Episode: 1322
Title: HPR1322: Kevin O'Brien - Ohio LinuxFest 2013
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1322/hpr1322.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:33:00

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Thank you.
Hi, everybody. My name is Ken Falano. Today is a kind of becoming a bit of a tradition
here where we talk to Kevin O'Brien, the publicity director of Haleio O'Halleio Linux
Fest. How's going, Kevin? Oh, it's just going great, Ken. I think I've heard your voice
on Haleio Public Radio before. I do believe you have. I've been doing the Libra Office series
of late. Yes, they're scheduled to go on until December if I'm not mistaken. But anyway, we're
not here to talk about that, although we could. I'm here to talk about the O'Halleio Linux Fest 2013,
which is accessible at HGCPS, column 4, such 4, such o'HalleioLinux.org. So, Kevin, can you
us a little bit of history about the O'Halleio Linux Fest? How long it's been going and the
usual stuff for anybody living in a jar who doesn't know about this Fest? Sure. This is our
11th year and it started a lot less formally among some college students at Ohio State University
in Columbus, Ohio. The first year or so for a couple of years probably was kind of small and
not the sort of production it is now, but a number of people got together and said,
we can do better than this. Let's make us a major event. They started to do the things necessary
to get better space, more sponsorship, and sort of build it into what I think is the
premier event in our region, which is the Midwest of the United States. So, we're probably going to
draw every year we draw about 1,000 people. Fairly impressive. Yeah, that's fairly impressive.
Big enough to be big and small enough to be intimate enough at the same time.
What's the layout of the place like for the first time visitor? How would they get there
first start? Well, we are hosted by the Greater Columbus Convention Center, which is in downtown
Columbus, Ohio. As a convention center they have lots of rooms with movable dividers, etc. So
we basically reserve a chunk of space there and start setting up rooms for different tracks and
talks. We're going to have, well, there may be, are you kind of flexible in the amount of space
that you can take or do you need to divide that up on the day? We have to contract for it.
So we have a lot of plans. We'll take rooms and for a keynote talk we might combine two or three
rooms into one larger one and then when the keynote talk is done, break that back into two or three
different smaller rooms for the run of the talks that go on through the day. Okay, but you can do that
just halls or do you need union help to do it? There's a staff there. Yeah, there are rules about who
can do what? Yeah, okay, no, yeah. To follow the rules. Yeah, and so is it easy enough to get to
and actually give me a rundown of the schedule. What's what's your what's a schedule looking like
this year? Okay, well the event starts on Friday, September 13th and what we do on Friday is we
have a few things that we focus on. First and I think most important for a lot of the people who
come there is a full day of professional training. We call that the Ohio Linux Fest Institute
and we're bringing in wonderful professional people who are building the programs that people
want to be trained in. Wow, I'm just looking at them here. Very interesting. Go on ahead. Sorry for
interrupting. Oh, all this information folks is on the website. I mean, you go to schedule on
you and click on the Linux Fest Institute and you're right there. So for instance, we've got a
full day of training on puppet, which is an automatic or automated system for administering
lots of servers in an IT environment and that's going to be taught by someone from puppet labs.
We're going to do two half day courses, one on SE Linux, one on building RPMs and we got people
from Red Hat coming in to do that. Oh, nice. Yeah, we're doing a session on configuration management
and provisioning virtual machines using CF engine, Baygren, and we got someone from CF
engine coming in to teach that. Oh, that's good. You know, we're really looking for very,
very professional people, the best possible instructors and we're able to offer it for a really
astonishingly low price. It's only $350 for the full day. Oh, you compare that to most of the boot
camp things out there and it's substantially better deal. Got a good question here. I see that you've
got RT basics. What's RT? It's something called request tracker and that handles things like
ticketing, help desk network operations, change management, bug tracking. I happen to be working
in right now on a project involving what's called IT service management. So that's actually
the kind of application that my life revolves around at the moment. One thing I would say about
that schedule actually looking at it is I would be torn as to what I wanted to go into.
