Another quiet week, and that's ok

This week was LinuxWorld; I went up to the Expo on Wednesday. In some previous years that would have been the high point of the week; you know Linux has gone mainstream when the most innovative products on the show floor were a new kind of ergonomic chair (which didn't seem to suit me) and some gorgeous, handmade wood mobius strips. OK, the 160GB flash drive on a PCIE card was pretty cool, too, streaming 256 movies simultaneously onto two large screens.

The point is that the real action has moved to more specialized conferences; all the open source developers were at OSCon two weeks ago in Portland, for example. As this blog post points out, that's not a bad thing. These days LinuxWorld is aimed primarily at IT departments considering making the move to Linux, or looking to upgrade their hardware or services.

It's an IT show, and I'm a hacker. Sold a CD to someone at the Creative Commons booth, though; easy sell, since all the music on it is CC. *shrug* I'll keep going as long as it's free and it's local. Let me know if there's an interesting conference or trade show in Seattle.

The Linux Picnic, which was this afternoon, was also smaller than in previous years, but still fun. Colleen came, and a visiting starless_knight substituting for the Y.D., who was off gaming with friends. I brought the XO, and Colleen brought her EeePC; I also brought Ruby and sang a couple of songs after lunch. No album sales, though.

Moving back in the week, we had a terrific talk Tuesday morning by our company president, on the history of $PARENT_COMPANY. It was followed by the company picnic; smaller than the Linux picnic, but the food was better.

All-in-all it's been a quiet week, but as I've said before, that's good. Very good. Compared to what many of our friends are going through...

Much of my creative energy has been going into the drafts of some River posts on conversation and communication. The first two (out of three) are just about ready, but I find that I like taking the time to work on them over the course of a couple of weeks. Plays hob with my other projects, though.