Just a quick reminder to all of you out there who might be considering submitting a paper for the Utah Open Source Conference coming up this October 7-9.  The call for papers is coming to a close on August 1 so hurry up and get it submitted :)  I’m planning on submitting a paper for FreeSeer and will likely also present on the State of UTOS at the conference.

Cheers,

Herlo

This project was dreamed up by Mr. Ian Weller and he graciously let me tag along to get the thing going.  At the Utah Open Source Conference tomorrow, we’re going to be digging into a workflow and concept around the items needed to make FES work.  We’ll be hanging out from 12:30-5pm in room 209 while we work on the project, feel free to drop by and ask questions as well.

So if you are interested in FES, come join us at UTOSC or remotely in #fedora-fad on irc.freenode.net

Cheers,

Herlo

And if you know anyone else who might be interested, that would be useful as well.

If you are, or know of someone, who is interested in helping print and pass out flyers for UTOSC 2009, please send an email to volunteer@utos.org with the subject line ‘UTOSC 2009 Flyers’.  Include the college you attend so we can keep track of the schools we have distributed flyers.  This is a first-come-first-served kind of opportunity, so act fast!!

Cheers,

Clint

21:37 <herlo> did you say you were willing to cook breakfast for us during UTOSC ??
21:37 <herlo> :-P
21:37 <herlo> I couldn’t remember if you agreed, or balked
21:37 <Jennifer> I did. I will make sure I don’t work so I can do it properly.
21:37 <Jennifer> 5 people, right. Plus us, of course.
21:38 <Jennifer> ?
21:38 <herlo> yeah
21:38 <Jennifer> Yep, for 3 days? I can do that. :)
21:38 <herlo> so far, I have Ian, Scott, Larry and Mirano and possibly Scott (from LA)
21:39 <herlo> it does mean that it has to be ready kind of early though…
21:40 <JenniferDean> Yep
21:40 <herlo> kk, grerat!
21:40 <herlo> or just great!
21:40 <JenniferDean> That’s what prep the night before is for
21:40 <herlo> lol, yeah
21:41 <JenniferDean> The only rule is: stay out while I’m cooking. Lol

So as you can see, I just had to comment about it right now!  Jennifer is awesome!

Looks like our guests will be well taken care of during UTOSC 2009!!

See you all there! October 8-10, 2009.  Register today!

Cheers,

Herlo

Looking forward, I’m thinking a lot about the tracks we’ll be having at UTOSC 2009.  I’m wondering what others think, but I want to have at least Developer, Business and Beginner tracks.  I know that Laura Moncur and I have are already been discussing the beginner track, so that’s very exciting.

So here’s my thinking, if you want to see a particular presentation at UTOSC 2009, comment here, or on one of the blog posts on utos.org.  In addition, when we put the call for papers out, we’ll try to do a similar thing to other open source conferences, like open source bridge, linuxfest northwest and others have done.  We’ll show you all of the presentation submissions.  We’re also hoping to alter our voting system to allow anyone who has registered for the conference to vote for or against a particular presentation.

I’m getting really excited about the Utah Open Source Conference 2009.  I hope you all are too.

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.

Missing Teeth

My Son Shaun lost his fourth tooth this past week.  He was so excited about it, he called me as soon as it happened.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to experience it, but I’ve been assigned to be in LA three times in the next 3 months, plus one or two trips back to Utah should help.  I’m excited to head out and see his more holey head :)  I’m expecting some pictures to appear soon.

Djangocon 2008

On Friday, I left with a friend of mine, Seth House to Djangocon 2008, the first ever.  While I was happy to go, I wasn’t particularly excited that I would miss an entire day due to a clerical messup.  I learned quite a bit about Django and the community, I’m grateful I could go.

Django is a great framework and I’m excited to learn more about it this weekend.  I’m also grateful Google let me come back onto their campus (without incident this time, I might add), they are such great hosts.  I also got to meet Leslie Hawthorne and introduce myself, she seems pretty awesome even though I hollered at her while she was on the phone (oops, sorry Leslie).

First UTOSC Videos Released

Another great bit of news from UTOSC 2008.  The first evening keynote videos of Mac Newbold and Paul Frields have been released.  I’m excited and grateful to KnowledgeBlue and OpenSourceTV for their help with this project.  Things are rolling great on the video, thanks to Doran Barton and Nick Bauman at KnowledgeBlue for doing the video.

UTOSC Pictures keep piling up

Make sure to take a moment and have a look at the UTOS flickr group.  There’s tons of pictures there and maybe you are in one.  I’ve been tagging like crazy and hope to have them all done later this week.  I’d love to see more tags than what I’ve

A Goodbye

Also, today I found out one interesting thing, my friend Christer, who I referred to come work at Guru Labs, has left for another position.  I’m glad he’s happy and wish him luck.  Sounds like a great change for him and his family.

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