ConFigures

Penguicon 5.0

I had a great time at Penguicon. My talk and my panels went pretty well (more on them in future entries), I attended interesting talks, got to dance, and met some pretty cool people. There was a lot of neat stuff to be found just wandering the halls; probably the neatest was when I came upon one guy showing a friend of mine a green hundred-dollar laptop (yes, a working model of the One Laptop Per Child laptop)! The display switch between backlit color (indoors) and power-saving black-and-white (direct sunlight), and the swivel between clamshell and ebook configurations were too cool.

Penguicon prep: I was very glad that the time I spent pulling slides together, doing dry runs (thank you co-workers!), and adding last-minute Penguicon images paid off with a well-received presentation. I had also spent time emailing with my co-panelists (who was covering what), copying don’t-miss events into my Palm Pilot (with over 10 events going on simultaneously much of the time, it would have been easy to overlook items of interest), and acquiring and reading Nifty Guest John Scalzi’s The Android’s Dream (I’d already read stuff by most of the Guests of Honor). Fun read, with more to it than reviews had led me to expect.

Travel and transit: People reacted with concern when I mentioned flying with Northwest, but it worked out fine for me. I liked the Detroit Metro airport (DTW), especially its shiny red monorails. Driving to/around the con was fine except for construction slowdowns and rush hour Friday night.

Convention organization: Check-in was quick and painless. Con Ops was right on the main hall and appeared available and in control every time I passed by. In most cases programming had guessed how to match room size and audience size pretty well, though I was sad that I got to the RepRap talk (open source personal manufacturing device) too late to be able to really see in — that one was packed and flowing out the door. The program book was above average. It came with a map of the main floor, pointed to the Consuite (which provided sandwich materials and fresh veggies, not just chips) and reminded readers that eating real food and getting sleep would help maintain stable moods (another blogger noted what a drama-free con this was), and had a cool essay in the back on Knowledge Ecology by Programming Chair (Wrangler?) Matt Arnold that tied in neatly with my presentation.

Pictures and more entries forthcoming.