Road Trip!

gabrielle — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:42:06 +0100

This past weekend, Selena, Mark & I loaded up Mark's car with flyers, mugs & t-shirts & headed up to Bellingham, WA for Linuxfest NW (website: http://linuxfestnorthwest.org/). Several LUGs in the area host this annual conference. This was my first Linuxfest & I was really impressed - it was very well-organized, well-attended and FUN. Mark gave his talk about ptop/pgtop first thing Saturday morning. We managed to see some other talks too - Selena checked out some Drupal talks & I went to Eric Hopper's IPv6 discussion on Sunday. We all had a great time running the booth, despite the lack of JD's entertaining presence. He was replaced by surprise guest boothster, Chris Travers! Chris showed up to give a LedgerSMB talk and we conned him into boothbeasting with us. Thanks, Chris! Even though it was crowded behind our table, I think four staffers was the right (minimum!) number to have for handling questions & greeting people. The conference was really packed. I think I talked at length to somewhere around 12-15 people. We had a HUGE range of questions, all the way from people wondering about replication strategies to "What's a database, anyway?" We also ran through the inevitable "how do you pronounce it?" Selena gave a long demo of pgadmin to someone who is currently using SQL Server. A lot of people are very interested in a MySQL -> PostgreSQL migration tool. We ran out of almost all printed materials we'd brought on the first day, necessitating phone calls to Josh B to acquire more flyers and a local copy shop to print them. Selena had the brilliant idea to get some elephant logo stickers printed as well; they were very popular. Saturday night, Silicon Mechanics hosted the afterparty at the American Museum of Radio & Electricity, a truly excellent site for a geek party! We got to dink around with static electricity machines & toys from past centuries. Selena stepped up to the theramin while Mark & I checked out the old music boxes. The best part of the evening for me was when the docents set up a small tesla coil. >:) We had a great little indoor lightning show & Selena became part of a multi-person chain that lit up a fluorescent tube. Back home now, attempting to recover from Conference Brain.