That is the line up. SE Linux from your mortals clashes with PostgreSQL admin clashes with you
should be using them. Trashes with public clashes with RT. Very, very good choice. And of course,
with this then, if people are trying to get to the fest then for the weekend, I'm sure that the
companies can pay that heartless contribute to it. Oh, absolutely. We charge admission for
the professional training because of what we're offering. That's the $350. Then there's no added cost
at all for Saturday. If you're registered, then you get the Saturday thrown in. So you get to hear
the keynotes. You get to attend any of the other talks. Just a regular reading.
After that, I guess. Yeah, and I think that's really what a lot of people do is they just
make a weekend of it. Yeah, because from a company point of view, if you're sending somebody out,
you send them out for days training and a nice overnight in a hotel like
and then I'm sure you can do a deal with the hotel to stay over an extra night to get the
Sunday and as well if you want it. Very, very, very cool. Pretty, I can't, again, pretty,
I can't go to these things. Well, there you go. Well, you know, we all have that problem.
You know, I'd love to go to Faustem, but you know, that's a bit more than my travel budget allows
for rice. Sucks, isn't it? Yeah. So on the Saturday, it's like a one-day fest traditionally,
I guess, yeah. Well, yeah, Saturday is when most of the talks are scheduled. We have,
because we've had so many submissions, you know, people that want to do talks, and they're good
talks that we actually will have some of the talks on Friday as well. Okay, because we couldn't
fit them all in otherwise. And we've got a Friday keynote. So after all of the professional training
and everything else is done, Mad Dog is going to be talking. Oh, it's a classic. Oh, people just
love Mad Dog. And I'm one of them. I mean, I was talking to someone the other day who said,
you know, he could be reading the back of a cereal box and he'd make it interesting.
I think the traditional one is reading the phone book. That's what I would have said,
but the person I was talking to used the other one. So, you know, actually, you've never
got a chance to meet him yet, but there's the yet in that sentence, so hopefully. Oh, absolutely.
So if you ever get a chance, it's worth doing. And, you know, he's been there
pretty much from the beginning. I mean, it was when Linus Torvalds was just getting started with
all of the Linux stuff. He was the guy who managed to talk digital equipment corporation into
shipping Linus, one of their computers so that he could port Linux over to it.
Absolutely. I just see here on the Friday as well. You've got UbuCon on. That's what is that
exactly? That is something that Ubuntu is putting on. So I don't know all of the things that
they're going to be doing. My guess is they're going to be talking about Juju. They're going to
be talking about the Ubuntu Edge. Maybe there's going to be some talk about the next version of
Ubuntu, which is coming out about a month after Ohio Linux Fest. I think they have the people will
know exactly what's happened with the Ubuntu Edge by the time this show releases, but I don't know.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't either, but there's a fellow who works for Canon. There's several people who work
for Canonical that are in this area, one of whom is a friend of mine, George Castro, who is one of
the developers on Juju. And so I know he's going to be at Ohio Linux Fest and he'll be doing a talk.
Okay. And I see on the schedule as it stands now, you're probably going to fill that out as soon as
the speaker list becomes available. When is that going to happen? Within days.
Okay. So for the show notes of this episode, we'll include links to these pages so you can see
who's coming up. Right. Right. Yeah. We had some, the fellow who was working on that got caught
up in some other things. And so it just took a little longer than normal, but we're just about
ready with all of that. So switching over to the Saturday, it's kind of appears to be running from
the, let me see here, the 7 a.m. doors open. And then it runs on to midnight more or less. So 7 p.m. is the
evening keynote address. Can you give us a rundown of the various different tracks on why you picked them?
Okay. There's a number of things that are going on. First of all, let me talk about the keynote
speakers. We've got three of them on Saturday. And I don't know who gets which slot yet. That's
the schedulers are working on that, but the speakers are pretty good. There's Kirk McCusic.
Kirk is a BSD guru who has been involved with BSD from the beginning.
In fact, he shared an office at Berkeley with Bill Joy, who pretty much wrote BSD.
So he was involved right from the beginning, developed the Berkeley fast file system,
and file system snapshots, background, FSCK, things like that, and has served twice as president
of the Usenix Association. So he's going to be present in an impressive Wikipedia article,
like that. He does indeed. And one of the things that we've always said is that we're not strictly
Linux. We're open source. And BSD is clearly open source. And we've always been very friendly. We've
always had BSD, some amount of that as part of Ohio Linux. That's a free solver. Don't tell you
that it isn't. Oh, yeah. So that's not a problem. We're thrilled to have Kirk as one of our keynote
speakers. And another one is Robin Bergeron, who is the project leader. Yes, indeed.
