to the 7 of us, there were about 1050 other people, up from just over 700 last year.

I did a new talk - 20 things you didn't know you could do with your Apache web server - and I had a ton of fun doing it. 20 things is really way too much material for 60 minutes, but even that worked out pretty well, as folks were never given the chance to lose interest. If one of the things wasn't of much interest, there would be another in 2 minutes. And there was only one person in the audience who claimed to know as many as 10 things, which was very satisfying.

I did cheat a little bit, since a lot of the stuff was from 2.2, and one thing was from 2.3. But evangelizing 2.2 is, I think, pretty important. There's lots of amazing stuff in it.

Also of great interest was the (as they were introduced) LIVE NUDE PENGUINS! Yes, two penguins came to see us. They were jackass penguins, and did indeed bray like donkies. It was very cool to see them. I'm sure that someone has posted a bunch of photos on Flickr by now.

Other excellent speakers included Chris DiBono, Jeff Waugh, Jay Pipes and Jon maddog Hall.

Jay's talk, in particular was very valuable. However, by about half way through, he had gone past my ability to understand what he was talking about. This is, of course, one of the things that makes OLF so unique. Zero product pitch. 100% technical talks.

Also very cool was hanging out with Skippy and Owen, and putting together our detailed plans for world domination. (No, I can't tell. It's a secret!)

Looking forward to next year's conference! It will be even better!

This weekend several of us from Asbury went up to Ohio LinuxFest. The conference is another post.

On the trip up, there were two cars, and we had an iVAN - that is, an intra-Vehicular Area Network. In one car, we had an inverter, and a wireless access point. I was in the other car, running the IRC server. I also was streaming Old Time Radio podcasts from iTunes, which they were playing on the stereo in the other car.

Oh, yeah, and we had CB radios, too.

We got a pretty strong link between the cars when we were 2 or 3 car lengths away, but beyond that, it broke down pretty fast.

Mostly, though, it was cool just to do it. And very geeky. :-)

I'm *finally* done with my presentation for Ohio Linux Fest. Yay. And it's only a week from today.

If you're anywhere near the area, you really should come. It's great.

In reviewing my slides one last time, I discovered that at the end I made a joke about Lilo coercing me to put in the plugs for irc.freenode.net. It's always interesting to uncover these little reminders of someone who is gone. Rob always encouraged me to softpedal promotion of Freenode when I talked about IRC involvement at conferences. If you benefit from Freenode's services, consider sending them a few bucks.

The great conference TShirt is one that, if you have to explain what it means to someone who wasn't there, takes 30 minutes, and leaves both of you feeling like it wasn't worth the effort.

My canonical example of this is the shirt from the first YAPC I attended. It proclaims:

YAPC 19100
Laziness, Impatience, Hubris
Pick Any Three

This has embedded in it at least 5 inside jokes/references. Or 6, depending on how you count.

Most conferences I go to try to make shirts that live up to this level of cleverness.

A good bar is like good software: Open

Trillions and Trillions Served

But I don't think folks often live up to the YAPC shirt.

I was thinking about this while doing laundry and I came across the "hAPI hAPI joy joy" shirt from the Yahoo booth at OSCon.