Gekitsuu's Geekery

The exibit hall was big and I went through it a few times just to make sure i got to each both and talked to as many people as possible. I bought some Perl books and picked up some goodies although there wasn't enough bribery trinkets to go around for sure. I did have some good conversations with the SugarCRM people and Kris Moore the inventor of PCBSD. Like all good ideas Kris has very valid reasons and a good vision of what he wanted to accomplish with PCBSD. He wanted to make a BSD for the average windows user and he designed his packaging system in such a way that my mom could use BSD and I could still use ports to bring down anything I want or compile things from source without breaking his system. He's just one of the many fun people to meet here at OSCON.

It's a good thing I bought a second battery for my laptop; I barely had enough juice to last yesterday. I was very psyched about Damian Conway's tutorials; truth be told they are one of the major things that got my interest in the convention. This morning, while I was waiting for his talk to start, I created a Flickr account so that I can enter the HP Photo contest if I get any pictures I think are worth entering. I'm picking front row seats at each of the talks which is something I wouldn't normally do but I feel like I need to make sure I'm not hendered by being too far away to see the slides, or hear the speaker. There are some big thinkers here and listening to them got me thinking about possibly giving my own talk some day. I don't consider myself an expert on any of the things love enough yet but someday I'd like to speak before an audience.
Today I learned that I am very dumb. In order to become undumb I will require (much * infinity) more practice at my craft. While I could keep up ok with the Perl Best Practices tutorial. I was mostly lost during the object oriented tutorial. Not because I don't understand the concepts or what he was suggesting but because I've had little experience with object oriented Perl. That particular tutorial assumed that you had a bit more knowledge than I do. I will be fixing that at some point in time. There are many smart people here which is nice but somewhat intimidating. So far I've met and spoke with 5 of the presenters at the convention and all of them seem to have intuitive understanding of their topics. I am still battling jet-lag but having an easier time than yesterday, where once I got back to my room I could no longer fight to stay awake. After a long day I really enjoyed the speeches at the "Tuesday Night Extravaganza".
This "sun" thing up in the sky is very strange. It seems to produce a type of radiation that the "day-people" accept being irradiated with. It is very hurty on the eyes and makes sleepy ju-ju at me. When I find a way to turn off the sun I'll surely execute the proper procedure.

Well it was a good first day at OSCON I got up around 5 and managed to snap some photos of the sunrise. Tomorrow I'm going to try and get out earlier so I can take it from the bridge. Speaking of bridges I found the list to sign-up for the Portland bridges tour on Friday. They were offering pastries and coffee in the hall in front of the conference rooms so after I checked in I made my way to the munchies and grabbed a chocolate croissant. After hopping on the wifi and checking my mail, harassing my friends and family with phone calls, and much pacing; it was time for the talk to begin. The first tutorial I went to was on robust authentication. When I saw the talk I thought I might be able to get some useful information from it but didn't have high hopes. I was pleasantly surprised when not only did I get answers to several questions for my company but I also reviewed some of the topics of the RHCE exam. All in all the talk was entertaining and I'm glad I went. The second one was on Snort Database reporting. I had hoped this one would cover advanced snort analysis but it turned out to be more of how to correlate data from the tables in a snort database. Don't get me wrong that information is just as useful to me but it wasn't what I was expecting from the name. Portland is a pretty place and I'm looking forward to tomorrow. It's time for Perl.