And she's taken a look at her resume. Again, she's also the door program manager,
organized the 2011 North American fund con and has had various roles in the door project.
Then there's a fellow. But surely you're bringing her on purely because she's a woman and you
want to promote your female agenda, feminist agenda by putting a female on the head of the keynote
speaker. Oh, you found us out. The clever and cunning plan has been revealed. Or perhaps she's
the Fedora project leader and just happens to be all. Well, I mean, we would want to get the,
I think we want to get a Fedora project leader in any event. So I don't have a problem with that.
We've got John O'Bacon as a keynote speaker at Ohio Linux Fest. So yeah, I know it seems appropriate.
I just, I do know that last year you were making the concerto effort to get some more participation
from female members of the community. And I think that was criticized, I suppose. Do you have anything
to say on that? How successful you were? Was that something that you should have done? Or do you feel
there were any lessons learned? Well, last year, 15, that's a one and a five. 15% of our speakers
were women. So if we were putting our thumbs on the scale, we did a real bad job of it.
Yeah. But you know, I was listening to an interest, you know, the way you really want to do this,
how do you take this out of the equation altogether? Well, it's very simple. You get more women
into IT in the first place. Well, that would help. But, you know, from the standpoint of picking speakers,
I'm not sure we can reform the entire IT industry for the benefit of our schedule.
But now, I happen to be a musician and there's very interesting story. If you go back 100 years,
overtually every musician and every major symphony orchestra was a man.
I'm shocked. And if you talk to them, they all said, well, you know, the manager is better musicians.
You know, women just don't measure up. And then they switched to what's called blind auditioning.
You know, the person playing the instrument auditioning for the part is behind a screen,
no name, no way for the people listening to know. And all of a sudden, they discovered that
there were actually a lot of women who were good musicians because they kept winning the audition.
I'll just surprise. I'll just surprise. So, you know, the best way to do it, and I was, you know,
heard someone talking about this with another conference is, you know, take all the proposals and
strip out the names and the identifiers and just look at the proposals and pick the ones that look
good. Absolutely. And I think that's really, that's the best way to do it.
And I think if you do that, the, you know, the cream does rise to the top. So, I'm not, I'm not
worried about that. We, we have a total of four keynote speakers, three of whom are a man.
Yeah, just that happened to be the best four people we came up with this year.
Yeah, and unfortunately that I think reflects the percentage of IT people at least in the US and
probably reflects here in the Netherlands. I don't know why that is. On my history in Ireland,
it was more a 50-50 split. I don't know if that's changed since then, but it seemed to be one of the
industries where, you know, there was no major gender difference. And to be honest, I,
you enjoy that because I prefer to work in a mixed environment. You get less, less tantrums from
from both sides, I guess. And it's certainly the environment I work in. My boss's boss is a woman,
and, you know, there are certainly a ton of women. I work for the IT Department of the
State of Michigan, so it's a government saying it, you know, there's, there's a lot of women
working there, many of whom are managing departments. Yeah. So, I think we put that one to bed. So,
let's, let's move on. You get, you've got to know SS. Oh, lots of open source solution stage. Come on.
Yeah. And that's, you know, that's for companies that have something that they want to say about
what they're doing. So, we have your stage scheduled. Yeah, I heard you were saying that that was
actually, I thought that that would be relatively unpopular, you know, to be popular by the
companies, but relatively unpopular by the people attending, but you were saying that that was
kind of positive last year. Yeah. You know, it depends on what they're doing. I think those talks
are as well attended as anyone else's. I mean, we had, for instance, I just threw up a recording.
We try and record all of our talks and put them up on archive.org. I won't say we get all of them
because every once in a while a speaker refuses to use the microphone. It can happen. Yeah.
Yeah. I don't know if they just don't understand why they need to use it. Can I give you a tip that
I've just used? Oh, sure. Get the guys to get the load of sons of clips.
