Whipped Cream Difficulties

This weekend has been rather busy, so I’m a little behind in blogging.

Friday was the annual barbecue roadtrip, in which a group of us rent a nice car and drive out into the Hill Country in search of barbecue.

After the jump, photos and commentary from the roadtrip, as well as the Texas Linux Fest:

This year’s car:

The Cadillac CTS.

I wanted to get a photo of the engine, but there’s not a lot to see:

The usual suspects:

The barbecue site this year:

Peete Mesquite in Burnet Marble Falls. Yes, it was pretty good barbecue, thanks for asking. Afterwards, a stop at the Blue Bonnet Cafe for pie (yes, the pie is legendary, and deserves to be so), and a stop at The Bookstore of Burnet, an astoundingly good used book store in a strip mall. (The same strip mall also houses a tiny Thai restaurant, which we’ve been talking about trying.) And to cap off the night, a nice dinner at Hunan Lion, and Crank 2, one of the most subtle movies ever to come out of Hollywood.

Saturday was, of course, the Texas Linux Fest.

The good:

• The Ubuntu on ARM presentation gave an excellent overview of what the state of Ubuntu on ARM was, the problems involved in getting it there, and the roadmap for the future of UbuntuARM.
• Udi Fuchs did a great presentation on his UFRaw software. Of course, I was pretty much his target audience, since I’m shooting RAW and running Linux…
• Thomas Cameron’s presentation on SELinux included a lot of useful troubleshooting information.
• The charging station for laptops and other electronics was a good idea.
• The vendors were very liberal with the free schwag.

The not-so-good:

• The Linux on PowerPC presentation was a disappointment to me.
• The Unicode presentation had a lot of good information; so much information that the presenters seemed to be rushing to get through it all in time. I think this presentation would have been better if they had made some cuts and taken it slower. Also, I was rubbed the wrong way by their lame joke about the guy at the charging station sabotaging their presentation. Sorry, guys, but blaming the volunteers for your screwups isn’t cool in my book, even if it was a joke.
• There was a notable lack of sit down and chill out space at the event center. I think next year, the organizers need to look for a space that offers some places for people to just sit down and chat, or relax.

The ugly:

• Registration. At 10 AM (when the keynote was starting), there was a line well out into the parking lot, and nobody seemed to know what was going on. Worse yet, they had organized registration so that everyone – pre-registered and paying at the door – needed to stand in one line (with two people working the line), either check in or pay, and then go inside, wait for someone to shout out your name over the din, raise your hand and yell, wait for someone else to grab your printed name badge, hand you your badge and holder, assemble your goodie bag, and hand it to you. I can think of at least three ways to improve this process immediately, and the closest I’ve ever been to working registration was standing in line at SF conventions.

Will I go back next year? At 10:15 AM yesterday, I would have said “No, these people couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery.” At 5:30 PM yesterday, I would have said, “Yeah, probably, but…” Right now, I think I would, but it would depend a lot on the facility, program, date, and price.

I’m a little behind in this, but I did want to note that Billy Joe Shaver was found not guilty.

On the loser update front, baseball teams that still have a chance to go 0-162:

Houston.

Yeah, betting the under on that 81 wins is looking like a real good bet.

Obit watch: Dixie Carter.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 11th, 2010 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Books, Cars, Clippings, Food, Law, linux, Loser, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.