I have been looking at airfare, hotel and other travel accommodations to FUDCon, but I seem to have more options than I can count.  Maybe some of you can make recommendations?  So here’s the details of my dilemma:

Option 1: Fly direct to Toronto

Now, of course, this is the easiest of the three options; in and out of Toronto International Airport (YYZ) is a great way to go.  What’s that you say?  Oh, right.  The cost prohibitive trip of a ticket that is well over $600.  WOW! That is all I can say…

Option 2: Fly to Boston and ride the FUDBus

To me, this option is the most appealing.  While I know that I can most likely crash with someone in Boston and then ride the FUDBus up, it’s going to be a bit more painful, but it might be worth the organizational headache to make what could become an epic hackfest (8+ hours) happen for me.

In this case, I would have to fly in Thursday evening, since the FUDBus leaves at around 9am from Alewife station in Boston.  And upon return, Tuesday morning could turn into Tuesday afternoon or Tuesday evening.  A bit scarier here for scheduling return flights.  The other part of this is the actual FUDCon event is only Saturday through Monday (Dec 5-7) so I would have to miss 5+ days of work, not just 1 or possibly 2 with the other options.

The price of this flight is a mere $409 round trip, a savings of over $180, so it could be worth the extra time as long as I don’t have to get an extra hotel room.

Option 3: Fly to New York City and ride a bus to get to the FUDBus

I have a good friend in Jon Stanley, who offered to put me up at his place on Thursday night, which is essentially the same as flying into Boston.  But there are a few benefits as well.  One is that the bus from NYC to Boston has an additional 4ish hours we’d get to hack and chat.  Since I’m really wanting to join the Fedora Infrastructure team, it would be a good opportunity to get my wings.  The other is that the cost from SLC to JFK is another $50 – $75 cheaper than Boston.

The drawbacks of having to leave earlier and travel longer seem to be a mitigating circumstance and really might be something I want to do.  I’m just not sure I’m willing to awake at 4am Eastern (2am Mountain) to take the bus to take the FUDBus.

Option 4: Fly to Buffalo and ride the bus to Toronto

This option seems the most economical and has the least amount of hassles save actually flying into Toronto.  Essentially, I would fly into Buffalo on Friday afternoon, catch a bus that would drive across the border and into Toronto.  The return trip is about as simple, just hop on the bus on Tuesday morning, and fly home that afternoon from Buffalo.  The cost is great too!  At a measly $200 round trip from Salt Lake, now that’s a deal!

I think the thing I am fighting with Buffalo, is that I’ll be doing this all by myself.  While it seems economical, I really, really would like to get on that FUDBus for the hackfest I am sure will happen.  Collaborating for an additional 8 hours is really really tempting.  Going to Buffalo would pretty much eliminate that option.  While I am a bit concerned about crossing the border and such, I don’ think it’s going to be the decision maker or cause me any real heartache.

Decisions, Decisions!

So what would you do?  How would you go to Toronto?  I have the funds right now and want to get everything booked in advance so I don’t have to worry about the details later.  I think my biggest debate point has to be whether to ride the FUDBus.  Money is probably the secondary issue, but comparing that seems to put Buffalo first without question.

I’m really excited either way for FUDCon this year.  I have some really good ideas to share and want to start building out a great Ambassador portal as well.  More on that to come!

Cheers,

Herlo

Our first meeting will be next Wednesday, Feb 11 from 11:30am-1pm
I will present ‘Fedora Remix: Custom distributions based upon proven design’

Here’s the rest of the details:

Conference room A on the lower level of the Salt Lake Library has been reserved.  Head down the stairs, make a left turn (essentially a U turn).  The conference room is directly under the foyer area (the area with all the shops on the 1st level)  If you aren’t clear, ask the information desk.  A map is available here of all floor plans of the library.

Also, our meetings should be posted on the Electric Signs by the entrance to the library on the first floor.

Meeting Days & Times:

All meetings will be held from 11:30am – 1pm on the Second Wednesday of each month.

• Wednesday, February 11
• Wednesday, March 11
• Wednesday, April 8
• Wednesday, May 13
• Wednesday, June 10

Feel free to add this and other Utah Tech Events to your calendar by adding the ‘Utah Tech Events’ feed to your calendar.

Traxx

You can get off 2 blocks west of the Library.  If you get off at the ‘Courthouse 500 South’ stop
There is also a University Train that stops right next to the library, but you’ll have to transfer at Gallivan Center.