And put a big, you know, I have a remove before flight sticker thing that diagonals down. You
know, like when you go to hotels and they've got like a big lung stick on the room key. So you
won't lose it. Something like that. And just clip it to their lapel. And then it's at least a
lot of work to get the audio track in, but at least you have the audio track from their perspective.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'll mention it to the sound guys. So I just posted one of them a few days ago
on various social media. And it was by Phil Robb of Hewlett Packard talking about their
open source initiatives. I think that was a well attended. I've seen Phil and he's a good speaker,
represents his company well and is obviously very passionate about open source.
And of course, on the other hand as well, you've brought a lot of guys and I'm using the term
guys and gals here. You've brought a lot of people in for the first day event. So there is a
business slam to it. So they are interested then and going into here what HP have to offer the
business community. Right. Right. And in fact, speaking of business and career, last year
for the first time we had what we call the career track. And that was speakers from companies
coming in and various things about managing your career, everything from how to write a good
resume to how to interview well with companies to what sorts of training and things are going
to make you more marketable. And it was the hiring managers and the HR departments
that were giving the talks. Awesome. Are these online? Yeah. Absolutely.
Can you send me the links to those as well so that I can get them in the show notes because
that is certainly needed. You know, I've often seen it where we get CB's in and the guys are
technically on the ball. You talk to them, they're a bit techy and then they go to the HR interview and
it's like, so yeah, you have to you have to play the game, you know, if you want, if you want the
and you know, a resource to be able to look at and say, okay, how what is expected of me in
HR interview? Right. Okay. So we did it for the first time last year. It was a huge success and
so we're going to do it again this year. Awesome. Another thing we did that was a big success last year
is a track. We call it Meet the Penguin. It's an introduction to Linux and open source software
for people who are new to it. Now, I think I think right there in those three tracks, yeah,
is what's setting the Ohio Linux Fest apart from quite a lot of other fest. You're taking in the
peripheries of the community, you know, taking in the professional, the HR people and then the
introduction because everybody's a new as Linux. I personally believe, I think I personally believe
that everybody has something to teach me about computers. So yeah, I think it's brilliant that
there's an easy track that somebody coming in to this for the first time knows this is a track I
can go to. This is all going to be aimed at me. Yeah, and we did this last year. Not for a number of
years, we've had a thing on Friday that we call Linux Basics Friday is the training day. So you
can sign up for Linux Basics and I think that's like 250 for a whole day of training. And we take
you through installing Linux and configuring it on a laptop and then you can at the end of the
Fest, you can buy the laptop for, I'm not sure if it depends on what it costs us to get it, but
for a very low price and have your Linux already on it configured. We've done this for a number
of years. What we added last year was we thought, well, wait a minute, just because you got Linux
installed doesn't mean you're ready to go do things. And so we added on Saturday a full day track
just for the people who are new. Well, you know, we will have 10 or 15 people that go through
Linux Basics. And I think we thought, well, we'll have the same 10 or 15 people. Boy, were we wrong?
Yeah. Those rooms, oh, we had standing room only. It was so crowded.
Frankly, you wouldn't expect to that in fairness. We even had standing room only for a one-hour talk
on the command line. Hey, who was giving that? Scott Courtney. Very good, very good.
From a company called CNA nominee and he and his wife were the organizers of this whole thing.
All right. Of course, I did a talk on Libra Office. Yeah, right. You know, that was kind of a given.
And then we had talks about graphics. We had Door to Door Geek did sort of a basic, all right,
you got it installed. Now what kind of talk that was very popular? Another man I could listen to,
I'm reading the phone because. Yeah, yeah. He's good. We had a guy come in and do a comparison of
different desktop environments. So, you know, Unity, GNOME, KDE, you know, what are your options?
What do they all look like? So, you know, that was just, it was a real eye opener to us just how
popular it was. So, of course, we're going to have it in a somewhat bigger room and do it again
this year. Of course, everybody who's gone last year will go, all right, now we can move on.
And the room will be deserted. I doubt that. I doubt that. Yeah, some of those folks I wouldn't
want to see myself, you know, just because you're proficient at a particular thing in Linux,
just I mean, you're not proficient at something else, you know. Oh, yeah, I always feel like
when I get into a room full of geeks, I'm probably the dumbest one there because, you know,
even with, you know, on hacker public radio, I, you know, have the stuff I listen to. It's like,
I'm not quite sure what they're talking about, but it sounds interesting.
