OSCON 2009: Day Five
Here’s my summary of day five, but it’s a little late. I didn’t get a chance to post it Friday because the wireless got cut off promptly at 2:30 PM. Yeah, I had my aircard with me, but I was too busy talking technology at the tables with my fellow geeks. It was a good time, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The day started too early, but I think that was because of the late night at the SourceForge CCA party. I managed to get to the conference center in time to catch the last two keynotes, but like most keynotes, I didn’t get much out of them. They were entertaining, though.
Following the keynotes was an interesting, but thoroughly uneducational, history of JSON. I should have gone to another talk, but such is life when you have 13+ sessions to choose from and only a summary to go off of.
After this, I attended a talk about data scalability. I learned more in this session than in most others, but there was little practical advice given. It was all theory and no practical solutions to the problems presented. However, given the scant 45 minutes the talker had to fill, I’m sure he left lots out just to shoehorn the talk into such a short time. I’m glad I attended this session as it refreshed my knowledge of what I already knew about scaling databases and gave me new items as food for thought.
The closing keynote of the conference was very entertaining, and I’m glad I sat through it. The part about “What PC can I buy for $1500 when using Linux?” was phenomenal. Now, I just need to find $1500 lying on the street. 
Then came hanging out with the friends I had made during the week. I had about three hours to kill. During this time, I helped one of the Ubuntu guys install Jaunty on a newly won HP netbook that another fella had won. Well… When I say helped, I mean I loaned him my aircard so he could install a few minor packages and get some critical updates installed. He did all of the work. I’m quite impressed by the speed of Jaunty on the new HP netbook. It made me wish I had won one of them. I think there were a total of six given away during the week.
Then came a quick train and bus ride to the airport, waiting around for a couple of hours at the airport and a very late flight home. I managed to make it home, get a shower and crawl into bed around 12:45 in the AM exhausted and happy to be home.
All-in-all, OSCON 2009 was a great trip, and I’m hoping to make it back again next year. Now to dive into my notes and prep a presentation here at work….