Parking

Parking is recommended to be one block away from the Library as they have reduced the meters in front of the Library to only 30 minutes.  However the meters directly east (on 200 East) should still be 2 hours.  Make sure to check the time you allow yourself is plenty.

See you all there.

Herlo

The course is 15 weeks long, 3 hours per night and will be held in the Warnock Engineering Building (WEB) room 208 on Wednesdays from 6-9pm.  Basically, that means I’ll be teaching Linux once a week and keeping up my training skillz.

The only real drawback is that I’ll be missing the PLUG and SLLUG meetings for the better part of four months.

Cheers,

Herlo

6:12pm: In hotel room, snuggled up to Jennifer.  Still debating whether I’m going to sleep or just head to FUDPub.

6:15pm: Send Dave an SMS message that reads ‘be down in 10 minutes’.

6:31pm: Dave replies with SMS that reads ‘Hmmm gave up and left’.

6:32pm: Head down to the lobby to try to catch up.   Nobody there, so Jennifer and I head over to FUDPub.  By this time, hunger has taken over and I am less tired than hungry.

6:40pm: Arrive at Flat Top Johnny’s for FUDPub.  Proceed directly to the rear of the building in search of food.

6:42pm: Find food, pile it on my plate and head back to the front of the building.  The place is packed an hopping.  Lot’s of pool is being played and it sure looks like fun.

7:00pm: Our server takes our order for drinks and the party commences.  We sit down beside Mike McGrath, Jeroen van Meeuwen, Dave Nalley and a couple others as well.  Of course, we start talking a bit about Ambassador stuff and the barcamp overall.

7:30pm: About the time we’ve consumed a couple drinks and ordered food, the conversation gets good.  We’ve had a few others join us, Jared Smith, Kenny and Cade all come over and at this point we’ve basically taken over the table.

8:00pm: I’m feeling much better, have eaten a chicken sandwich and consumed a few more beverages.  At this point I’m very happy I didn’t stay at the hotel and sleep.  Jennifer and I are having fun with the rest of the group.

8:??pm: Not sure quite when it happened, but Mo Duffy decided to come by to take our pictures for the Fedora Picture Book.  It was at this time I was invited to do something, rather egged on by the table pounding.  I proceeded to the front of the restaurant to perform my now infamous moonwalk.  (Thanks to Ian Weller).

9:ISHpm: Played pool with Jennifer, Dave, Jared, Colby and others.  Spent a good hour playing pool and trying not to repeat a performance of my moonwalk.

10:30pm: Arrived at the hotel and discussed the video uploading hackfest.  It was decided we’d meet on the 3rd floor and hack for a while.

10:45pm: Met Chris Tyler and Matt Domsch along with Ian, Dave, Kenny and a few others and proceeded to render video.  I wanted to play with the syncing of the video with the audio recordings I obtained, but after several attempts, it was clearly not going to happen.

1:00am (Sunday): Because video takes a long time to render, I was still up tinkering with my rendering. About this time, Mo Duffy had sent links into #fudcon showing my dance moves.  Ian and others at the video hackfest decided this was a much better hackfest.  In the next hours, Ian had created an animated gif as well as an ogg video of my moonwalk to the tune of ‘Smooth Criminal’.  Each time I made a comment about it, the pure ridiculousness was raised another magnitude.

3:00am: After enduring enough of the video rendering and ‘Smooth Criminal’ in midi, I decided it was time to head up to the room.

3:10am: Because I hadn’t gone to bed at a reasonable hour to be useless for Sunday’s hackfest, I decided it would be a good idea to pack my bags.

3:25am: Decided that it wasn’t late enough to sleep, I started on and successfully got Moksha up and running with Luke’s demo data.  I can see how cool it will be to build Fedora-Event-Splash with a Moksha back end.  I was also thinking about an Ambassador Portal, probably somehing with statistics and updates when a user updates.  Could also show tracking of resources and other useful tools.

4:00am: Time for bed.  ZZZZzzzzzz ZZZZZZzzzzz

While I am a pretty solid Linux Admin, what I really think I’d be good at, is Project Management.  The problem being that I’ve little to no paid experience for such a thing.  The reason, however, that I believe I’d be a good fit for something like this is the fact that I’ve been in charge of the Utah Open Source Conference and it’s successful rise to the largest community conference in Utah.

Last year, we had a successful conference after a year of planning.  This year’s conference was much less work thanks to all the great volunteers, but it was still a big success, and a lot of work.  I’m excited to say that this is my pride and joy, and why I think I would be a good fit for a Project Manager.

