Penguicon 2007:

Went off with Dale Cozort to Penguicon this weekend; long drive both ways, and without significant breaks on the way back. I’m seriously achy and tired, and waiting for the allergy/decongestants/painkillers to kick in so I can go back to bed. It’s probably the first truly ‘new’ con that I’ve been to in a while; heard of it for years, and the programming and guests drew me in.

Dale was a good chatter on the trip, and a good roomie, and I tried to look after him; I’m sure he felt a little fish-out-of-water on the trip to a new con and territory. Our biggest regrets were mostly circled around the amount of good programming that we didn’t get to because it overlapped each other.

There were some things about the con that didn’t work: the internet connections were very on and off, especially the wireless one in the computer area (didn’t work worth a damn) and being in the overflow hotel. The shuttles were very infrequent, and shut down at 10 pm, and that screwed up a lot of out connections on Friday. Saturday, I just gave up and drove over. Next time, I stay at the main hotel….

Also, someone should draw up a food-places list. Finding food was hard unless you went far afield in the area, and the hotel’s restaurants were pricey-plus.

Dale was also having a lot of trouble with his rest, and zonked out during some of the panels. I crashed early both nights; I was tired, and the parties were limited.

The programming was beyond amazing, and I recommend that you go to their site and look it over. The various experts and guests went out of their way to be approachable. The staff of the con were helpful, and the general atmosphere of the con was vibrant and chummy. The attendees were generally much younger – from about late high school to about 33 or so – with a few old pharts I hadn’t seen in ages, like Clif Flynt, Richard Tucholka (just back from bypass surgery), and Tom Barber. It was Friendly Geek Land. Lots of cute Geek Ladies, by george.

Ended up at the Saturday noonish LJ get together, as per beldar’s post, and Dale got his introduction to LJ, and the rest of us to each other. Adoption and the girls ended up being a topic; two adoptive parents, a birthmom, and an interested outsider who knew about Nancy Segal and her separated twin studies! A very good talk with some nice people.

The con suite had some seriously interesting oddities; a large cylinder of liquid Nitrogen, which was used at various times by the staff to fix different batches of really good ice cream!  An outside barbeque of Brazilian beef (auto-chuscarreria!) on Saturday that made the joint smell heavenly.  Rocket fuel, aka strong coffee fixed with caffeinated water!  (There was a ton of caffeine-related goodies and stuff in the con suite.)   A cow passing out ‘ox tails’, a rather interesting candy.

The computer area also had a huge rube goldbergian device called a ‘Chaos Machine‘,  a LEGO exhibit, a burn-box for burning your favorite distros of Linux (I picked up a Edubuntu and Ubuntu 7.04) onto con-supplied CDs, and a Myth-TV box as an example of what it could do.   There was an installfest, but it seemed to be also some sort of hardware thing as well, and people were working out various bugs in this and that.

Highly recommended.