I'm in the TGV back to Valence on wednesday, which luckily has many power plugs, unlike the Thalys which has wifi but no plug for those battery-drained guys like me. It's 21:30 as I start writing this. Will take some more days to finish though...

Not there yet

But first things first, after attending a meeting on Friday in Grenoble, I headed back to Valence to leave some stuff there, then back to the train station, where my train got delayed by an hour or so. But the other frenchies I was to share a car with were also a bit late, so they didn't have to wait for me too much. We then took the road to Düsseldorf and started to talk about each others work, and GSoC since we had two of the students on board.

Well, after a long delay and BeGeistert 021 among us, I suppose it's time to tell my story about the Ohio LinuxFest (OLF).

My friend, Amir, and I set out to Columbus from Pittsburgh on the Friday evening before OLF, and as we traveled, I could already feel the excitement. Once settled at the Hyatt hotel, I scrambled a bit to build/install Haiku on my MSI Wind U100 netbook. I also let Amir try out a live CD on his laptop, and we shared some conversation about Haiku. He wanted to come to OLF mainly for the various talks, and naturally I was there to help man the Haiku table. As he slept, I eventually got my system set up as I liked it with a GCC4 hybrid trunk build (with additional apps/media), and then went to sleep for a couple of hours.

This was my first time being at the OLF, or any computer-related event for that matter, so I didn't know what to expect. Upon meeting Darkwyrm and Mike after registration, I felt right at home and knew the day would go just fine.

Well, for not having been doing hardly anything Haiku-related in the last month or so, this kind of made up for it. It all started with almost not getting a table at the conference and then on Wednesday--if I remember correctly, that is-- suddenly having one by the power of Greyskull, um, I mean Koki. ;-) This meant a flurry of e-mails, burning what remaining CDRs I had around the house, quickly putting together a Haiku demo machine, and a host of other details.

I arrived at the Greater Columbus Convention Center at about 7:15 am to set up and was quickly met by Michael Summers, whom I've known since the first WalterCon years ago, and Joe Prostko. We had been concerned about not having a projector, particularly on such short notice, but as we found out, it wasn't really necessary. We had a six-foot table, Joe's MSI Wind netbook, my Thinkpad R40 laptop, some live CDs, a bunch of fliers Urias had sent us, a couple of chairs, and some great neighbors in the non-profit section: the Northeast Ohio Open Source Society (NOOSS) and The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS). Setting up didn't take long, and even at that early hour there were already a lot of people there besides the sponsors.