I attended LinuxWorld this year as a full conference attendee, thanks to a professional growth and development opportunity from my employer. Caroline and I took advantage of the fact that the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco was within half a mile of the San Francisco WorldMark resort, and drove up there the weekend before to do some site seeing. During LinuxWorld Caroline and Mai met me for lunch, and then after the day’s sessions were over we did more site seeing and found interesting restaurants for dinner.
I had three goals for this trip. First, have fun with Caroline and Mai in San Francisco. Second, pick up new technical skills and new ideas at LinuxWorld. Third, take lots of great photos around San Francisco, with a enough top-notch photos to put together a 12-month San Francisco-themed calendar. I think I succeeded at all three.
Caroline, Mai, and I walked around many beautiful places in San Francisco, ate at some delicious restaurants, and generally had a great time in the city. I’ll leave the specific restaurant reviews to Caroline (http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=c7j-0cX26jvSu5oa7HwnWw), but overall we loved almost every place we went to. We walked around the San Francisco side of the Golden Gate Bridge / Fort Point, Union Square, Chinatown, Japan Town, much of the waterfront, the Ferry Building, and much more. (Incidentally, I think I need to replace my sneakers after that much hiking in them.) Mai was very well behaved almost all the time, and we didn’t have any significant problems in any of the restaurants. She did get cold a couple of times — the temperature in SF in August hovers in the 50s and 60s, with a chill wind and fog. Caroline even admitted she had a good time.
LinuxWorld had a lot of interesting sessions. I think I chose a good mix of specific technical sessions (DRBD, Heartbeat, etc) and conceptual (virtualization options, system management, etc). Virtualization was definitely a hot topic, for good reason; while it adds a lot of complexity, on balance it can make IT’s job much easier if implemented well. (Of course, it can turn into a giant nightmare if it’s implemented without sufficient planning.) With RedHat and SUSE having separate conferences, a lot of the focus was on Ubuntu. Personally, I prefer RHEL/CentOS as my server OS, but it’s not like there’s that much difference at core between the distributions.
I won an iPod Touch 8GB from Rackspace for placing first place in their sysadmin challenge. My time was 8 minutes, which beat the #2 person by a respectable margin. (I think #2 was 12 or 14 minutes). The challenge seemed simple enough — Rackspace provided you a Linux VM and gave you a list of 4 simple tasks that you had to do in under 20 minutes. Of course, problems on the system prevented you from doing those tasks, so you had to fix the problems in order to complete the tasks. It was a pretty good breadth-of-knowledge test — each problem was simple if you’ve seen it before, and somewhat challenging to near impossible if you had no experience in that area of Linux sysadmin. I’ll have to remember this technique if I’m ever asked to interview sysadmins in the future.
The photography went well too. Right before the convention Palm unexpectedly sent me a bonus check for a patent application filing, which I used to buy the Sigma 50-150/2.8 lens I’ve been eying. In addition to that, I also brought my Sigma 18-50/2.8 and my Sigma 30/1.4. The 50-150 made a great walkabout lens on Saturday and Sunday; it helped me get some great birds-in-flight photos. The 30/1.4 was perfect walking around at night and in restaurants — I was able to get some great photos handheld in low light that wouldn’t have been possible without a tripod. Caroline’s patience with my photography bordered on saint-like, which gave me to the time to get most of the shots I wanted.
On the last night, at about 9pm, I filled my 16GB flash card (talk about good timing!), and ended up with about 1300 photos shot. We’ve started going through them, but it will be a little while till they get posted. I expect about 100-130 photos good enough to post online, and I’m pretty confident at least 12 will be good enough for a calendar.