Sexy Sexy Penguins

In last night’s FAmNA meeting, we discussed the fact that nobody had remembered to register to help at the Fedora booth at OLF.  David brought it up and within a few minutes we had most of the spots filled.

As an event organizer, I understand the importance of having a booth manned at all times.  If you have a moment, head on over to the OLF Planning page on the wiki and add your name to a slot.  We could use at least 2-3 people in every spot.

There will be a ‘USB Creation Station’ there run by my little 7″ ASUS EEE PC as well as some XO laptops and other cool swag like stickers, t-shirts and buttons (thanks John).

Thanks to Jeffrey Tadlock for heading up the organization and it will be great to see him at FADNA on Sunday as well.  It will be great to meet all the gang and put faces to names.  Don’t forget to bring your camera!!

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: booth, fadna, Fedora, ohiolinux

Get your name on the list for the Fedora Ambassador Day - North America, October 10-12, 2008.  It’s coming in just 2-1/2 weeks in Columbus, Ohio while we’re enjoying the Ohio LinuxFest.  The agenda is being formed, we’re planning a FADPub (maybe), and might even have some FAD - NA shirts to give away.

If you are coming to FADNA, please take a moment and sign up on the wiki page.  OLF doesn’t have any more rooms at the Drury, where some Ambassadors are staying, so many of us are staying a short while out of town at the Holiday Inn Express in Grove City.  If you haven’t reserved a room, they have pretty good rates, even cheaper than the Drury.

In addition, if you haven’t taken a moment to sign up to help at the Fedora booth, we would like to make a good impression there as well.

Many of us will be carpooling in each day and we’re working to reserve a room at the Holiday Inn Express for Sunday’s Meeting.

See you all at FADNA.  I am very excited to meet many of the North American Ambassadors at OLF.

Cheers,

Herlo

I'm Going to FAD-NA

Tags: Ambassadors, fadna, famna, Fedora, ohiolinux

5 years! w00t!

Tags: birthday, Fedora, five

Hi all,

Just another quick reminder that if you are an Ambassador in North America and are wanting to get your input in on what will happen at FAD - NA, come to the meeting tonight.  It will be at 20:00 EDT in #fedora-ambassadors on irc.freenode.net.

Previously, I stated that this was for North American Regional Ambassadors.  I was corrected recently that it could be for any Ambassador with interest, so please feel free to put your $.02.

Sorry for the confusion.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: fad, famna, Fedora

Following up with our FAMNA meeting this week, the FAMNA regional ambassadors are meeting tomorrow night at 20:00 EDT in #fedora-ambassadors (irc.freenode.net) to discuss the agenda and events surrounding the Fedora Ambassador Day - North America.  I’m not sure if this is the first FAD - NA, but we’re definitely in a good resurgence with some good folks involved.

In commemoration of this exciting event, which will be held concurrently with the Ohio Linux Fest, October 10-12, I created a badge similar to the one created by Nicu Buculei for FAD EMEA.

I’m excited this looks as good as it does and will show pride for those Fedora Ambassadors in North America who will be joining us at OLF.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: fad, Fedora

Day 2 seemed to be even smoother than day 1, much of the time, running around putting out little fires, but not too many.  I was the room manager for Paul’s Fedora Remix talk, quite enjoyed that, even though most of it I already knew.

I also got to enjoy both keynotes today.  Howard Tayler was quite entertaining with his bit about ‘The Price is Right’ and making content that doesn’t suck.  Joe Brockmeier’s keynote was a bit down to earth, yet had some very fun elements.  I really enjoyed the ‘Dairy Council’ idea for Linux that was brought up during the Q&A session.  It reminded me that I need to send him an email for a similar idea with community conferences.

The Fedora booth was going smoothly.  Unfortunately, Paul spent most of his time there, except for his presentation.  Jared Smith and Nathan Blackham helped out while he was gone.  Next year, I want to make sure that if we have Paul or Joe at our conference, they don’t have to spend time in the booth.  It would seem they could help better in other ways.  Maybe I’m wrong?

In the evening, we headed out to Tucanos Brazilian Grill at the Gateway for the UTOSC Geek/Blogger Dinner.  This dinner was a complement to UTOSC 2008 so some who weren’t attendees showed up to join us.  I was able to purchase brazilian lemonades for the entire group.  Its so much fun spending time with geeks of my sort.  Both Paul and Joe were able to attend as well.

