Awakening

This Friday the gates opened to SCALE6X, actually from the looks of it some rammed the gate. They came from far and close, a march of penguins that congregate once a year at the Westin Hotel LAX. We know this meeting is better every year and keep looking forward to do it again. Someday I hope to be live blogging, from my laptop, or maybe my phone with a blue tooth keyboard. However I just gave up my SIM chip, so can't be called right now.





Again before dawn, amazing, I must be getting old, I dry out in the night, go to a leaky faucet get a full Brita filter. And the sun is coming out by the time I take another little nap and start dreaming about some work related crap, it is amazing how the whole weekend, SCALE6X didn't make a dent in my early thoughts. The week that passed, I have a ton of things I saw, I should live blog in this events, but I realize I need to borrow a better laptop to do so, the battery life just wouldn't allow me to do it, plus I would loose some attention, on the other hand with a memory device, I would retain more of what I type.

This event isn't expensive at all, with our LUG discount and the fact that I I got paid to go right on site it was only $35 to attend. Given that the conference covered 2 meals, or the sponsors I suppose, I only ended covering 3 more meals and transportation. Parking is not cheap, but Sunday you can street park in front. USENIX does cost more, but also has a longer tradition, and is probably better at putting on shows right now, but I have to say is more expensive, and SCALE is really so close to me and so right on target with so many things it got to be my favorite trade show, I also have to admit that I am surprised at how many people know me there, I have spoken at local groups, so they are the main audience. Home court, I guess.

Thursday I had a class, walked to Sepulveda carpooled to it, came back Eric was here. The start of a very busy weekend. Good day for his plane to be late half an hour, still probably got here still an hour too early for what I could do. So catching up and then sleep, big days ahead, Friday was a rather quiet day at SCALE, lots of tracks, but we didn't pay up the $300 track so were more limited. After finding a carpool, getting ready we got into Dan Anderson's talk about Using Computer Programming to teach Concepts integrating Science, Math and Technology. I was impressed with his curriculum and AP was probably not a problem. Viewpoint School must be a good place to go for CS. I would love to replicate this at or school.

Pretty early I get recognized by Ealon who once showed up at a LiLAX meeting at BiPro with a Dell laptop running some kind of Darwin version of the Mac's OS X. It was rather cool to think that this thing ran on cheaper hardware, but the legality of it all is kind of a problem, Apple might not like this. I don't think it hurts them much, probably would drive sales, it probably hurts Linux more, but then who cares, since there isn't really money involved so nobody is going to complain. Was happy to see him again, hope that we can get all these people to show for our LiLAX meetings, now that we have cool new digs, we can take more of an audience.