My Trip to the Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon

I wasn't sure what to bring along to read.. but I think we all know which side would win out.

Me and Luke at the Grand Rapids Airport.. You can see the snippet of the tail of the plane we will be flying on.

Fun and Crazy ceiling lights down in O'Hare airport.

We finally arrived in the portland airport.jpg

Here's the view from our Hotel room.

Here's a look the other way out our window.

Here's our room.

I want to know what that round building with the weird lift on the right side is... it's like Vanilla Ice's hair..

Here is the convention center, where OSCON is happening.

Inflatable furnature, lots of laptops... Nerds!

Here's the Registration center.

You would not believe this mullet...

Here's my Optimizing Mysql session.. it would eventually be pretty full.

Here's our first break.. free coffee, but no water or juice.

I thought that big building might be our hotel.. but that is prolly wrong.

I don't know what this is, but there were at least 2 of them.

There was a really kewl looking green mini that I wanted to get a shot of so rachel would have a good look at it (and perhaps paint hers to match).. but i couldn't get my camera set in time.. you can just see the tail of it on the right.

Here's my second session: Starting out with Eclipse. Huzzah for Java.. (B00!)

Hey.. it's the welcome signs!

Brian, looking alert.

Brian Tol, accessing the internets.

More tutorials on Tuesday. This one is on optimizing mysql, which was quite good. Lots of information on indexes, table types, using EXPLAIN, proper query syntax, etc.

Here's where I sat.

This is.. um.. Lemmings.

Okay, I'm not exactly sure what they're doing, but it involves die6s and die20s, and they had small plastic pyramids in front of them, and they were inviting other people to join...

Here's my "passing" shot.. you can kinda see the plastic pyramids. I would have chosen to be "Carlos the Dwarf"

This was hanging from the ceiling of the convention center. I'm pretty sure I saw this boat in Zelda: WindWaker.

NoMAH!

A shot of the pool from the glass elevator.

Here is Luke, stuck outside, having forgotten his nametag, which was needed to get back in to the convention. (Turns out, he left it in the hotel, but I had grabbed it before heading back, so all was well. We were really just outside because there was a fire alarm going off inside the convention center)

I don't know what these are, or why they were considered a good idea... later on we found the plaque explaining what these (and those big green fruit-like things) were [they were together as 1 piece of "art"], but I've already forgotten.

It's evening on Tuesday, and everyone got together for the official kickoff ceremony for the Open Source Convention. People would be talking.

BCP took pictures.

Many pictures.

Larry Wall gave his State of the Onion. Later on this week, I talked to him for a bit. He had emailed the Bible Gateway before, and I had reponded to him... that means we are now the closest of friends!!!1!

State of the Onion!

For those of you that don't know.. Larry Wall invented Perl, the programming language.

Huzzah for Perl!

His speech involved a game made up of different spies, all of them representing different kinds of people involved in perl/open source development.

And now it's this guy.. who talked about how the old workplace/cubical farm office approach just doesn't work for us. Having a dude explain that just because you're "at work" doesn't mean you are "working" is funny, until you look over to your left and see your boss sitting 2 chairs away from you.

Here's a Silver Mini. I'm taking pictures of Minis so Rachel and I can get a good idea of how her RC car could be painted.

Wednesday morning. This is one of the linux kernel developers, I think. His talk was... anyway, moving on.

And they opened the exhibit hall. Here are some Macs, test driving something....

Yahoo's booth

That girl was wearing.. yeah... Miss, you seem to have misplaced something... your pride.

Gibson had a booth set up with a ton of guitars all hooked up to the latest PODs.. I quickly grabbed that small black guitar, and played for about 10 minutes.. It was L-O-V-E-L-Y.

More pictures with BCP.

Lunch hall.. it was packed.

Here's a scan around the lunch hall.

There was a Starbucks, or local coffee shop, every 15 to 20 feet.

Thursday. We walked from the hotel to the convention center (not too far, 2 train stops, or about 3 average "blocks" away). This hotel was on the way.

That weird building that I thought was a hockey stadium or something (Vanilla Ice's Hair) Turns out that was just part of the convention center.. which is HUGE.

These guys were very very funny, in a very very nerdy way. They gave a 5 minute "Lightning talk" that involved juggling in the style of different programming languages, operating systems, and common text editors.. It was well done. "Notice it's pretty much like C, only with a lot more hand waving."

How can you possible need that many icons on your desktop? At this point, what good does that desktop do you?

The City at night. I was looking for the Northern Lights, but it's way too bright out.

This building, and the way the lights worked off the sides of it, reminded me of how buildings in Gothom looked in Batman: The Animated Series.

This is either a dark scan around the city at night, or me getting abducted by an alien spacecraft. You decide!!

Another shot of the city at night.

We're on the train, heading towards the airport. There are some F-16s lined up.. so I got my camera ready, turned to take the shot, and "Click".. right as this stupid little building came out of nowhere.

A Plane Landing!!

Tol and Luke... "No More T-Rexes!!!" People on the train are interesting... and like to talk to people who obviously have no interest in talking to them. On a related note, Luke learned a lot about dinosaurs and how they died out on this train trip.

After the guy started speaking, Tol quick got his earphones in. A clever escape for him, but it left poor Luke defenseless... I was going to call Luke on my cell to free him, but that's when the guy turned towards me and BCP and yelled "NO MORE T-REXES!"... I got frightened, said "Well Okay then", and quickly found something out the window to focus on.

There's the tower.

There were Jets and what looked like KC-135 refueling planes out there.

There are some F-16s back there.

Luke!

If you look closely, you'll see Grand Rapids flight (from Chicago). Sheduled to leave at 9:15, it's now slated to leave at 11:25. B00000!

Now you see that due to "Aircraft Availability" it's slated to leave at 11:40. Aircraft Availability means they don't have an airplane. Let me repeat that. The airline didn't have an airplane to fly a flight they sold a bunch of tickets for.

On the right side of the right screen you can see we are now "boarding". Nothing could be further from the truth.

We eventually did get to leave, and made it home safely. After I came home, Rachel returned home from a service trip in West Virginia. While there, she picked up these goliath sized FlavorIces. They're amazing.

And... finally, another Mini. This one is kinda closer to what Rachel is thinking (Minus the flames, of course) Metallic Blue, White top.