i knew it

I just knew that if I had a blog I wouldn't update it regularly enough :-)

Anyway, so whats been happening in the last month (yes its nearly a month since the last post).

Well, the most recent thing would probably be the LinuxWorld conference that I attended last week. This was two days and involved a stay over night. I have to say I wasn't sure that two days at LinuxWorld was going to work, I mean normally you can see the whole thing in a few hours but as I was going with fellow lug members I realised that we wouldn't be at the conference for the whole two days

We started out at about 9am on a train journey that Jono had arranged cheap tickets for. Well done that man, the cost of rail travel seems to have gone crazy recently. This gets us to London midmorning so we made our way to the hotel to drop off bags and then on for a spot of lunch. For lunch we went to Nandos, Ive not been before and I have to say it was very nice. Even as a veggie, there were a few decent options and their sauce (which come in 4 heat levels) was most pleasant. As my room mate remarked "blimey thats a bit urgent !"

Then it was off to the show via the underground. Im getting quite used to the underground these days, and they guys had made the exact journey before so knew exactly where to go.

The show itself was pretty much what you would expect, lots of big company stands however there was no IBM stand and no Redhat stand. It was nice to see the org village was on the same floor as the big company stands not downstairs like last time. Downstairs was reserved for "the great linux debate" which was mildly interesting. I also got to see Jonos (one of the guys I traveled down with) talk, it was a cut down version of a talk he gave elsewhere and was quite interesting and may well have had quite an impact - but I cant say in what way.

I had a chat with the guys from the BBCs R&D department and challenged them over the choice of Real Player files and not .ogg - to be honest they had a good reason for their choice, as they explained to me. They were displaying their new video codec, which looks very good indeed.

I also challenged HP over their linux compatibility as a friend of mine had recently bought a laptop and had problems getting hardware to work with it. Their answer was extremely lame as was the main show puller to their stand - a full sized F1 car hooked up to a F1 simulator - which was running on an XP box ! Honestly, these big companies just dont seem to get it, what on earth has an F1 simulator running on XP got to do with Linux ? Shame on you HP.

Novell had a big stand there and were pimping SUSE 9.2 amongst other things - it does look very slick and shiny. The Novell girlies were very pleasant too, I want one!

As I say the show had a very corporate feel to it, I guess thats not going to change now and we shall just have to get used to it.

The evening was a great laugh, lots of beer consumed, followed by a Persian meal (which was quite average) followed but quite a lot more beer. Its fair to say that my "year off the beer" has been a spectacular failure ! Luckily I remembered to drink pints of water before bed and so didnt feel too bad in the morning.

To be honest, the social side of the event was much better than the event itself. Im glad I went and look forward to the next one.

Onto other events that have occurred this month, we I cant fail to mention BrumCon4 - yes I finally made it to a BrumCon. I have to say I enjoyed it immensely, there were a good few interesting talks and I was strangely drawn to the lock picking talk at the end. There so much that interests me in this life, its a shame we dont live longer you know, so I could fit it all in.

Finally on the work front, it was my six month review and they have finally decided to honor my job title and salary (that was agreed when I started). Must remember to order some more business cards - with Senior Network Analyst on :-)