Ok, so it’s been a week since LUG Radio Live 2006 and was it good? Fuck yeah 🙂

As with last year we met up on the Friday night in the Hogshead pub and it was great to see everyone from last year again. MrBen, Bruno, Neuro, Bastien Nocera and Jon (without an ‘h’, still haven’t worked out your surname yet though Jon) from Red Hat, Aquarion, Pickle, Russ and Jen, Michael Erskine, Robert Postill, Xalior and Lejt, Jonathan Riddell who I did my level best not to drunkenly hassle, plus a whole host of Wolves LUGgers. I have to say, my promise not to drink as much as last year was just about fulfilled, it was a close thing though. Oh and by the way, Michael Erskine is definitely the hardest bloke at LRL and a genuinely lovely bloke too.

I also got chance to have a good chat with Mirco Muller about Lowfat and I hope to talk more about that later.

Well we were all supposed to go home when the Hogshead finally kicked us out and the whole LRL tribe hauled ass around the city centre trying to find somewhere else that would let us in. Thankfully, nowhere would and the responsible members of the LRL community sloped disappointedly off back to their respective homes and hotels. Not so for me or the Red Hat guys. We continued to to trapse the city centre and found ourselves at the dreadful and almost empty Planet nightclub’s downstairs room where I ponied up for a round of Red Stripes. The next hour or so was filled with me mostly hassling everyone with my camera, drinking Red Stripe and dancing to hideous rock music, though my request for Hysteria by Muse was thankfully fulfilled and I air bass-guitared my way through it in the “I’m the best and most important dancer in the room” way of the irretrievably inebriated.

The Red Hat guys tired of the incessant Red Stripe and rock music around half 2 or so and despite my initial and continuous complaints at not going home at 1, Carl kept me there until at least 3am, convinced that he was about to pull the girl that looked like Wurzel Gummage. Thankfully, Carl gave in and we retired, Wurzel free and got back to my gaff at half 3.

4 hours later I drunkenly awoke and prepared to spend a day being hungover and trying not to fuck up the audio recording for the second year on the trot. I dressed in my second annual disgusting suit and headed to the venue. As with last year my suit was met by a variety of bemused stares, “fucking hell”s and “oh my God”s. Perfect 🙂

So, rather than go through every talk blow by blow, I guess it would be best to say what I enjoyed most and what wasn’t so good. For the first 2 hours of the morning I was tied to one of the lightning talk rooms looking after the speakers and audio equipment. Sadly I didn’t make many of the BOFs or talks over the weekend that I had hoped to, but Mirco Muller on Lowfat was outstanding. Also fascinating was Bastien Nocera talking about where Gnome should be going. I agree completely that to compete we need our own web services which export and APIs that can be accessed from the Gnome desktop. Everybody is using del.icio.us and flickr and so on. With Google rampaging to make the OS irrelevent then we need attractive web services which we can tie in to. In the interests of a Free system, we need Free web services. And yes of course, those services need to help us get laid 😉

As I said I missed quite a lot of the stuff I wanted to see, either due to responsibilities or lack of steam, but I caught some of John Leach’s talk on Everybody Loves Eric Raymond, which was good fun, some of Kat, Jen and Phated’s talk on being women in Open Source, which highlighted some of the behaviours we men seem to take as normal which are actually quite offensive. I don’t claim to know the historical reasons for why IT is so male dominated but I guess we are in a status quo where we tend to behave like a big boys club and like in any sexual vacuum, we gravitate immediately to the few women around by being over helpful, rude, overtly sexual and irritating, which of course keeps women away. Think we can all think of circumstances where we could improve on that score, even the most enlightened of us. Take “a/s/l” and “are you fit?” off your list of things to ask girls on irc.

I thought that Simon Phipps of Sun made a great deal of sense in the Mass Debate, though I didn’t catch his own talk. I thought that Stephen Lamb of Microsoft was a good sport for putting his head in the lion’s mouth as it were, but as gamely as he tried, I didn’t take much of what he said as useful to my world. Again, I didn’t catch his own talk, I only saw him in the Mass Debate. He made a point about kernel modules needing checksums for security reasons and well it’s a great idea when your kernel is hacked to pieces with third party bolt ons and atom-bombed on a daily basis by every malicious software writer in the world, *and* when nobody at all likes you, *and* when you have an instrinsically broken, Swiss cheese security model. But I’d like to think we have years to go before we have to worry about the security of kernel modules, expecially as third party modules are few outside of your distributor’s kernel. Besides, packages installed using the Debian and Fedora Core package managers are checksummed by default. I’d be worried if we needed to checksum our kernel modules at loading time. I will also be worried if that comment comes back to bite me in the ass in the next few years 😉

The Live and Unleashed recording as always was great fun but maybe could have done with more of last year’s singling out members of the audience and publicly abusing them. Apparently, the guys were lambasted after last year’s show for not actually discussing anything about Linux in the live recording, so maybe this was a natural reaction. Besides, I’m being a little unfair as plenty of attendees were abused in front of everyone.

Possibly the real highlight for me was Bruno “He’s basically French” Bord’s talk – This Talk May Contain Swearing. A lively, humourous and outstandingly well told journey through the quality and quantity of swearing on LUG Radio, over an 11 episode sample. For someone who’s primary language is not English, his comic timing was excellent and the talk was outrageously funny. Bruno, you’re a king 🙂

By Saturday evening I slowly started to crumble from my painful, throbbing hangover, lack of sleep and inability to go anywhere safely due to my disgusting suit, so after getting extremely irritable with my friend Carl, we grabbed some food and Carl went out to meet friends and I pretty much fell asleep where I lay and missed the LRL party. Sorry about that. Once again, that will teach me a lesson for staying out late and getting wrecked the night before LRL.

Sunday morning I took my PC to join in the LAN gaming where I promtly spent most of the rest of the day getting my ass blown to pieces by various people, not least by Moitio whom I accused of having a blog full of photos of fit birds, but alas I was wrong and he showed me who was boss by blowing me to shit with endless mines. Arsehole 😉

And that was largely it. Thanks to the LRL guys for awarding me with a free game from Tux Games for my pathetically small amount of help this year. The final play out of the event was when pretty much everyone who was still in Wolves met up at the Quality (Ch)Inn. It was really good to unwind with everyone and I got chatting to Corey Something from NYC. Sorry man, you’re surname had too many consonants to remember 😉 Hanging out at the Chinn was a great way to end the weekend. Sadly I had to go home earlyish as I was at work in the morning, but the farewell made glad I’d turned up in the first place. We have a great bunch of people here.

New friends for this year are Tony ‘tonytiger’ Whitmore who is an absolute God send and really genuine guy. Thanks for looking after the audio recordings for me dude 🙂 Seb Payne who looks about 14 and gets teased a lot for it but spoke authoritively on iFolder, Bryn who was the square headed ginger mate of one of last year’s concessionees and is a cool bloke, Phated – well what can I say about Phated that hasn’t already been said? She came all of the way from Singapore and made quite an impact to say the least. Finally, having probably missed out a great load of people, there is Felim Whiteley who despite losing all of his luggage on the way back from holiday came down anyway and became my new nemesis 😉 It was good to meet you man, you are a legend 🙂

To finish up, my LRL 2006 photos are on flickr here and the LRL 2006 flickr group is here (including ones of my horrific suit in Ron’s photos). As a side note, my LRL 2005 photos are now here.

See you all next year 🙂