gemmapeter.co.uk

As usual I write these posts and then decide they are not interesting enough and they sit in my drafts folder for ages until I either delete them or someone tells me to post something (thanks Simon).

Friday 21^st July

Me, Ben and Seth left Plymouth at about 10am. I was under orders from my parents not to drive too fast and to generally be vigilant of any changes to handling, temperature or noise to the car because it is quite old and the head gasket has recently been dodgy.

Ben brought some music to play on a USB hard disk and Seth brought his laptop to play it on. One problem though, Ben’s disk was formated in ext3 and although Seth’s laptop dual booted, sound didn’t work in Linux. So we stopped at a service station and downloaded a Windows ext3 driver and then we had music, except if we opened the car windows or turned up the fans we couldn’t hear it because of the punyness of the speakers.

The journey up was very long and hot. We arrived in Wolverhampton and found the Fox Hotel easily. The rooms we had were a twin and a single, Seth had the single one me and Ben took the twin. The room was a comfortable size and the en-suite bathroom was too. There was an iron, a kettle, two mini fridges (only one worked), a fan and some dubious quality electrical wiring. The smoke alarm was hanging on two heavy-duty wires poking through the wall, some of the the sockets and switches were not securely attached to the walls and the lead for the kettle was held together with chocolate block.

We went to check out the town, the venue and the Hog’s Head (the pub where people were meeting later). Whilst looking at the venue site we found out that some people were meeting up at another pub so we went along too. I ordered some lunch there and my food was claimed by someone else so they had to cook another, taking over an hour in total.

After returning to the hotel for a siesta we headed out to the Hog’s Head there were several tables of LUGRadio Live attendees already there indicated by a sign which they were having difficulty displaying in a prominent position, I promptly offered the services of the duct tape to secure it in the table’s umbrella hole. Some of us decided we would go for an evening meal but were undecided on the type of food, we stood outside for 5 minutes debating before a group of us decided fork the “get food” project and wandered towards a local curry house.

Following the meal we returned to the Hogs Head which was now packed with people. I got talking to a guy who asked me if I was persuaded to attend LUGRadio Live by either Ben or Seth. He looked quite surprised when I told him that infact I was the one who had brought them along.

Saturday 22^nd July

Us in a queue.

I went to the Playstation 2 Linux talk. It was mostly about what people had been doing with the PlayStation 2 Linux kit and some about the PlayStation 3 (cell architecture stuff I wasn’t too interested in, my next console’s probably going to be a Nintendo anyway). There were also demos which considering that the presentation showed PS2’s clustered as a supercomputer it was funny that all of the demos were retro style games which were nowhere near showing off the PS2’s capabilities. Perhaps it is because modern consoles are too complex for single developers to code for them. There was also a Vi user vs Emacs user deathmatch in a retro beat-em-up, the Emacs user won but the Vi user won on the rematch.

Did anyone else notice that the Microsoft guy’s talk was the only one on the printed schedule that had a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters for the title all of the others were all caps?

Seth disapeared to Wigan because he’s like that. Something bothers him and then he disappears and then we find out that something was bothering him.

My duct tape also saw service again in the session on “Virtualisation” where it was used to hold the large paper pad containing the presentation to the stand because one of the clips was missing.

My favourite talk of the day was Bruno Bord’s “THIS TALK MAY CONTAIN SWEARING”. It was a statistical analysis of the swearing in LUGRadio shows and was very funny.

When we got back to the hotel there was a very loud wedding party going on Ben decided was too tired to do anything so he hid in the room for the rest of the evening. However I wanted to party. On the way out of the hotel I found a the Debian UK people and friends (very nice people BTW) in the lobby and tagged along with them for a curry and the LUGRadio Live Party. There is a video of some of them head banging to Oasis’ Champagne Supernova but I’m not sure whether to put them here because they also contain my terrible drunken singing. The best night I’ve had out in ages, should have challenged them to a game of pool.

Sunday 23^rd July

Someone discovered the one valid use for a html <blink> tag, as the colon seperator on a digital clock.

I went to the Hardware Hacking BOF and now I’m seriously tempted to get a Nintendo DS so I can run dslinux on it. The major advantages it has over the GP2X are its built in WiFi and easier input because of the separate keyboard screen and stylus.

At lunch I went to the pub where they ‘lost’ my food on Friday. This time around the food was on time but then the waiter dropped the chips all over the table and floor so had to get me new ones. The guy apologised and I got refunded the cost of my food.

I also went to the “Women in Open Source” talk which was very interesting. I can relate their comments to personal experience though, the number of times I’ve been asked “are you technical?” but the same was not asked of any male members of the same group makes it quite apparent that men are usually assumed to be technically competent whereas women are not and also in computing if a person is incompetent it is far more likely to be blamed on their sex if they are female.

The journey back…

Having forgoten to check the water in the car I stopped in Gloucester to get a drink and let the engine cool down before I checking the water. Saw a guy in the car park almost wreck the front bumper and exhaust of his car by driving over one of the kerbs separating parking bays at 20mph ’cause he didn’t notice it was there.

Was very hot also and we didn’t have much in the way of music. The only stuff we had was “Best of the 80’s”(which was unplayable due to skipping), “Best of the 70’s”(Ben quickly flicked through the tracks and decided he didn’t like them), “Dire Straits: The Sultans of Swing”(which was played to the point of not wanting to hear it any more) and a Boyzone album (definitely not played) that always seems to be in the CD player of the car (my mum likes it) which I was very tempted to ‘accidentally’ lose it out of the window on the motorway.

The whole weekend was really great and I met with lots of new people I definitely want to go again next year.