OpenExpo Bern March 24, 2008
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo, On the road ... , 2commentsWell, it’s been nearly two weeks ago that I’ve been in Switzerland for OpenExpo in Bern - but somehow I’m lagging a little bit behind with reports on Linux events I’ve been at. So here it goes …
It’s been November/December that I first talked to Tiziano Müller about having a booth at OpenExpo in Bern. He organized our the booth at the Zurich OpenExpo some months ago and luckily he offered to do so again for OpenExpo in Bern. The booth was quickly registered and also confirmed very quickly. I also submitted an introductionary talk on Gentoo, but sadly my talk wasn’t accepted. But hey, the published conference program showed a clear focus on business-related talks.
Getting a confirmation on our booth early allowed me to search for cheap plane-tickets, as I wanted to have only one overnight stay in Bern I needed an early flight outbound on Wednesday morning and a late inbound flight on Thursday evening. On a typical business-route like Dusseldorf-Zurich these flights were quite expensive with my favorite airline, so I spent a look at what other airlines had to offer - and yeah, I found some quiet cheap flights offered by Air Berlin. To be honest, the train ticket from Zurich to Bern v.v. cost me nearly as much as both flights … (and yeah, i also considered flying to Bern-Belp, but those tickets were extraordinary expensive!).
So I got up on 12th march quite early, took the train to Dusseldorf Airport, got my usual airport-coffee at Starbucks and was able to board the plane to Zurich on time. I spent some additional euros to reserve a seat in row one for me - which was very-well-spent money as both flights were booked quite well. The landing was a little bit bumpy due to stormy weather … *shudder*. From Zurich airport it was an additional one-and-a-half train journey to the Bern Expo were I arrived around noon.
The expo already started some hours ago, so Tiziano already set up the booth and was just talking to a visitor when I arrived. I got some additional flyers to hand out to interested visitors and also a copy of my book “Gentoo Linux - Die Metadistribution” with me. We hadn’t that much space (one table and some chairs) but Tiziano did a very good job in setting up our booth. We had one notebook and an additional display to show visitors what they can use Gentoo for, had some place for handouts and so on … nice booth, well done :)
On Wednesday evening Markus Meier joined us for dinner and I also had the pleasure to meet again with Marc Herren (aka Dj Submerge) who has been a member of our first generation “German conspiracy” and helped as at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe some years ago. Before heading out for some food we joined the social event which was quite overcrowded, so we took one sausage and some beers and went on to the install-zone. We had Wi-Fi there and had some minutes left until the install-party ended, were Marc was helping people to install Ubuntu …
Ah yeah, we had FreeBeer there which was both free of charge and free in license … I’d suggest to get at least two of those tiny bottles ;) Very tasty beer! After having dinner and some additional beers at a restaurant located directly under the tribune of Wankdorf soccer-stadium I fall asleep very early.
(Picture showing Tiziano and our little booth)
The OpenExpo again started at 9 am on Thursday morning. Tiziano already was at our booth when I arrived, on Thursday we also had a /dev/snack-box at our booth :) Time passed by quite fast and around 3pm it was time for me to leave Bern to get back home on time. So, time for some kind of conclusion. When I first heard about OpenExpo in Bern I thought of a nice little regional event - but in fact it was a much bigger event than expected by me. We had lots of interesting discussions, both with people interested in Gentoo but also existing Gentoo users. And what impressed me at most was the huge number of visitors who told us they’re using Gentoo at work or even are building as hosting-platform with Gentoo. No surprise therefore that lots of people asked about best practices on how to administer a large amount of Gentoo boxes and also if there were some efforts on building management-platform for Gentoo systems (like SCIRE). Very interesting discussions and lots of interested visitors made the OpenExpo a big success for us, hopefully I can also manage to visit the Zurich OpenExpo this year!
At Zurich airport I had enough time to buy some swiss-chocholate for my co-workers and also for another tasty coffee for myself. The flight back home was nothing spectacular, got some interesting kind of “sandwich” and warm beer … aside that flying Air Berlin was a good choice :)
Schnee! March 24, 2008
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Me, Myself and I, Ohne Worte , 1 comment so farFür die Leute in Bottrop II die mir partout nicht glauben wollen! ;) Da schaut mal kurz nicht aus dem Fenster, plötzlich: weiß! Und das mitten im Ruhrgebiet …
