Friday, January 29 — Day 1

Gathered at Red Hat’s main office, we brainstormed in a manual ‘tag cloud’ kind of way.  Mel had us all take sticky notes, write upon them based upon a few words on the white board and then, stick them to said white board appropriately.  This got our minds going about what a FUDCon or FAD should be, why it was important and the things that could really be improved.  I felt very happy about the amount of ideas that were shared on these sticky notes.  it was quite cathartic to get out the things that always had bugged me or I thought needed improvement in our Events.  I have a few pictures of us doing this process, enjoy them.

After spending about 1.5 hours doing this and discussing it, we broke into separate groups, the FUDCon 2.0 folks (upstairs) and FUDCon Live folks, aka me, Yaakov, and the freeseer folks online (downstairs).  My main target was to get the freeseer application working with completely free software and build the AV Kit from components I had, plus the ones that Mel had purchased for this project.

After getting downstairs with Dennis Gilmore (he was my helper for the first hour), we quickly discovered that one component, the Epiphan vga2usb device, was not working.  After a bit of digging, we also discovered that it had a non-free driver and that it would likely not be easy to find a free driver alternative.  We did, however, attempt to build the binary they provided, but kept getting errors.  More on this later on (or in another post), so stay tuned.

I spent the next few hours trying to get everything else up and running, doing research to find a different alternative for video output from a VGA source to USB input.  heffer joined us on IRC and gave me some good links as to where I might look for a Scan Converter and a easyCAP device.  While a little lower quality, the Linux drivers for it are completely open and free, so I set out with a plan to find one in Raleigh.

At 4pm, Max and I headed out on the town, hunting down several items, including firewire PCMCIA adapters (for our miniDV camera) and the Scan Converter components.  We needed to get a screw driver and some other firewire adapter stuff too, we headed to CompUSA. Though normally I wouldn’t go there, but this CompUSA had actually been converted from a Tiger Direct, so I thought we had a chance.  After about 1.5 hours of failure, we ended up with two firewire cards and some audio cables, we headed off to see Avatar in 3D.

Saturday, January 30 — Day 2

After leaving Avatar, we discovered a nice big blanket of snow had come down in Raleigh.  Just 2-3 inches, and in Utah, we’d think nothing of this, but here it’s quite a bit different.  First off, North Carolina doesn’t seems to have the infrastructure, no plows or ice melt, to really deal with something like this kind of storm.  There were news reports of it on every station, the Governor called for a state of emergency, and I just thought it was odd.  Because of this, it was determined that we would not leave the hotel for Day 2 of the FAD.  Instead, we reserved a room in the hotel and worked from there.  Luckily, the hotels infrastructure, plus the Days Inn next door provided us with our networking needs, while Max stayed at his apartment and called in using Fedora Talk.

My work was to spend as much time with the FreeSeeR folks and do tons and tons of testing of their code, plus provide feedback and gstreamer pipelines to get us closer and closer to our eventual goal.  Thanh had spent a lot of time while we were at Avatar to turn FreeSeeR into an API.  He also altered the code to put the gui into a more sensible tool, with both Qt and Gtk implementations.

About half way through the day, I discovered that I had accidentally left my power adapter for my audio mixer in Max’s car (he was 15 minutes way with no snow and at least 25 with), essentially eliminating my high quality audio testing.  Luckily Chris Tyler had a headset with a microphone and Dennis Gilmore had a webcam we could use because the firewire cards were a bit flaky and kept crashing my kernel.

By the end of the night, with some tweaking by Dennis and I, we had FreeSeeR working with DV input, USB video input, 1/4″ audio input and were able to output to an ogg file with reasonable quality and consistency.  A lot of testing later, and we were able to determine that we still needed to tweak some of the code to provide for a better way to adjust audio and video settings prior to recording.  All in all, the FreeSeeR software is coming along very nicely.  Andrew Ross and Thanh Ha have been doing an amazing job and I really appreciate their help working on getting this working.  The new version of FUDCon Live thanks you as well, because without this, we won’t be able to provide our users with a good quality remote experience.

Sunday, January 31 — Day 3

The sun is shining, but for some reason, the roads are still not that clear.  Several cars are still having difficulty climbing the incline out of the Best Western to the main road, which is now melting, but still very snow covered.  Today, we discover that we’ve met one major part of our goals, the Fedora Pony has been created!!  We must thank Robyn Bergeron for creating, Frank, the Fedora Pwnie.  Now mind you, Francis is really her name, but she’s such a tomboy that, well, you just can’t call her that, she doesn’t enjoy it too much.  So we call her Frank.