In addition, I’m looking into starting my own business, the only problem there is the timing.  I’d like to launch it soon, but I don’t have enough capital to really get going anywhere.  However, I may still do this as I think the ideas I have would work well and could really benefit an open source community as well as small/medium sized tech businesses.  In fact, I have a meeting set up for tomorrow morning with someone who’s believed in me from the beginning on this endeavor.  I’m excited to try my hand as an employer.

I do want to mention that while this isn’t a plea to help get me a job, but rather some thoughts I needed to scribble down, I am actively looking for work.  If you have anything that might fit, here’s the latest version of my resume (in pdf form).

Guess we’ll see where the world takes me on this fun, fun ride I’ve been on for 30-some-odd years now.  And I guess that’s the point, I’m really enjoying this ride called life and so while it’s a bit of a stressful time, I’m grateful to accept these challenges.  I love solving problems, and this is just another small problem.

Fedora 10 - Released

Available at mirrors everywhere.  Also via bittorrent ? and jigdo ?.

Freedom, Friends, Features, First!  That’s Fedora!

• Take the Tour
• Read the Release Notes
• Digg it

Cheers,

Herlo

After creating the Fedora Project Mind Map, I was better able to understand how UTOS was currently structured.  I was able to put together the main pieces pretty quickly, although it seems there are several gaps in my thought process still.  For that reason, I’m opening the UTOS structure up as well.  It might not have as many contributors, but I’d like to see the structure grow.

To that end, I created a very shabby hierarchical structure which I passed around a week ago at the Core Team after conference dinner.  It went over okay, but people had a lot of questions about how the structure was organized and what not.

Organizing My Thoughts is Hard!

I didn’t know what exactly to do.  As it is, I’ve never been an integral part of an organization before like this one.  Nor have I ever created organizational charts that were very well done.  I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.  But, something amazing did happen in the span between last Friday and today, that was VYM, or View Your Mind.

When a “Mind Map” was first suggested to me by my buddy Doran Barton, I thought “well, I’ll look into that later”.  However, the more I kept trying to cram jobs into places they didn’t go, the more I got frustrated that there wasn’t a good application to accommodate the structure I was trying to build.

VYM is an application that helps get your thoughts out onto a structure.  It lets you move it around quickly and easily and even associate pictures and notes where applicable.  The problem for me was understanding how to use VYM in an environment I already knew and UTOS was not the right place!

The Fedora Project “Mind Map”

It turns out that a lot of people always wonder how the Fedora Project is structured, where the pieces go and who, what, where and how the project is put together.  Because I could at least see all the pieces, I decided that would be a good place to start.  While it’s not complete by any means, I present to you the Fedora Project VYM “Mind Map”.  From VYM, one can create pdf, png and other output sources, so I created a pdf as well

Contribute!

I’d like to see the Fedora Community take this up and add many pieces to it as it grows and builds into something more than I could make.  It’s fairly simple to add pieces as well.  You can create separate maps which can be integrated into the larger map.  Or, since the format is a zip file (essentially) with an xml definition file, I believe patches could work.

Cheers,

Herlo

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

As the organizer (among others), I tend to be running around a lot, but this year, I’ve already seen 3 presentations, which is pretty good.  I enjoyed the Drupal presentation, Mac Newbold’s Keynote and Paul Frields Fedora Keynote.

The registration booth was probably the biggest issue, but I’m happy about it now.  We need to be better at printing badges and I need to plan better regarding those sorts of things.

The Fedora and openSUSE booths were rocking, as were the Guru Labs, KnowledgeBlue and the Massage booth (yes, there’s massages here, aren’t you jealous?)

I’m excited to be in charge of a great group of volunteers this year.  And I think they’ve been the best thing for us this year.  Without them, we couldn’t take on all the great things we have and I’m confident they’ve been the difference between a smooth conference of 500+ people and us running crazy and not getting most things done.  THANK YOU VOLUNTEERS, WE LOVE YOU!

Lastly, between the two keynotes last night, Jayce Hall announced a $1000 challenge grant to the Serenity Foundation for the remainder of the conference.  That’s today and tomorrow.  As the Utah Open Source Foundation, we felt Phil Burns has been such a great motivator in the technology community, we wanted to give back.  So help us help Serenity and her foundation.  I was quite moved by Phil’s reaction, and was very happy we could help.

Looking forward to finishing off Day 2 and participating with all of you.  And thank you all for making UTOSC 2008 such a great success!!