For the last four days, I've been talking to people, meeting new people and finding interesting new bits of information. But I wasn't online, I was meeting some very familiar people, in real life. irc.freenode.net #foss.in has been buzzing with activity over the past month or so - with plans, ideas, questions and lots more of fun. I got to meet guys like Dalfry or davidfetter, even Rasmus Lerdorf and Alan Cox. I only got my camera on the fourth day afternoon, so there's not much to say with pictures here.

The Yahoo! Booth

This where my average position was at the event expo. I was hanging out at either the Yahoo! stall, the asterisk one, or the gentoo stall. So you could say that I was hanging around at the stall for all four days. Lots of yahoos were around at the event, though only for a couple of days each, except for a few. Which wasn't such a bad thing, because whenever a delegate said I'm not coming tomorrow, the next thing that we said was ok, gimme your coupons. I've drunk a total of 31 coffees at the event (that reminds me, someone still owes me a coffee) and lots of small items. Probably if you've seen me around, I was probably holding something to eat. After all, eating is my favourite thing to do after coding and sleeping ( I did a fair bit of all three at the event). Thankfully, it isn't very obvious when you see me.

I'm a gentoo user, but I'm not a gentoo fanatic. I wouldn't thrust it upon a random stranger and say use gentoo, it rocks - I've made that mistake before. The real reason I started using gentoo was that it was easy to test drive (wget, tar -xjvf, chroot stage3/ su -) and it was great for a developer to be able to have the flexibility that USE flags gave. I never had a printer and from looks of it the only things I need to print are resumes in .DOC (when I go to interview someone). Being able to give -cups when I build is worth all the trouble of compiling half the stuff on the box ( you know, gentoo has binary packages too). Anyway, there I was at the gentoo stall - hanging out, like Tejas here who seems to have wandered out from his Fedora stall.

The Gentoo stall

I got my camera only on friday, so I was there looking all stooopid. With a cap backwards, hands in bandage and all that. I bunged up my hands trying to hack on one of the boxes at the conferences and sort of stretched a tendon on my left hand. Then I went back home, sat down to hack the AMD64 FPU parts of the engine - which is nearly finished by the way. I sort of got out of deep hack near 3:30 or 4 in the morning and then decided not to sleep. But I had already pulled myself beyond the normal limits of stress. But at least Tarique is Dr Tarique Sani, so I got an analgesic (over and above my early morning brufen) and some gel to apply on the wrist. I'm typing right now with one of Seemant's wrist guards on my left hand.

Do I look stupid or what ?

Like I said earlier, I was almost always in the expo area. Hanging out either at the Gentoo stall or the Asterisk one, always keeping a quick watch on the Yahoo! stall (mainly because I had dumped my bag there).

Seemant at the gentoo stall
We be burnin' and consumin' cd's there
Asterisk stall - Dalfry in the middle

There were enough Yahoo!s there. Well, enough and a bit more. Let's just say that we had enough noisy people outside the Yahoo! stalls and too few in there. From the looks of it, swaroop really got around - look at flickr/swaroop.

Swaroop and Sumeet

Met these twins at the Asterisk stall, running around trying to get some softphone running on the machines. They just needed a compat-libstdc++ from an older gcc 3.3 installation. That's how I actually talked to them, my policy being the opposite. I had a little trouble knowing which one was which till the last day. Well, actually I got a clue from them when they said We're wearing different T-shirts and got a I never pay any attention to what anybody is wearing reply. I could remember that the white google T-shirt is the Do No Evil person (and obviously the other one has to be the sinister twin). And then I heard someone call one of them statue, that sort of removed the similarity between the names, at least in my head. I still didn't say their names, did I ? .

In case I forgot to mention the best photo I took all day (or night) was one of Alan Cox. I'm not a celeberity hunter and he was probably a lot tired from being photographed. Anyway, I'm proud to say that I was behind the camera on this one. Someday, I'll deserve to be in the same frame as he is.

The finale was two fold for me. I was going through a caffiene dip, which was really hitting my head badly. But Arun Raghavan managed to get me a coke, which got me past those. I was flipping between the stairs section and the phenom concert - nearly got the best of both. Except for the Swalpa Adjust Madi song they played in between.

Well, I was there. Everywhere

For the rest of my snaps - hit flickr/t3rmin4t0r. That's all folks, I'm off to the next party. Yahoo's year end party.

If I run myself far enough today, I'll probably not have to worry about monday at all.
I'll be dead.

posted at: 11:11 | path: /conferences | permalink | Tags: public