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Sun, 26 Jun 2005

Coming home from LinuxTag

During the past days, I got several mails, asking me if something is wrong with me, since I haven't bloged anything during LinuxTag. I got even asked, if I have been there at all. It seems like people liked the live blog I did during CeBIT and I planed to do that again.

But as you noted: Not a single blog entry during LinuxTag - and that although I wrote a some articles. But for various reasons I decided not to publish any of those stories during LinuxTag. But since you explicitly asked for it, here it is, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth:


To busy to do anything!

I knew, that I had a quite tight schedule during LinuxTag and then I found out on Monday, that I had a small problem caused by an old calendar in my office with several deadlines for different projects I should met. So I went to Karlsruhe to some important dates and spend the time between them with doing work I could have done easier at home...


No, not my style to complain this way - it was my fault, so why should I complain here? So let's write something else:


Travelling by train is funny

As you might know, I'm one of those long haired, nonathletic not well shaved geeks. One of those who are not liked by athletic, good shaved people with short hairs wearing t-shirts with stupid phrases printed with old german letters. Unfortunately my reserved seat in my train to Karlsruhe was in front of one such guy. The phrase on his shirt could be translated as: "The weak survive only through the mercy of the strong" When I noticed how he disliked me looking over him, I couldn't do anything but lough. Think about it: A guy who could chop trees with his bare hands or break all my bones with his small finger (whichever he would like to do more), feeling uncomfortable when I examine him, and feeling so week, that he needs to tell the entire world, how strong he is? That's ridiculous...


No, that's not my style either. Perhaps mako could have made a good story out of this, but my English is to bad to express, why this was so ridiculous. So let's find something else to blog about:


Won a penguin, a bottle of champagne and a prerelease of etch

Today I won something a some nice things, while walking through the exhibition area. For example at the Linux-Discount booth. They said in their newsletter, that the first customer to buy Debian Sarge on Wednesday after 12:00 would get a bottle of champagne and - so he didn't need to wait for three more years - "etch". And guess what: Luckily I won it! Okay, I needed to buy a boxed version of sarge, but I planed to do so anyway (their boxes look some kind of cool). And I have been told that the champagne itself is more worth than the price I paid for the box. And more important I got it: Etch!

Later that day I won a stuffed penguin at the LinuxNewMedia booth and Frank Ronneburg came by to give me a autographed copy of his recent book.


No, still not my style. I didn't do much things to do that, calling me "lucky" for winning all those stuff would be complete misinterpretation if the word "luck".

Would you like to know the truth from my point of view? I got the champagne and the etch by setting my alarm clock to 11:45. When it rang, I left the Skolelinux-booth with a non working network configuration, which they asked me to fix several hours ago - and it still didn't worked when I came back a couple of hours later. And since it was just the day of the business congress (with no free talks) and since LinuxTag was so nice to take admission charges, there was no large crowd waiting for 12:00. So all I had to do was to do some smalltalk and wait for my watch to point at 12.

The same for the penguin. LinuxNewMedia raffle them every time at their booth at every fair. I knew it pretty well, since I have spend many exhibitions near to their booth. And through the already mentioned circumstances when they raffled their three penguins at 16:00, there was just one other guy. Pretty easy?

Of course I needed to leave the Debian booth during my shift to get there, and of course I didn't told anyone else from the Debian guys about the high changes to get penguin and etch - they could have become competitors...

No, I decided to not blog about that. Till know I most people have a good opinion of me, not knowing that I can be a ruthless asshole if I really want something. And who am I, to tell those guys, that they are all wrong about me? So how about that:


The talks I visited and gave

As every year there were some interesting talks at LinuxTag. I had a list of more than 10 talks I would like to visit. Of course I didn't really expected to see them all. I was planed to give two talks myself and managed to be at ... two talks.

On Tuesday I gave (again) a "News from Sarge" showing the audience some new features and giving them some tricks. I was the very last speaker on that day, and was surprised to find some 30 people in the audience. And I love to be the last speaker, mainly because no one really cares, if you take more time than the 45 minutes. After I finished the main part of my talk and mentioned that I would like to show the new debian-installer, but couldn't since it was just a borrowed notebook someone from the audience gave me his and I could show much more. I think I took 45 minutes to an hour, showing the audience nice new features and tricks in Debian GNU/Linux Sarge.

The second talk I was able to visit was Meikes talk about the debian women project. Although she did strange things with her fingers, she did a quite amusing and informative talk. Very well done.

I didn't made it to any other talks than this two...


Ups! At this point the reader might think, that I made a small mistake, that I expressed me mistakable. Didn't I just say, I was about to give two talks? And didn't I just say, I visited one of my own talks and the one of Meike, but no more?

To answer your question: Yes, I did write exactly that. No, although I wrote it in a foreign language, I did not expressed me wrong. Yes, I missed my second talk.

Great. After not showing that I'm an asshole, I decided not to show that I'm incompetent, too.

Or would you like to read something personal like this?


The l-word

Met a nice girl the other day and I would really like to tell you all that I have fallen in love. But I haven't, since she seems quite happy with her current boyfriend. So out of respect and since I have proven to be a real asshole in my last relationships. So instead of trying getting to know her better, I become a wiener, trying to avoid her as good as I could which was on the one hand easy, since I was often away anyway trying to do all the work I should have done weeks ago, and on the other hand quite hard, especially since I'm quite good at cheating myself...


Uhm, no. The last time I wrote something similar my whole family was keeping an eye on me, thinking I would do something stupid, having the entire project looking after me doesn't sound very funny.

Last not least a possible entry for blog I didn't published, since I forgot to rename the file without any extension (so it isn't recognized as blog and I can edit and spell check it) to a .txt file, which would have been picked up by my blog:


6

In words: Six. This is the sixth event, were I forgot to take something important with me. This time I forgot my towel - IIRC the last time I forgot socks and before that my shaver. The interesting thing is, that I usually pack my baggage by an list. I really don't know how I manage to forget something when working with a quite detailed checklist...

So now that I told you all the stuff, I did not intend to tell you: Are you satisfied? Could you please stop sending me such emails or bugging me on irc? Could just leave me alone? I have still some work to do and a woman to forget. And just in case someone of my family has read so far: No, I don't intend to do stupid things - there is to much work to be done and I have not enough time to think about such things ;)

postet at 19:47 into [Debian/events/LinuxTag-2005] permanent link


Thu, 21 Apr 2005

Call for Papers: Debian-Day LinuxTag 2005

Again there will be a small sub-conference for Debian during this years LinuxTag, called Debian-Day, which will be on Thursday the 23rd of June.

If you attend LinuxTag in Karlsruhe / Germany (biggest event about Free software in Europe, nice people, nice exhibition, nice penguins in the nearby park, don't miss it) and would like to give a talk for an audience consisting mostly of experienced users and developers, please send me an mail, we have still some slots free.

But so far, it looks promising, Norbert Tretkowski will do a talk about backporting in general and backports.org in special, Andreas Barth and / or Martin Zobel-Helas will talk about volatile.debian.net, Joey Schulze about security.debian.org, Luk Claes about i18n / l10n and someone from the Debian women project promised a talk about their project. I can't remember any LinuxTag where we had so soon so many interesting talks for the Debian-Day.

P.S.: I accept bets, if Amaya will make it this year ;)

postet at 23:34 into [Debian/events/LinuxTag-2005] permanent link


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About

Alexander Tolimar Reichle-Schmehl lives in Tuttlingen / Germany. He works as IT manager (specialized on Unix and SAN/Storage) for an international automotive supplier.

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