Thoughts from the abyss

I just got back to the hotel room a bit ago from the end of Ohio LinuxFest 2006. It’s amazing to see how much this event has grown. This is my third year attending. The first year I was here, 350 people showed up, the second year 700 showed up, and this year over 1100 showed up. It’s fun to see the Linux and open source enthusiasm growing very rapidly like this.

There were a lot of good programs here today as usual. As always, they had a lot of good speakers available, and at the end of the show John “maddog” Hall gave the exit speech. This is the second time that I’ve heard him speak, and he’s quite the open source evangelist. Before he came on to give his speech though, the Columbus, Ohio Zoo brought in two penguins! Their names were Punky and JB. I never knew this, but penguins are monogamous. I guess that shouldn’t surprise me, since many birds are already that way, but I just never really thought about it with penguins. Anyways, the penguins were really cool and cute before maddog came on to speak.

This is a really cool event. It would be nice to see it stretch out to two days worth of programming and panels, and at the rate that it’s growing, I can totally see that happening within the next few years. You can learn a lot here in a matter of a day, and of course it’s fun for the geeks to get together. Sometimes in my case, yes, it’s very fun but it also reminds me of how just how much stuff I don’t really know. There are a lot of very knowlegeable people and presenters here, and it’s nice for me to always go home at the end of the weekend knowing something that I didn’t know when I got here. Until next year, thanks Ohio LinuxFest 2006.