Ugh. I have some blogging catching-up to do, which I'm going to try to take at a fast clip. I tend to get bogged down in the daily details, which can make getting my info down electronically kind of difficult.
Trip to New York City
Maj, Amita June and I drove down through upstate New York for LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit. It was a good drive -- really pretty going through the Adirondacks in winter. There were icicles hanging dozens of meters from stone cliffs -- really dramatic.
We spent Tuesday night with our friends Jen Bohner and Massoud Marzban. Jen is a friend of mine from high school, and Massoud is her husband. They live in Sunnyside, Queens now, after a year stint here in Montreal just before Amita was born. We miss having them around here, but they seem to have settled in well in NYC. Jen is working way too hard on a master's of education while teaching 5 classes during the day in New York public schools. Despite this, they found time to make us a great dinner, open a bottle of wine, and spend the evening chatting. Really decent people.
tags: jen massoud drive montreal travel queens
LWOSS
The next morning, Valentine's Day, I got up early to go into Manhattan for LWOSS. I called for a car service that Jen and Massoud use, but they failed to show up, and when I called back they hung up on me. Deborah's Car Service, there. Make sure to miss them if you're in the area.
Anyways, I managed to flag down a cab and get into Manhattan anyways. It wasn't too much fun -- there'd been a big snowstorm the night before, and traffic was gnarled and bitter. Still, I got to the event hotel -- the New York Marriott Marquis on Times Square, got checked in, and registered for the event just fine.
The keynote speaker was security expert Bruce Schneier, who gave an extremely insightful talk about economic laws as they apply to computer security. It was very interesting, if hard to follow at times -- it's not always easy to keep economic theories and security practices juggling in your brain at the same time.
I met up with Don Marti, who'd invited me to participate at LWOSS, in the speakers' lounge. He had assembled a great team of interesting people who know a lot about Linux and Open Source: John Mark Walker, Jeremy Allison and Jerry Carter of the Samba project, and Jeremy Garcia of LinuxQuestions. Sadly, the snowstorm had canceled the flights of two more participants, Donald Becker and Sascha Chua.
(Those weren't the only two people who couldn't come because of the flying problems. I overheard dozens of conversations on cell phones of people whose colleagues couldn't make it for the show. In retrospect, it's pretty surprising that we had the event at all. Schools and businesses were closed all across New York on the 14th and 15th.)
Don's plan was simple: to hold an "unconference" at the heart of the conference. We took a section of the showroom floor, set up some chairs and a big monitor for demoing, plus a whiteboard, and just started some interesting conversations. I talked about Web APIs, since I wrote an article on Web APIs for LinuxWorld.com in December. Other people talked about their own projects, about Linux distros, about tools in the Open Source toolkit, about the process itself, and all kinds of things. It was really fun and productive.
(I'm realizing now that I should put Don in touch with Ted Ernst, who's been instrumental in organizing three of the Open Space events I went to in the last year. It would be really interesting to have an Open Space event the day before or after the main conference... making mental note, here.)
Otherwise, the event was really pretty good. I talked a lot with Jeremy Garcia, who started using MediaWiki about the same time we started using it for Wikitravel. LQ is a really great project, and a nice mix of different community platforms. I managed to luck into an LQ t-shirt, which I'll wear proudly.
The other big news, for me, was getting a loaner Nokia N800 to use during the event. The N800 is an Internet tablet, about the size of a cell phone, but without phone features. I liked it so much that I asked the Nokia team to loan me the device for a long-term review, and they agreed. So I took it home with me.
Meanwhile, Maj and Amita June had a nice time tooling around New York. They went to the American Museum of Natural History on Thursday, which was pretty great -- Amita loved looking at the animals. We had dinner on Wednesday at a pub off of Times Square called The Perfect Pint -- although the food was a little more upscale than pubby. Thursday night we got a babysitter through the hotel and had drinks at the Broadway Bar (in the hotel) and dinner at The View (also in the hotel). The View is a rotating restaurant at the top of the Marriott Marquis -- pretty fun to do.
tags: lwoss don marti unconference manhattan marriott marquis linuxquestions
UbuCon
On Friday, I went to the Google HQ in Manhattan for TheUbucon, another (!) unconference, this time about Ubuntu and the people who love it. I got to hear Mako talk about the Ubuntu community process, how it works, and how to get involved. It was pretty impressive. I also did some key-signings and talked to a lot of interesting people. Including Kevin Mark, who had lots of comments on my blog. Hi, Kevin!
I had to take off just as the event was getting started, to go pick up Maj and Amita June at the hotel and check out. We took a cab back to Queens, where we'd stashed the car so we didn't have pay outrageous Manhattan parking fees. Sadly, someone had taken the opportunity to key our paint job. I love you back, New York.
tags: ubucon google kevin mark
Drive home
I wanted to drive back through Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont on the way back, for variety, so we turned east and headed up through Westchester County. It turned out to be a real mistake -- traffic on a Friday afternoon out of New York is apparently pretty miserable. We took 4 hours to get to Hartford, by which time the baby was miserable and the rest of us were feeling pretty punked out, too. We ended up in the Motel 6 in Enfield (Connecticut) where we ordered pizza, took showers, and just got our heads back together.
Today we got up early and had a nice drive through Western Mass and Vermont. The little northern New England towns were pretty beautiful in the snow, and we passed a lot of barns and farmhouses that looked like movie sets. We stopped in Burlington for lunch, and had a leisurely drive over the border and back home. When we got to our house, I had to shovel drifted snow -- about 3-4 feet deep -- out of our parking space so I can pull the car in. But otherwise the house is in good order. I'm glad to be back.
tags: connecticut massachusetts vermont burlington snow home