In addition to our major goal above of a Pony, the FUDCon Live team has done some amazing work.  Yaakov has been working on the FUDCon Live document with Mel, while I was working with the FreeSeeR guys to get their git repo moved over to fedorahosted.org, which is awesome!  I’ve been given commit and sponsor rights to the repo, so we’ll start getting more developers involved right away.  Have a look at the screenshots of the GUI if you’d like to see what FreeSeeR can do.

Jon Stanley and I discussed the possibility of moving fedorahosted.org over to gitolite, and discovered that Jesse Keating has been experimenting with it himself, so this might be something we can do in the near future.  While we currently appear to use gitosis, gitolite gives us the ability to set ACLs on a particular branch, which then can help keep the master branch cleaner.  To help illustrate this, there’s a very great article on nvie.com which explains a git branching system which can really make development and commits very clean and easy to track.  Gitolite can help with this, so I’m going to be experimenting with it this coming week.

I spent the rest of the day writing up the AV Kit wiki page along with Mel.  I stubbed it out, and she added a big section regarding the modules in the AV Kit.  I then rewrote much of that to cover the two styles of AV Kit we’ll be building over the next month or two.  In fact, I plan to have one complete in time for the Marketing FAD in March, where they can use and test it out.  I really hope to get some good feedback on it and improve FreeSeeR some more using these upcoming events as testing grounds.

Currently, I’m on a plane which I didn’t think would take off tonight, headed home for Salt Lake City.  I’m excited to see my sweetie and get some much needed sleep.  As much as I enjoy hanging out with my Fedora friends and working on projects like this, it really wears me out.  I’m ecstatic at the amount of work we accomplished though, and am very appreciative to Paul, Jon, Chris, Denis, Dave, Mel and Max, plus all the folks online for their hard work this weekend.

FUDCon 2.0 is alive and kicking, FUDCon Live will make it just that much better.  Watch for upcoming posts in the near future regarding FreeSeeR and the Fedora AV Kit and how everything is going to work.

Cheers,

Herlo

It’s clear that Mel has done some incredible work, getting a good number of people to Raleigh this weekend.  I’m looking forward to giving my input and listenting to others as we come up with better ways to handle such things as the EventBox, recording and streaming different presentations, encouraging users to join Fedora and the overall professionalism we portray at each of our events.  There are so many things to get done this weekend, I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out the other side.

As for what I will be doing most of the time.  While I plan to help with the initial brainstorming on FUDCon, external events, etc., I really plan to spend most of my time focusing on improving the way that we record and stream our events.  These events can be as simple as a Local User Group (LUG) meeting to something bigger, like the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE), the Ohio Linux Fest or Pycon, and of course, somewhere in there, is the Fedora FAD and FUDCon.

Now mind you, I can see hundreds of other uses for this concept of recording and streaming.  Including live video podcasts, recording for redistribution, ad-hoc collaboration sessions, troubleshooting a problem with code and many, many more use cases.  However, I think I’m going to try to limit my use cases to those specifically around our events.  Things where we can easily set up our recording equipment and share it with those interested, whether in real-time, or making it available later on to the general public.

The software we plan on using to get the recording and streaming off the ground, is called freeseer.  It’s been put together by some folks who help organize and run FOSSLC.  Andrew and Thanh have been hacking hard lately, altering their code to move from the patent encumbered ffmpeg, to the more open and free gstreamer library.  They’ve also been busy moving from a gui with a command line behind it, to using the python gstreamer bindings.  Much cleaner, much easier to manage and alter in real time.  I’m very excited to see how we can improve freeseer over this weekend.  I actually think we’ll be able to do quite a bit with freeseer to improve external participation in Fedora.

Well, the pilot just announced that we’ll be landing in Raleigh in about 20-30 minutes, and that I need to pack up my electronics.  I’m looking forward to seeing all of my Fedora friends and making an amazing events solution.  I’ll try to keep you updated, with pictures and text, over the next few days.

Cheers,

Herlo

I am very sad to report, there will not be any pressed F12 media at FUDCon this time.

However, I expect the financial details to be sorted out sometime between now and Monday.  If this happens, it’s quite possible we can deliver media starting next week.  Still pretty fast, considering.

I guess every FUDCon can’t be perfect, but we’re still going to make this a great event!