After we consumed large portions of meat, socialized and drank ourselves into a stupor, the group started to disperse.  A few of us decided to take light-rail home afterward, which was a nice departure from all of the driving I had done recently.  It also gave me an opportunity to spend a few more minutes with my sweetie, Jennifer.  She’s been so great throughout.  I’m just happy to know she’ll support me, and she said she had a lot of fun as well.

Many, many people came by the booths from what I saw.  I know the OLPC would be a big hit on Saturday, Family Day.  Time to get out the little fedora shirts and show off the coolness that is Fedora.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Fedora, geekdinner, UTOSC, utosc2008

In the next 3 weeks, I will be among the busiest people I know.  Probably the only people busier are Presidential hopefuls, Olympic organizers and sadly, those fighting in Georgia.  The reason I am writing this post is to help me remember what I have left to complete between now and the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 on August 28-30, 2008.

Recently, I learned that our website doesn’t render well in Internet Exploder, Safari and some older versions of Firefox.  I’m guessing its due to the inability I have to create and maintain css, because well, I’m not a design guy.  Because of this, we’re having a hackfest tonight, both at my house, and online.  Feel free to come by at 8:30 and help out.

Prior to the hackfest, I will be working with Fedora Ambassadors to grow the North American region.  We’ll be discussing such things as AmbassadorKit, EventBox and of course, Fedora’s presence at UTOSC 2008.  This meeting tends to get a lot of good people making the world a better place.  I am interested in making this happen starting with North America.  If you are interested in helping out, or just lurking, feel free to drop by #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net at 1:00UTC (9pm EDT).

Prior to the Fedora NA meeting, I’m planning on working on the PCs that we’ll be using for the Utah Open Source Conference.  This will be done over at a friends house, who is loaning the PCs to UTOSC for the week of the conference.

I am attempting to record every presentation this year with either audio or video.  We have been rewarded again this year by having our friends over at KnowledgeBlue come and video record much of the conference, but they don’t have enough staff or equipment to simultaneously record 4-6 rooms.  So the plan went to me to setup recording devices in each room.

The plan is simple setup 6 PCs with Linux, install audacity and darkice.  This way we can stream the keynote audio live over our streaming server and also just record the audio from other presentations to be published at a later date.  I anticipate I’ll be able to install and complete this task pretty quickly.

Well, its now 7:40am here at my desk in my house.  I still have head into the office today for a bit of work, so off I go.  Feel free to come by #utos anytime today and wish me luck (or help if you are so inclined) with anything you can suggest.  Hopefully, today won’t be too long.

Herlo

Tags: Ambassadors, audacity, darkice, Fedora, hackfest, na, recording, UTOSC

I’ve been very busy this last two weeks updating pages and working on finalizing details for UTOSC 2008, held August 28-30, 2008.  For instance, the Fedora booth is coming along nicely.  For a conference of around 400, we should have a pretty good booth turnout.  I had Jeffrey Tadlock, Paul Frields (who’s also keynoting btw) and its possible other NA Ambassadors may attend.  I’m really excited about this development.

In addition, Joe Brockmeier of OpenSUSE will also be keynoting and we’ve got quite a list of presenters on our website.  Our goal is to help open source grow in Utah, and by providing this conference once a year, we can help our local LUGs and open source leaders.  We have approximately 50 presentations, plus events and other fun stuff up our sleeve over this 3 day conference.

One of the great events returning this year is the Guru Labs Troubleshooting Challenge.  We hope to have this event bigger and better this year, with cash prizes for the winner(s).  There will be sign-ups available on Thursday morning at the registration booth and the contest will run all day Friday, crowning a winner Friday night!

Another great return from last year is KnowledgeBlue.  With opensourceTV, they’ll be recording the video for several of our presentations and keynotes.  They’ll be working just like last year (only better) to provide interviews as well with some of the leaders of the open source community.  We expect you all will enjoy the videos as they go up on youtube.  This year, they will focus on multiple angles and getting a good quality presentation from the presenters.

Lastly, I’d like to talk a little bit about Family Day at UTOSC, August 30, 2008.  If you take a look at the presentations on Saturday, you’ll notice a bit of a trend.  With a few exceptions, presentations are intended to help the family. Also, we are working on activities for the kiddies such as an OLPC, videos on MythTV, edubuntu, Fedora Electronics Lab demos and more in our try-it lab.  We’re also working to acquire a moon bounce and sumo suits (for the big kids).  Saturday looks to be a ton of fun.

