The chronicles of Lug Radio Live 2007

LUG Radio Live 2007 was great fun.  There was a real community vibe thing going on.  A quick random chronicle of the weekend from our point of view:

Arrived Friday evening, dropped things off at the hotel and went straight to the Hog’s Head pub to meet all the other early arrivers, of which there were many.  Met quite a few random and not so random people: Patrick Finch from Sun, who is just the nicest tech guy in the world.  We met him last year too.

Alan Pope, Neuro – both ELER fans and purchasers of many Geekz tshirts.  Johan and Sebastian from Sweden, who noticed my Knuth t-shirt and said his friend had one too and was surprised to learn we make them.  He took a photo of me wearing it and sent it to his friend back in Sweden :).

Andy Davidson, he’s from Sheffield and was surprised to learn there is a WYLUG planet and wanted to know how he could get listed on it.  Louisa recognised his name and he was then further surprised to learn that he is already listed on it.

Glyn Wintle from the Open Rights Group, who comes in a close second in the nicest tech guy in the world competition.  We hung out with Glyn for most of the rest of the weekend, especially since his stall was next to ours (we were selling our geeky tshirts and stickers and badges and crap).  He convinced me that I need to do a whole lot more with regard to defending our freedoms (like *actually* writing to my MP! Shock! Horror!)  We’re also going to switch our EFF donations to them.

Most people I met seemed to quite like my web comic, Everybody Loves Eric Raymond, which was a surprise to me given the sparse updates this year.  Though nearly all of them complained about the sparse updates.  Must do better.

Had to get up super early on Saturday morning to be at the venue in time to set up the stall and give out the presenter and crew t-shirts I designed and had printed.

Sold a bunch of t-shirts and stuff throughout the day and did my talk on ELER, tribal elders, crowd wisdom and free software.  I managed to remember most of it, yeah!  The turn-out wasn’t as big as last year, I think due to everyone attending Chris Dibona’s talk in the other room.  I heard that he announced he was keen to catch my talk though and was flipping through his slides quickly to finish in time, but Gervase Markham tells me they kept him busy with questions.  I should do it at a few more places while I still remember it.  Any offers?

Saw loads of people in our shirts, which was cool.  Nice to see them “in action” as it were.   Saw a good few xkcd shirts too.

Saturday night went for a curry with Glyn, Becky Hogge (also from ORG) and James.  The curry place was recommended by Adam Sweet and was coincidentally the same curry place Louisa, Gianni and I wandered randomly into last year.

Sunday was good too, some good talks and I met Nat Friedman from Ximian/Novell (but forgot to complain bitterly about Evolution dropping maildir support!) um, and I saw funnily bearded man (and Beagle hacker) Joe Shaw too in passing.  All this geek celebrity made me wobbly at the knees.

NOTE: All this name dropping is an attempt to make me great by association.  I trust that it is working.

There are some photos of me doing a mini-talk thing at Adam’s gong-a-thong thing here, taken by Ted Haeger.  Note my new big hair.

Tired of remembering and typing now.  Summary: good.