If you are in the area, or wish to participate from afar, we’ve got ways for you to get involved.  FUDCon is always free and I’ve got two remote microphones and two mixers that I plan on using to record and stream the audio from two rooms.  I’m also working on a way to stream/record the desktop of the presenter at the same time so we can have audio and video from the desktops in real time (we’ll see if this part happens).  I might even suggest a hackfest on Monday to make it more solid if I can’t get it working tonight/tomorrow.

I’m excited to see all my friends at FUDCon.

Cheers,

Clint

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

10:15am: Finish packing my gear, wake Jennifer.

10:50am: Head down to the hotel lobby and drop off our bags at the bell desk.

10:55am: Find a restaurant for breakfast.  Get some coffee and breakfast sandwiches.  Sometimes breakfast is really nice when it’s hot and delicious.  I’m glad it was cold this day as I have now purchased a warm hat from the MIT Co-op store.

11:15am: Leave the restaurant, heading for MIT to do a little bit of hacking before heading to the airport for our flight home.

11:25am: Arrive in the middle of the release planning meeting.  Contribute a little to the conversation.

11:35pm: Hunt down Jarod Wilson so that I may obtain some stickers to put into the EventBox.  Jarod informs me that the stickers are in his car which is approximately 45 minutes away.  It’s decided that we’ll get in touch after Monday and get the box shipped to me in time for SCaLE 7x.

11:50pm: Head back down the hall, say goodbye to friends.  Say goodbye to more friends as we head out for the airport.

Goodbye FUDCon F11, it has been fun.  See you all in 6 months time.

12:30pm: After arriving at the airport and checking in, the gentleman helping me check my bags for the Delta flight informed us that there would was a direct flight leaving at 5pm.  He asked us if we’d like to take that instead, so we did.  It did mean waiting in the airport for an additional 3+ hours, but he also offered to put us in the Crown Room while we waited.

12:45pm: In the Delta Crown Room watching planes take off, get de-iced and a couple garbage fires.  Was also able to hack on Moksha with Luke for a while.  We were able to determine that a few bugs still exist in his code and that I’d look at it again very soon.

4:15pm: Pack up to get on the plane and head home.  Flight was uneventful and I was happy to arrive in Salt Lake City.  We arrived at our home around 9:30pm Mountain Time.

10:00pm: Sleep.  ZZZZzzzzzz.  ZZZZZZZzzzzzZZZZZzzzz.

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

8:35am: Arrive at MIT for the FUDCon bar camp, grab a muffin, some juice and coffee.

8:50am: Complete set up of audio equipment, quickly down my juice and muffin.

8:55am: Head out to get some more food, but I only found some morsels left.  I snagged a small bit of bread left, and begin my return to the audio equipment.

9:05am: Streaming has begun, or so I think.  Darkice won’t start, giving a strange error that the device wasn’t there.  It turns out I’ve forgotten to plug in the usb cable from the mixer, so the first few minutes of Greg DeKoenigsberg’s talk are missing.

9:08am: Plug in the usb cable and restart the stream.

9:30am: Pitch a session on the Fedora Classroom.

9:40am: Vote for my favorite sessions and hope others want to participate in the Fedora Classroom session.  As I we are voting, I chat with Dave Nalley, Ian Weller and Ricky Zhou about recording audio in whatever room they are in each hour.  It seems to be a good plan.

9:50am: Paul asks me to help get sessions scheduled, so I grab chalk and start crossing out sessions that have been scheduled.

10:15am: All the sessions are scheduled, because I am recording the audio of many of the presentations, I choose to stay in the main room, also the largest room.

10:30am: I begin streaming the Filesystems session, Chris Tyler is also in this room recording the video for posting later on the web.  The session did not start off all that interesting.  Near the end, I learned a bit about the transition from ext4 to btrfs for the future of Linux in general.

11:30am: This was my favoritest hour of the entire bar camp.  Luke Macken and John (J5) Palmieri presented on Moksha.  Moksha is an application built upon Turbo Gears 2, orbited, jQuery and about 10 other technologies to bring together a simple interface for making real time applications on the web.  It’s much more than a simple AJAXified application and has benefits to allow one to write a simple connector to communicate to the browser.  Watch for another post on this in the near future.

12:15pm: During the Moksha talk, I recalled that I desired to head over to the Marriott hotel and take pictures of the Fedora window posters.  Because I hadn’t brought along my camera, I first asked Mairin Duffy to see if she had a long range lense, She did not.  John Stanley informed me he had one with his Canon Digital Rebel XTI, and that he would happily lend it to me.  However, he couldn’t leave as he was covering for others during the lunch hour.

