[Novalug] My personal FOSE wrap up / tues and wed

[nick at hackermonkey.com]

I always forget how much I liked DC, NoVA and the Linux guys down there. I had a
great time at the booth. I love talking to people at the booth, both the workers
and the people visiting. A few notes about things.

1) The visitors seemed more polarized this year. Usually we have a huge spectrum
of people from experts to beginners, and people that want to try, people that
refuse to try and maybe a few swag-baggers. This year seemed much more extreme.
The experts seemed more expert, the haters more so, and the swag baggers even
more blatent.

2) The longer I spend in the booth talking to people, the dumber I feel. Not bad
dumb, I leave with a list of more things I need to learn and read up about. So
its a good thing, a nice personal growth thing :-) I still dont quite understand
64bit HW vs 32bit HW, but then I have all old HW and nothing remotely close to
64 bit anyway.

3) I have a doppleganger that works for a VT based scanning company!

4) My personal low moment of the show was when I gentleman came up and asked
"Which one of these is for Windows XP?" I explained what they were and he said
no way he needed to "remain compatible. Goodbye" and waved off. I yelled
something after him about "compatible with what?" and then I felt real bad
about it, I should have been more polite. The more I think about it, the worse
off I think the poor guy is. Not because he didn't listen to me, but simply
because here is he running a horribly vulnerable OS and he wanted "the XP
compatible" cd from me before he even knew what it is I had. So who knows what
sort of condition his PC is even in.

5) We should have done something post show, gone to Fado or something? I would
have liked to 'debrief' after each night. I dont think the wife cared much
about my ramblings of the show and who I talked to about geeky things. (Did I
know there was a DC chess group? NO! Wish I knew then, I STINK and would love
to play with people and learn to play well!)

6) One of the USB encrypted key people told me their product worked with Windows
and no plans for OSX or Linux, yet, but maybe. "We had to go after the biggest
market." Ok, no problem. Thats a good company plan, but no plans for Linux yet?
I actually said "if I buy one, and get drivers written for it, would you want
them?" and he goes "No."  Fast foward to the other side of the show floor and I
find IronKey. They were working on Linux drivers, I read about it. Not only are
they excited that Im from tux.org and know about their product, they want me to
review it and hand me a 1GB key. Unfortunately it had the old code and wasn't
Linux ready, so they are sending me a new one in the mail. I can't wait to try
it on every system I have (CentOS, Ubuntu, RedHat EL, Linux Mint and for the
hell of it, OpenBSD :-) and just see what happens! I don't know why but lately
I've been very crypto concious.

I think thats all I have for now, other then a HUUUGE thanks to everyone that
showed up. If you helped or just stopped, you made the day go great and I can't
wait to do it again. Next time I'll do the whole show, and show up for
setup/breakdown, I forgot those were a fun time as well. Yes, Im weird like
that...

Did anyone ever get the CDs burned on Thursday? We ran out sometime Wednesday
afternoon and I know we had made some arrangements with MicroTech (?) to get
some extras for Thursday. Looks like 300 just isn't enough. We could probably
make due with 600 or so.
Nick