I have that myself quite a lot. And I imagine probably some people feel that way with my
Libra office stuff. And that's, that's okay. We can. Yeah, but the thing about it is you got
the rewind, but just go back and listen to it again. Yeah, and I do have that with your Libra office
thing, even though I've done similar training with your Libra office, and I've said it before,
and I'll say it again during the community news, but we're just coming up after this.
You know, that's a great resource. And you don't have to take it all in. Just listen,
do it a few times. It's not like a one-time deal. It's on the radio and it's a podcast. Save them.
Right. So I've got a few more to record there. But anyway, back to Ohio Linux Fest,
and we're going to be we're going to be doing that training for the new folks again all day.
How's your gun tiered for this one? Oh, yeah. Excellent. The problem with the door is not
getting into volunteer. The problem is to restrain him from trying to run him off. Yes, yes, yes.
You know, he was saying, hey, I could do a whole day track all by myself, and it's not quite the
way we like to do things. I'm surprised. Yeah. So, but you got four other traditional tracks. What's
the deal there? Do you, any ideas? Can you give us any pre-shedual hints? Like I said, I'm pretty
sure. I know of at least one of the talks because George Castro, he actually gave a talk at my
Linux users group on Juju, and I said, George, you've submitted this for Ohio Linux Fest,
haven't you? And he said, yeah, I have. Anytime I hear someone give a good talk, I always say,
you know, submit this for Ohio Linux Fest. So I know George is going to be there, and his talk
will be worth listening to, certainly. I don't know exactly what the others are, but let me tell
you a little bit about how we try and fill out the schedule. Sure, for him. So, you know, first of all,
we have to get people submitting proposals, and so we open that up back in like,
January, I think, and had it open, and I would periodically post reminders to people,
hey, we're still looking for talks, and we closed it in July. So, you start with, we can't
schedule something that isn't submitted, and I've occasionally had people say, hey, you know,
you should have more talks about this or that topic, and it's like, we didn't get any.
Now, if people don't send us talks, it's not much we can do. Then we start looking at trying to
get a range of topics. I will tell you that every year, we'll be criticized by people because we
didn't have enough talks about this, that, or the other topic. It's like, well, we had three.
But you can please some of the people, some of the time more of the people, a little more of the time,
but not a lot of the people all the time. You really can't. So, we try and hit as many areas. So,
there'll be some about graphics, and some about system administration, and some about networking,
and there's going to be some about different distros, and so on, and you try and spread it around.
The other thing we try and do is get different expertise levels. So, some of them are going to be
really advanced, and some intermediate, and some more of a beginner level. That makes sense.
Yeah, we really try and say there's something for everyone. Nobody's going to come there and say,
boy, every single talk was exactly what I wanted. There's no way to do that.
That again, if you're an encouraging and new users to come, there's going to be talks that will
be way over their heads, and I'm sure there'll be talks on business talks that regular
hobbyist hackers, I'm no interest in, it just makes sense.
Exactly. And then, of course, you're going to get the complaints of these two talks. I wanted to
see Ron at the same time. How could you do that? Go to neither of them and watch them after the fact.
Yeah, you know, pick one to sit in, and then we'll put the audio up on archive.org afterwards,
and you can listen to the other one. One thing that they did at Old Camp last year, which is
quite good, actually, is when people came in, speakers and presenters, they got them to fill out
the CC by essay, permission slips. So that was already done, everybody did all the legal stuff.
As soon as you came in, you signed the thing to say what you did want, that you, in coming to
the festival, you realized that people would be taking photos and such. And that also allowed
them to, you know, be more, be less worried about getting permission for the recordings and stuff
after the fact. And one other thing that I would ask, the people who are there to do is get a copy
of the presentation on USB stick, have a little laptop or something, just to copy the USB,
copy the presentation off so that if you're transmitting it via audio, that somebody can follow
along with the presentation beforehand or after or during. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, we do,
we do ask people to submit their presentations ahead of time so we can review them.
It's even better. Yeah. Because one of the things that we have to do is there's,
we always say that Ohio Linux Fest is intended to be family friendly.
So we don't want adult-only material.
