Josh Saddler

SCALE 2007 was a blast, as some have already reported. My wife and I arrived late Friday night, whereupon we met a few Gentoo devs, including Pete, Christel, Josh, Dan, and Mike. Hurray for the bar! I proceeded to get loaded with two (2!) Sprites, with ice. Yes, fizzy sweet nonalcoholic beverages are my drink of choice. Mmm, sugar. Diabetics should probably not read this blog. More devs, users, and random folks from other FOSS projects dropped by. And, of course, the merits of double-doubles...Christel ordered a double rum and coke, and I jokingly told the waiter "make it a double-double!" He obliged, and she didn't realize it until 15 minutes into her drink! . We also discussed the merits of paragliding versus paraFALLING, and the (relative) merits of buttplugs -- not for any of those present, but for certain people in other countries.... Anyway, we had a blast until 1AM or so, when it was time to crash.

Saturday came far too early. Seven hours of sleep, ugh. Headed downstairs to face the line for a bit at 9:30, until some kind SCALE organizer pointed out that since I was an exhibitor I could just head right in. Met up with Pete, who was the first on the scene. David showed up a little later I think, and then a general crowd of Gentoo devs showed up. We set up various desktops and laptops on the table in our (all too small) booth, and when I dodged upstairs to get /dev/snacks (as I affectionately labeled them), I came back to discover the mother of all booth attractions...a 28-someodd inch widescreen LCD TV hooked up to a Playstation3 running the Gentoo/PPC64 livecd. This was courtesy Dan (dostrow) -- oh man, it was so sweet, and proved to be quite the draw for the rest of the event. Even had a "Powered by Gentoo" sticker on it. One of those stickers was later slapped on my butt by a mischievous Christel. Actually, that same cheek was repeatedly groped by Josh and by my wife at various opportune (read: someone had a camera) moments, with predictable comic effect.

I caught two talks on Saturday, Jono Bacon's How to Herd Cats and Influence People (aka Heckle Gentoo and Get Heckled Back!), as well as Alex Ionescu's ReactOS talk. I had one question...."Can it run StarCraft?" His answer: "Yes." I'm sold!

Once Saturday was finished, we ended up going out to a nearby Thai restaurant...so good! So yummy! There were about 22 of us once we all got there (turns out that GPS is in fact a bad thing). All of us devs, my wife, some Freenode staff, Gnome developers, and some attendees who'd just arrived from San Diego. I chatted with them for a bit, since they work at the UCSD library (fellow library-types! yay!), so it just goes to show I'm not the only Linux-type who works in a library.

After that, we returned to the hotel and went our separate ways for a bit. A bunch of us headed to the roof of the parking lot to watch the planes land nearby at LAX, but they weren't going for the closer runway, and it started to rain. Back inside, then ... only to discover Christel&co getting friendly with Mr. Vodka and Mr. Laptop. (Licking ensued, the video is on YouTube somewhere). Merriment! Eventually we giggled our way into the hall, and Pete had the great suggestion that we play Tremulous. Oh man, that game is intense. The aliens totally have an advantage over the humans if used right. Eventually, they wouldn't let me play as aliens anymore, even when it was me vs. them (blackace, latexer, calculus and I took turns on 3 machines). Bah. I scared the **** out of them, though. "Where is he?!? Where is he!! AHHHHheATEmyarseoff!" --> this was Pete screaming like a little girl. I stumbled off to bed at 1:30, feeling like I had a cold.

This was justified; I spent all Sunday feeling sick. I think some SCALE attendee gave me a cold, so I manned the booth despite feeling terrible. Met users, other FOSS project members, folks curious about Gentoo, etc. Thanks to James, Pete, and David we had lightscribe CDs to give away that day, not just our handwritten, limited-edition one-of-a-kind Sharpie CDs. The lightscribe discs looked really terrific!

We intermittently ran a networked Tremulous game on Pete's AMD64 and my laptop as part of the demo, and Steve (nerdboy) brought his k'neXBox (as I dubbed it) out. Didn't get that working; it had hardware issues, but it got some attention anyway, since its case was made of K'nex parts. Sunday didn't feel quite as busy as Saturday, but it was still a good time. I finally went swag-hunting with David, and had to deal with some crazy old guy who monopolized our entire booth. Grr. He dragged out a chair, plopped into it, and proceeded to tell stories about everything imaginable, while blocking access, trapping all our devs at once, and drove off attendees all at the same time! And he ate all our candy! All our other visitors were nice enough, though one guy asked us "What is Gentoo? Who are you guys?", and instead of listening, proceeded to use our PS3 to look up wikipedia's article. Ummm, okay? I'm told Linux events have their share of wacky folks, so I guess this is to be expected.

Anyway, on the last night, we went out for dinner at a craptastic Pizza Hut before going our separate ways. I came away with a better sense of who these people are that I work with. They're a fun, awesome group, and it's too bad we can't hang out in person more. At least we have IRC. Of the devs who were supposed to attend, only Chris, Elfyn, and Steve didn't make it. The rest of us had quite a huge party going at all times.

Looking forward to the next time all (or some) of us can get together in person. FOSSCON is just around the corner...

Still reading? Man, you're focused. Go get yourself a cold drink or something, and remember to blink!