LinuxFest Northwest 2012: Day 0

The reason BillingsLUG members Andrew and Warren were visiting the BozemanLUG meeting was because they are going to the LinuxFest Northwest 2012 show in Bellingham, Washington along with BozemanLUG member Gary Bummer and myself. Yeah, four people for the trip this year! Last year I was all by myself.

On the road again

Warren was kind enough to drive again this year. He is a "professional" and "ninja" driver. Andrew sat next to him in the front and Gary and I sat in the back. Gary and I watched two Big Bang Theory videos on my laptop along with the HBO movie Game Change. We also listened to the most recent episode of the Sunday Morning Linux review audiocast.

Visiting Psymin and Agethol

I don't know if I spelled Agethol correctly so forgive me if not. Speaking of spell checking, Firefox 12 doesn't seem to be doing while-you-type spell checking for me so I'm sure this post will be rife with typos. :(

One of the traditions that we do on the trip to LFNW if at all possible is to visit with Seth McClain and Frank in Missoula. We meet at Seth's favorite eatery, "The Shack". Seth yet again bought everyone a bruchy meal. I had oatmeal with fruit and it was delecious. Even with the long trip we stayed and talked geek talk for about an hour and a half. It was awesome.

It was also Seth's birthday. Happy birthday Seth! You are getting old like me dude. :) Thanks for the food and sorry we didn't bring the dirt and rocks from Manhattan that you wanted as posted on Craig's List (inside joke).

Arriving in Bellingham

When driving from Montana to the Northwest coastal region, you gain an hour. We arrived in Bellingham around 7PM. We stopped at our favorite hole-in-the-wall oriental food place and all had "Spicy Chicken". While I've been trying to cut back on my animal product intake this year, I couldn't resist. I'm a wimp when it comes to spicy stuff but this wasn't too hot and was very tasty... and on Fridays you get a can of soda with each meal FREE! :)

With our full bellies we went over to the Hampton Inn and checked in. Gary and I went over to the Fox Hall (part of Hampton Inn) for the last 30 minutes of a Job Fair event that was held as part of LFNW. We weren't looking for jobs or anything and were mainly fighting bordom... but they had some fruit kabobs and some finger veggies so I snacked a little bit and didn't even feel guilty about it.

Looking forward to day 1

There are many fine presentations scheduled. The Calligra Krita folks (as mentioned in BozemanLUG April 2012 Meeting Report) really wanted there to be a Krita presentation at LFNW and I believe one guy really familiar with Blender (and giving a presenation on it as well?) volunteered to show Krita off even though he is relatively new to it. The Krita folks mailed him a copy of the promotional training video DVD with physical comicbook included to be donated as a prize at the LFNW World Famous Raffle. I'm going to buy 20 raffle tickets in hopes of winning that and I'll definitely be attending (and hopefully video recording) the Krita presentation... along with all of the other presentations I attend... with the permissions of the presenters of course.

Here are the presentations I hope to attend:

• An Intro to CrunchBang
• Software Patents: What You Can Do
• Linux Logical Volume Manager Advanced Topics
• Help us get open source used in local schools
• ownCloud - Your Cloud, Your Data, Your Way!
• The LFNW World Famous Raffle
• Krita - Digital graphics for real artists
• XenClient: Client-side virtualization
• Meet Fedora: The Not-So-Miraculous story of a successful community
• Teaching Linux and Linux System Administration as Distance Education Classes

Isn't that list awesome? There are quite a few other (overlapping) presentations I wish I could attend and it was hard to settle on those. I hope to blog day 1 and day 2... although there might be some lag... and I'll be posting the videos ASAP after the event to archive.org in webm format.