Every once in a while, someone thinks that, you know, having a slide with women in bikinis is
funny. And we say, no. Yeah. I don't like, yeah. I'm not coming to that for
different reasons, but yeah, I don't know. I personally have never come across that and decided
upon my recent investigations into the topic showed that it did occur at various different events
here. So I don't know, people grow up. But that said, I do, I don't necessarily hold with the
concept of family friendly because every, it's very cultural. But then again, it's Ohio, it's
in the West, so you have every right to define what you consider to be family friendly in Ohio,
if you know what I mean. Yeah. Go for it. Yeah. So that's, that's part of what we are.
We're not apologizing for it, but we make it very clear right up front. This is how we do things and
and I think we're known for it enough that it's not going to surprise anyone at this point.
Yeah, true for you. But then again, you know, it's, it's also nice as well. My kids are a certain age
where you think, okay, I'm going to bring them to an event. And while I don't think to be that
worried about that sort of thing, to be honest, except shouting out, why is that lady in the bikini?
Yeah. Yeah. And we do, we do have people who come and bring their children. So
get them young, get them young. I think that's absolutely wonderful. In fact, I think
Dordador Geek was saying in 2014, he's going to bring his son along to OLLF.
Oh, excellent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good meeting young.
And like to hear his views on on it.
I think that might be possible. Cool. Is anybody, we haven't spoken about the export thing.
I don't think we can talk that much more about the schedule to be honest, because it's not set at
this point. Well, it's going to be the usual Ohio Linux Fest, high caliber stuff,
Zonder New Dizzy.
What's the hotel situation like the dreary and the high SSC?
Yeah. There is, and I think this is fairly common. When you have a convention center in the
heart of downtown, there is usually going to be hotels that are connected to it in various ways.
And so the high ed and the dreary are the two hotels that are connected to the convention center,
which means if the weather were bad, you would not have to go outdoors to go from your hotel room
to the convention. And so we've made arrangements with them. They're both fine hotels. I personally
have made my reservation for the dreary, but I know some other people that are going to the
high ed. It's slightly different accommodations each way. But yeah, whatever you're going to,
I guess, I guess people who travel with no people in the States, do they have internet? Is there?
Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's, there's free or low cost Wi-Fi in both places.
Fair enough. Okay, and it's only
250 to get from the airport with the bus. Fair enough? Doesn't seem too complicated to me.
Yeah, I drive. I live in Michigan, which is the state right above Ohio on the map.
So it's a three and a half hour drive. Well, I'll drive down Thursday and then drive back Sunday.
You're missing GPS coordinates here.
Probably never occurred to me. What? If you know, if you just put the address in a Google Maps,
yes, for Android, my navigation is what I'm using. And I have a HVR episode.
We're ready to rock on that. But yes, okay, good, good, good, excellent.
Well, actually, if you can't get it, even, even Android has a,
you can get to it by address and postal code, so that shouldn't be too big a problem.
And then on this, what have you gone on after the convention,
usually a part or something? Yeah, yeah. And I think we're going to, there was a local,
local bar we went to last year, not far away. And I think we're going back there again.
OpenNMS are sponsoring us. I understand.
I think that was last year. Oh, okay. MC Frontalos. Yeah, I was last year.
Yeah, that's right. He took the page. Yeah, I'll have to mention that to the web people.
I don't know if we're going to go for an entertainer this year. We try different things.
Some of which are successful and some of which aren't. But we had a number of people
over the last few years say that they didn't like having the loud music because they wanted
to talk to people and they couldn't because it was sound noisy. Yeah, I can understand that.
Yeah, I can. And I know last year you tried the pajama party. How did I go?
Complete failure. What? What happened? Nobody showed up.
No, one guy did. I mean, that was, that was an idea that just, okay, say, you try stuff.
If it doesn't work, you get rid of it. If it works, you keep it. But it's not the,
it's not the open source where really they at least throw it against the wall, see what works.
So, you know, the pajama party complete flop. But the the newcomer track and the career track
that were also new things last year were very, very successful. And we're keeping them.
Yeah, I think in fairness, it was a, it was a good idea to, to at least try it.
Right. You were looking. It probably wouldn't have suited everybody. It could have been
nearly in the day, you know, but hats off to them for trying it. That's, that's what I say.
