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FrOSCon 2009: 1 down, 1 to go

So, I’m in my hotel room and I got some sleep. Now, it is 2:15 am and Icouldn’t sleep for some reason. PRobably has something to do with me being narcoleptic, as weird as it sounds 🙂 Since I can’t sleep for a bit anyway, I figured writing a blog summarising the first day of FrOSCon would be a good idea.

Well, in one word: GREAT! In a few more: The first day was a big success. I started it out with a shift at the registration desk (I’m volunteering for FrOSCon as well). Since it was very early, most people that came in were actually exhibitors and speakers, and they all had to be at the VIP desk. At first, the door wouldn’t open. Later it turned out that the sensors thought we were to close to it. Claustrophobic doors are interesting.

Then, there was breakfast for the people with VIP access. Basically that was anyone who was not just a visitor. I helped out for a bit and then went back to my hotel room to catch up on some sleep and practice my talk a bit. The practice run was done in a staggering 57 minutes, which was exactly enough since I had 1 hour to finish. I went back to the conference and saw some talks. I saw the tail-end of Sheeri’s talk on ‘a better mysqltuner’ and then the start of Jan Kneschke’s talk on MySQL proxy. It was interesting, but my nerves made me exit that prematurely so I could be sure to be in time for my own talk.

When I walked into the conference room I was giving my talk in a half hour in advance, it was already empty because the previous talk was finished early. This gave me a decent amount of time to finish setting up.

I decided to use the wiimote that the CentOS guys were offering as a presentation remote. That turned out to be a very good decision, as it gives you something to hold in your hands so you hve soemthing to do with them. It also gives you force feedback and led information on how much time you have used for your talkso far. Pretty awesome!

The talk itself went pretty well, and people asked good questions afterwards. One guy came up to me an I thought he was asking me a question, only have hearing him sya he wrote this stuff. It took me a while to realise that it was Pascal Hoffman, the guy that wrote all of MMM 2. I hung out with him and my friend Nicolas from Rotterdam at the social event all night, speaking about many things related to MMM.

That is actually what these conferences are so great for: the human interaction aspect. You get to meet the humans behind an irc-name or blog, and talk to them directly, (almost) always a pleasant experience.

Before the social event I went to the PBXT talk in the OpenSQLCamp room, but i was too tired to focus on it with the attention it deserved. Kind of ashame, because i think PBXT is an interesting project.

Looking forward to tomorrow, in particular to the shootout in the OpenSQLCamp room between experts from various open source databases. I guess I should go back to sleep now, so I am full of energy tomorrow. Walter signing off!

PS. I’ll put the slides to my talk online as soon as possible.

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