NOTE: This doesn’t mean that we have enough family stuff, and in fact, we really don’t.  One thing I’d like to see, is a presentation on content filtering for the family.  Something like “Howto use Dan’s Guardian effectively” or a discussion of pfsense, smoothwall or other firewalling/filtering tools.  If you have a presentation you’d like to suggest in this area, please let me know by commenting or emailing me.

I hope to see many of you there as the cost is quite low at $70 and if you are LUG member, its only $35 until August 7 for the early bird pricing.  Read more on our website at http://2008.utosc.com or register directly with eventbrite at http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com.

See you all there.

Herlo

Tags: 2008, conference, Fedora, opensuse, UTOSC, video

One of the things I’ve been working pretty heavily on the past couple weeks is getting more involved in the Fedora Ambassador program.  And let’s just say its been a blast.  I love the new direction of the North American Ambassador program and am excited to be a part of the newly rejuvenated program.

A couple reasons more why I’m extremely excited have to do with the people I’m working with, Alex Maier, GregDek, Jeffrey Tadlock, David Nalley, John Rose and Rashadul Islam among others.  Each of these folks is a leader in their own right, and I’ve especially enjoyed working with David Nalley.

He and I have been working hard to reshape and reinvigorate the NA Ambassadors program.  I suspect others are working tirelessly as well, and I’m excited about that prospect.  David and I are the architects of the new ‘Regional Ambassadors’ in North America.  The idea is to work in our respective regions to get a Fedora Ambassador in every State/Province.  Once we’ve done that, we’ll start working toward major metropolitan areas.  The regional ambassadors currently assigned are:

• Eastern US: David Nalley
• Central US: John Rose
• Western US: Clint Savage
• Canada: Rashadul Islam

This doesn’t mean that we’ve limited the regions to these areas, just that they are a good start.  Regional ambassadors will be the central point of contact, distribution of swag, etc. for each ambassador in that region.  The goal is to make it easier for Ambassadors to go out to events and promote Fedora.  Regional ambassadors will also be responsible for mentoring, providing tools, media, swag, etc. for each ambassador.  All the things needed to make Fedora look like the world class organization it has become.

In the next week or so, I’ll be sending out an email to all of the Ambassadors I can find in the western US.  If you don’t get an email from me soon, feel free to email me and we’ll get you going.  The plan is to get your opinions, have you start coming to meetings and join the mailing list.  Participate where you can, and we’ll help you grow your state/province/city.

As NA Ambassadors, we’ve set new goals too, here’s the bullet points:

• Contacting existing Ambassadors
• Mentoring new and existing Ambassadors
  • Help to remember why they joined ambassadors in the first place
• Delivering media in a more timely and better process
• Working closely with FAMSCo to get a good budget to help NA Ambassadors expected growth

We’ll be discussing much of this at our next NA Ambassadors meeting, as well as progress on contacting all of the current ambassadors.  If you are interested in participating, join us at #fedora-meeting on Wednesday July 30 @ 1am UTC (Tuesday 9pm EDT).  Current agenda and task list are being formed now, so feel free to contribute.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: ambassador, Fedora

Well, its been more than two weeks since my last post about FUDCon.  I figure its high time I posted something about what’s been going on in my neck of the woods.  Things have been quite busy and are bound to continue at this phrenetic pace for a bit longer.

DarkIce - Audio Streaming

I’ve been working this past week on getting darkice packaged for Fedora.  Darkice is a front end audio recording tool for streaming servers like Icecast.  I much prefer it over ices and any other streaming client I’ve tried.  It does have bits for mp3/mp2/faac as well as ogg/vorbis, so I’ll be packaging it for only the latter.

It seems rpmbuild is a bit more cryptic from my last foray into building RPMs and I have to hunt a little harder for the libs and the binaries.  Its coming along nicely, now that I have my virtual machine back in place.  I’m also hoping that darkice will be easy to integrate into Fedora Talk as I’ve never dealt with the asterisk end before.

Utah Open Source Conference

This past weekend, we spent a good bit of time reviewing and selecting presentations for the Utah Open Source Conference.  I am the head organizer and founder of this all volunteer conference. In fact, our very own FPL, Paul Frields will be keynoting on Thursday evening.  Keep an eye on this blog for future updates about the conference.

A New Interest

I’ve recently started to see someone of the female persuasion.  Many of my friends have met her, and I’m guessing they like her as I do (well, not quite as much).  Here’s hoping things go well with Jennifer

There’s more here, and I’ll try to be more vocal about it as I think its good to share.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: 2008, audio, darkice, Fedora, icecast, streaming, UTOSC