Gather 'round boys, girls, vagrants, lawn gnomes, and robots. Oh yes, robots.
I know all you robots that attend the meeting think you've got
everyone fooled, but I see you beety little eyes. I'm on to you! Ahem.
Right. So, it was another meeting, as good as ever. There was a fair
bit more people, which is always good.
The meeting started before I arrived, essentially, as many people were
already there.
Notably absent was Mario, but this is alright, as he empowered me to
"begin" the meeting, so I stood before the unwashed masses and did my
best impression of Mario. That is, I mentioned this was a joint effort
of SLUG and HCC, and thanked HCC graciously, and especially Wayne
Pollock, for arranging for us to meet in such a nice place. Then, I
said a bit about how there's usually free stuff, and a raffle,
mentioned that Mario would arrive soon, and started the Q-and-A
session, which basically devolved into different groups talking,
rather more quickly than most months. I think this is perhaps a good
thing.
It's no easy task filling Mario's shoes, almost as difficult as
wielding the mighty wooden shoes of Aaron Steimle. Luckily, Mario
arrived about ten minutes after, and began to talk and stuff. I
mingled, talked with people I know, and talked to people I didn't
know. I *did* take a role of sorts, the names of those present, but I
decided to not use it for the minutes of the meeting.
So, what all did we talk about? Linux, but of course. Specifically
networking, SSH, Samba/SWAT, Webmin, NTop, Graphviz, PCI
driver/hardware databases, Asterisk,
Chad's hobbies, Dylan's (my) psychological disorders. It was trouble
keeping up at times with the discussion.
Someone asked what a good newbie distro would be,
the answers were mostly Mepis, Ubuntu, and SuSE. Holywar aside, there
was no bloodshed. For some reason James suggested attaching electrodes
to my chair...
Hopefully nobody named Fred or Alice was at the meeting, as Fred
stalking Alice was used as an example of a directed graph. ahem.
Alex Harris and myself spun around in chairs--actually, I continued to
do so much longer than Alex--and Chad found this hillarious.
There was another fellow named Jim at the meeting, though I'm 'friad
didn't end up talking to him much. This makes three Jim/James for
Tampa meeting--- him, Jim Lightfoot, and James the Killer Miller.
Speakling of Jim Lightfoot, he started a very interesting discussion
of politics and linux, specifically the danger of linux becoming more
mainstream and vulnerable to commercial influences.
LDAP for address books was brought up, but there wasn't much talk on it.
Alex Harris is using a firefox plugin that syncs his bookmarks to
LDAP, and also the mozilla sunbird calendar has LDAP capabilities.
IMAP server software was discussed, mostly pertraining to how most
IMAP servers have different ideas about how to organizer the
repositories of mail.
I talked to an ex-Elm user about the niceties of Mutt and the power of
expression its config files. I forget the chap's name right now---
hmm.
William, Chad, Dave Lowe, and perhaps a few others were in and out of
the IRC channel during the meeting, which was somewhat funny.
To remind everyone, that's irc://irc.freenode.net/slug.fl (if the link
is not clickable, connect your IRC client to irc.freenode.net and join
#slug.fl).
The channel is still pretty quiet, but there's been times in the last
month or so when there are three or four people there, and active
conversation.
About ten or eleven of us met up afterwards in the nearby Benigan's,
for good-hearted, off-topic conversation. Chad Perrin gets browny
points for bringing new a new person to the LUG -- well, technically
to the after-meeting feast, but it still counts.
Well, this email is long enough, so I'll bid the fair people of
Slugadonia goodnight.
I'm sure I've forgotten countless quips, jokes, and useful knowledge
that happened during the meeting, and I'd encourage anyone that was
present to share their experiences, if they have the desire or time.
And for those people at the meeting that were secretly robots or
vagrant lawn gnomes,
I'm on to you! Don't think you can fool me. I know where you live!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked
Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages
posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 17:35:51 EDT