KLEPAS.ORG

Just had my first taste of a Sydney Linux User Group meeting. Man it was a load of fun. It’s like a tiny little mini LCA in an evening. We met at the Uni­ver­sity of Tech­nol­ogy and Science (if I recall it cor­rectly) and we had about 70+ atten­dees! Blew me away seeing so many new faces. It’s just great. No matter where on this planet you go, if you’re into free soft­ware and free culture and meet like-​minded people at other LUGs in other cities you will just be amazed at how you can so easily sit down, share a coffee or in this evening’s case a meal with people you’ve never met before. Kick ass!

The evening began with the SLUG/LA Live update which was streamed as an OGG Vorbis stream so anyone from Aus­tralia, or well the world in fact could tune in an listen. Announce­ments were made and then once that was all over we had a break with some nice refresh­ments. Moving on we divided itself into two groups. One group enjoyed a tech­ni­cal talk, held by James who talked to us about Mono, while the others went to one of the uni lounges and just chatted amongst them­selves, helping each other out with various issues and such. I sort of divided that time between both. Some people I know from the SLUG IRC channel helped me with my ipw3945 wire­less card and we’ve almost got it working…

Actu­ally, that was the best part: once again being able to put faces to IRC nicks. I met several people I was meaning to catch up with, several new people and col­lected some busi­ness cards. Some Google guys made an appear­ance too, seems they’re opening an office here in Sydney. They announced that if any of us knew any­thing about this weird thing going around called Linux or perhaps had friends who did we should have a chat with them about pos­si­ble job oppor­tu­ni­ties. Very cool.

I def­i­nitely enjoyed the evening, from begin­ning to finish. I was quite intrigued by the more organ­ised struc­ture of SLUG and now I want to take some of the ideas back to CLUG down in Can­berra, which is where I shall be heading tomor­row, well I guess rather today, at 12:30 PM. SLUG meet­ings are more organ­ised, and although I prob­a­bly won’t con­sider intro­duc­ing a pres­i­dent or some such as SLUG has to CLUG, we could def­i­nitely do with some more com­mu­nity involve­ment as well as maybe some fresh blood.

As for my stay in Sydney these past ten days, I had a lovely time. It was won­der­ful catch­ing up with Silvia, Pia, Jeff, Lindsay and more as well as pre­vi­ously men­tioned, meeting some new faces. I’ve learned a fair few new things during my time at Solu­tions First and if all goes well they might be using some of my work on one of their web­sites soon. I’ll keep you lot updated. In general though, it’s been great. I had fun, spent too much money (mostly on food… mhhh…) and made some new con­nec­tions.

Def­i­nitely look forward already to another oppor­tu­nity to do some­thing like this, maybe… perhaps even taking up a cool job for a holiday or so next time. So to finish off, you all rock, SLUG rocks, Linux (espe­cially Ubuntu) rocks and it’s most cer­tainly there in the work­place as well.

OAO.