Right. Another thing we did is we, we have birds of a feather sessions. Those used to be on
Saturday, but they conflicted with all of the other Saturday things. So we moved them to Friday
evening. That seemed to work out a lot better. And for the birds of a feather sessions, it's,
basically we set up, oh, I'm going to say there's like 18 slots,
those like six runs and three one hour slots per room. And it's first come first, sir. So,
you've got something you want to talk about with like-minded people, just, you know, go to the website
and just say, hey, I want to be able to, I want to do something about Pulse Audio.
If I want to, I want to get together a session on a Libra office or whatever it is and
just claim a spot, set it up. Do that right now. Good idea. One thing just about the after party,
I'm sorry, let's, let's talk about the birds of a feather session again. What time do they start on the
Friday? Uh, don't. Well, you don't have to be precise as morning noon.
It's evening. So, somebody you arrive on time, throw yourself into the hotel and say,
I'm going to say it starts at eight. I think that's about right. And about the, um, about the,
the after party, because you see, I think you're running into a bit of a problem because,
um, you know, guys want to go to this. This is the one chance in the year where they get to meet their
buddies online. And they want to crack open a few beers. And then of course, on the other hand,
you've got a hundred age kids who are, who are common or a mixture of both. Guys want to crack
open a few beers with their buddies and they've got kids. And I'm, as far as I know, US licensing
laws don't, uh, don't shine lightly on, on that sort of mixture. Uh, you're correct about that.
Now, I think I understand how this works the way we're doing it. Um, and that is this particular
establishment we've taken it over for the night. So it's not open to the public. And I think that
changes things slightly. So we can have minors as long as we don't serve them alcohol.
Yeah, that's, that's fair enough. What happens is everyone's going to be, have their ID checked
at the door as they go in. Uh, and if your ID says you're of a legal age for drinking,
I, which I think is 21 and Ohio, uh, in the United States, that's done on the state by state
basis 16 here, although they want to move it up to 18. Uh, yeah. So anyway, you'll get like a wrist
band if you are of legal age. And if you don't have the wrist band, uh, you better be ordering
a Coke, you know, fair enough. Well, at least, uh, I mean, that seems like a good solution to the
problem because it is a bit of a problem, you know, and yeah. And if you don't have, uh,
that loud music or there's the ability to, you know, you or the participants feel like they have
control over where the music is and that the venue has the feeling that, okay, these guys are not
here to listen to music. They're here to talk to each other. But, you know, in one corner, they might
want to put the music up, but then I think it might work. Yeah, well, we're going to see. All right,
so this is, uh, if we get a whole lot of complaints from people that, you know, hey, where's the music?
And maybe we bring it back next year. But, you know, like I say, our, our philosophy is, you know,
try something and then if it doesn't work, abandon it. Might be no harm to have a, um, you know,
a small, you know, kids party DJs thing in the corner or something that, you know, you could turn
up the music on if, if that is there ready to rock, you know, surely somebody's going to have a laptop
and, and some free, uh, creative comments music to play. I suppose that could happen. Uh, we don't
have anything organized on it just at this point. Yeah. Well, you know, Kevin, at least you're trying
stuff, you know, that is the main thing because that was the thing I heard, you know, everybody was
saying, uh, the talks were great, the atmosphere was great, but the negative part was this, uh, was
about the after party. But then the previous year, there, there was negative things about the
after party as well because for the exact same reasons of the bits that they liked about the art
after party this year. So, um, I'm interested, I'm genuinely, very interested to know how you,
how you solved the after party, uh, issue on whether this helps. It seems like it's worth a try.
So that's all we can ever do. Exactly. While we're coming up on the HBO community news time,
so is there anything that we haven't, uh, gone over? I think we better just give people the
dates again and, uh, which is any other message you want to send us. Friday September 13th, uh, is the
opening and then all day Saturday, the 14th, uh, and, uh, we've got a couple of things on the
50th. There's a diversity and open source workshop and there's also going to be, uh, certification
exams. So, uh, but not, not a huge program for Sunday. So, uh, I just say go to the site and register.
Okay, so the best thing I could say. And there's a donation thing there if you can't make to the site
that you can throw these guys a few, a few books because in fairness, these are they, uh, is the
cornerstone best on the calendar comes up every year and, uh, you know, they try stuff out so you
don't have to. Yep. So, thank you so much for giving us a chance to promote this to the
Heck Republic radio audience. Kevin, you know, this is much your network as it is our network. So,
anyway, tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Heck Republic Radio.
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