12:30pm: Jennfer came over and spent about 20 minutes with me while I ate my lunch.  Then we found John together and headed out *quickly* to get the pictures of the hotel.  We talked about what she was going to do that day, visit some older churches in the area and such.

As we arrived at the hotel, we saw several windows with the Fedora window posters.  I pulled out the camera and fired away, catching several good photos.  After taking the first photos however, I noticed that the camera was reporting that it did not have a CF card.  It turns out John didn’t know he didn’t have a card in his camera, which means no pictures from the hotel experiment (unless others have some, here’s hoping).

1:33pm: After hurrying back from the failed photo shoot.  I found myself running behind the schedule just a little.  It turns out the Puppet session was next and Jeroen van Meuween wasn’t too interested in waiting on me.  As luck would have it, everyone seemed to be in this session and Ricky Zhou saved the day by recording the first few minutes on the stream for me.

The puppet session was good, but I wish I had seen a bit of a demo of advanced features.

2:30pm: The desktop session was started recording, however, I was asked to come out and do an interview with my good friend Dave Nalley about the progress of the Ambassadors with Colby Hoke.  We spent a good bit of time talking in front of the camera about the awesomeness that is the new AmbassadorKit, the new Media Box and some other initiatives coming soon to the Fedora Project.

2:55pm: Headed over to the remaining bits of the Git Basics session run by Paul Frields.  I really enjoyed this session.  While I know quite a bit about Git, I was able to help teach others about a few things and even learned a thing or two about git-reset.

3:25pm: Returned to the main room to finish up the streaming for the Desktop session.  There was a lot of discussion going on about the new feature in the GNOME (I think?) desktop, but coming in at the end, I wasn’t certain.

3:30pm: After starting the recording for the KVM session, along with Kevin Fenzi, I headed over to the session we were holding on Fedora Classroom.  I was saddened to see that there were only 6 people (including us) in the session.  But that’s what you get when you compete against KVM and other blockbuster sessions and your topic is really, really new.

Even with the small audience, Kevin and I were able to come up with some positive plans for the future from the group.  I anticipate we’ll see more basic topics for the #fedora and FedoraForum.org crowds.  We talked about how a lot of the folks we’ve seen in the #fedora-classroom sessions over the past two months were those who really could become great contributors with just a bit of opportunity.

We also discussed ways to get more presenters and topics into the curriculum.  Part of what is keeping this from blooming quickly.  Hopefully the things we discussed were useful for the future of Fedora Classroom and its future does look bright.

4:30pm: As everyone gathered into the room, I learned that we were going to be having a hackfest in the evening after FUDPub.  The goal of the hackfest was to get the videos and audio uploaded and shared as quickly as possible.

5:08pm: Paul’s final remarks for the bar camp, thanking many of the contributors.  I was grateful for everyone who put in effort today.  The MIT folks were very gracious for letting us hold FUDCon there this year.

Paul announced the FUDPub at Flat Top Johny’s and that the OLPC folks were sponsoring the food and one drink.  Very nice of them as well.

Part 2 will be coming shortly as it is another day unto itself.

Cheers,

Herlo

8:30am: Decided I was finally awake enough to write FUDCon F11: Day 0 post.

9:00am: Packed everything I needed (or thought I needed) into my backpack.  This took incredibly long.

9:10am: Somewhere around this time, I was expecting the reminder “We’re waiting” SMS from Dave Nalley.  None had arrived.

9:14am: Send SMS to Dave asking if he’s downstairs yet.  Get reply that he has not made it down yet, with a 7 minute ETA.  I chuckle, pack the rest of my audio equipment and head downstairs.

9:20am: Arrive with others for breakfast, many have given up on us, headed over to order food and head out.  Dave arrives approximately 1 minute later, we head to Au Bon Pain and promptly order and eat breakfast.

9:35am: I look up the instructions to the Tang Center for everyone.  None of us had decided it important enough to do this earlier.  Luckily, it’s about one block away.  We head out toward the HackFest.

9:45am: Arrive at Tang Center on MIT’s campus without incident, proceed to the 3rd floor (following well placed signs).  Obtain our badges and head into the main room for a short discussion.

10:05am: Discussion begins.  Approximately 25 projects are placed upon the board.  Names include, AmbassadorKit, Moksha, DevShell, OLPC / Sugar development and many, many others.

11:00am: Head to room 395 for the AmbassadorKit HackFest.

