I was wrong. The convention ended rather abruptly (after an excellent session on open source hardware featuring the proprietor of adafruit.com), but there were munchies and bottled water in the lobby, and the wireless net is still up for the moment. So I'll decompress a little, drop my backpack off in the hotel, and go out for walkies.
OSCon's final session and wrapup is only ten minutes away; sometime after 2pm or so they'll take down their network and I'll be left hungry and disconnected. The hunger I'll be able to do something about, but I'll have a lot of catching up to do on LJ when I get back.
Last night's music BOF only had 4 or 5 people including me; the only interesting thing was a folding travel banjo (made by Goldtone, IIRC) that somebody brought.
Few conferences are as well-connected as OSCon - basically you just attach to the open WiFi network, and you're in. Access in the hotel completely sucks; I probably won't even be able to print my boarding pass in their business center.
I've exchanged email with my project manager at Oasis; as long as we get the artwork files uploaded by 4pm (presumably EDT, so 1pm my time) Monday we're good to go. That's tighter than I'd like, but OK. I'll aim for Sunday evening.
On the whole it's been a good conference, but I'll be glad to get home.
In the expo here at OSCon there is a booth with a cute little animated penguin toy. It's sort of like the Nabaztag wi-fi rabbit, except that it can do a lot more (open and close its beak, flap its wings, spin around, talk using text-to-speech, ...), costs quite a bit less, and all the software is open source. The company website is kyosh.com; there's also a user/community website at tuxisalive.com. The bottom of the box lists "fully Linux-compatible PC" under system requirements. How cool is that?
( And, it's cute and fluffy and its eyes light up )Yeah, I bought one. Darned near bought one for one of the kids, but I didn't think either of them wanted to learn to program it. I'll happily be proved wrong, though. Probably just as well; it's going to be tight in the suitcase with just one.
I have an ostensible master ready to ship to Oasis, and have put a sizeable but not excessive payment on my Amex card. The sensation is surprisingly familiar from having been in at the birth of my kids. It's mostly fear.
I don't have any really good way of verifying my disks; the only program I
know of on Linux is qpxtool, and it only seems to know about
Plextor drives. If anyone knows of something better, or knows whether
something free that runs on a Macbook Pro or a Windows XP machine will do
the job, I'd appreciate a link. I do get a little feedback from
cdrdao read-toc; found out that the Fuji
inkjet-printable disks I have a spindle of have a lot more CRC errors than
the Memorex disks.
I did determine that cdrdao wasn't writing the CD
text correctly, so I ended up falling back on k3b, which
just fscking works. If only it could take project info from a
text file... Especially if it were the same toc file
cdrdao uses. Grump. Also discovered that my drive won't go
any slower than 8x. Should be OK, but...
Things are going to be a little tight tomorrow, since I'm flying up to Portland for OSCon around noon. I'm going to give the disk one more listen in the car on my way to and from work today, and live with it on headphones for a while.
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