• AmbassadorKits are designed and put in place.  It is determined we need to obtain Tyvek bags to ship them and make the kits disposable and easily distributable.
• Media Boxes are a big hit and everyone is cutting them out and taping them together.  I did a short video presentation on how to fold them (hopefully will have that content really soon) for inclusion in the AmbassadorKit.    Tape is also needed for the Media Boxes.
• Discussion of the many uses of the Media Boxes was held.

11:30am: Decided the printed Fedora Window Posters were great for the Tang Center.    Placed them on the windows wherever good and visible.

12:30pm: Four ambassadors; myself, Ian Weller, Brian Powell and Dave Nalley head out toward Central Square to obtain packaging and tape from the UPS Store.  We had it in our mind this was a good idea now that we have a NA UPS Account.  In reality, after traveling on the train, walking 20 minutes in the windy, brisk cold weather and discovering the lack of true UPS supplies we could purchase on our account, it might have just been as good to head to the nearest shipping store.  Ahh well, lesson learned.

1:15pm: Arrived at a lovely pizzeria recommended by one of the nice UPS Store employees.  We decided to share a pizza.  After ordering, the total came to just over $20.  I reached into my wallet, pulled out a $20 bill and thought, “gee, I need some change”.  Dave promptly swiped the bill from my hand, and nonchalantly handed it to the cashier as if it were payment.  Thus, i was paying for lunch.  Dave promptly got a “waaa!” from me.  I then received a $5 bill for my trouble from Dave, as if that fixed everything.*

2:15pm: Arrived at the hotel, headed up to get the Live Media to bring to the event.  Headed back over to the Tang Center.

2:30pm: The AmbassadorKits were packaged, Brian Powell will be shipping out 2 (or 3) this weekend.  The remainder will be distributed among the Ambassadors to fulfill future requests.

3:00pm: Decided it a was a good time to distribute the rest of the Fedora Window Posters for the hotel.  Ran out of posters with doublestick tape.  Need to buy more.

3:15pm: Set up and tested audio streaming for tomorrow’s FUDCon sessions.  It appears we’ll have enough to do 4 rooms with streaming audio and 3 rooms (I believe) with video to be distributed soon after FUDCon.  Test was quite successful.

3:30pm: Discussed the new CMS with Karsten and others.  Promoted WordPress as a possible CMS platform.  Argued for its stability, value and flexible API.  Not sure I converted anyone, but it was worth a try.

4:30pm: Hung around, discussed media and other Fedoraish topics with others in the room.  All in all a good bit of work was done.  Much to mull around in this brain of mine.

6:00pm: Gathered with Paul, Greg and many others for a round table session about Fedora. This part was the most useful for me so far.  I was quite grateful for the opportunity to come in and discuss all the great things happening in Fedora.  To see the gratitude from these folks was cool.  It really pushed home why I like hanging out with Fedora folks, they are very genuine appreciative people for what we all do.  I learned so much about the contribution benefits and how others contribute.

7:45pm: Met in the lobby of the hotel, then headed over to Cambridge Brewing Company for a nice dinner.  Quite good food and drink.  Good company and gorgeous girlfriend to boot.  What a day!  What a day!

10:30pm: Arrived back at the hotel to hack on Fedora-Event-Splash with the new Moksha functionality.  Essentially, we wanted to get a better feel for Moksha and what it provides after Paul described it earlier in the day.  Thing is, there are a lot of things to getting it working and we could only get so far.

However, while working through this, I was able to discuss plans for tomorrows Audio Streaming and Video Recording of the sessions.   Thus the blog post and some logistics which should make things easier for everyone.

I was also able to discuss the Fedora-Classroom session Kevin Fenzi and I are proposing tomorrow.  We’re looking to have a lively session tomorrow regarding this and see where it might go.

Another discussion that came out of this was the usefulness of EMEA and its non-profit.  Seeing as we’re looking into this for North America.

2:30am (Saturday): In bed.  Zzzzzzz

Streams will be available at http://stream.utos.org:8080, look for the links to be semi-descriptive.  We are also limiting the number of listeners per stream to 20 to make sure we get good streaming. We may increase this nearer the end of the day, especially for Paul’s address.

In addition, many of these same talks will be video recorded by the famous Chris Tyler and Matt Domsch, and others.  Their video recordings will be shared with the community shortly after FUDCon.

This should be really good.

If you are curious about the schedule, check the FUDCon F11 Wiki page to keep up on the latest sessions and locations.

Cheers,

Clint

Cheers,

Clint