FISL, Day 2

Day two of my trip to FISL (Friday) started out with me waking up a bit late and scrambling to get ready on time. Rafael kindly picked several of us up at the hotel and drove us to the conference. I spent the morning talking with people both in the Fedora booth and in several of the other booths around the show. I also spent some time in a press interview with Linux Magazine. For lunch, we ate at the buffet and I got to experience the famous banana sushi first hand.


In the afternoon, I cheered Dennis Gilmore on as he gave a presentation on RPM packaging in Portuguese. He doesn’t speak much Portuguese (yet!), but he was brave enough to translate his talk into Portuguese and read it as best he could. After Dennis did his talk, I ran over to the large presentation room for my presentation. I talked about how Red Hat and Fedora work together, how Fedora makes a good upstream for RHEL, and how Fedora works with upstream communities. Several hundred people attended the presentation, and I thought it was well received.

After the presentation, I ran into a Brazilian friend of mine doing VoIP work here in Brazil. We chatted for an hour or so about various topics including Fedora, VoIP, and cultural differences between Portuguese-speaking and Spanish-speaking countries in Latin American. After another stint at helping out in the booth, we all ran back to the conference hall for a great presentation on SELinux from Douglas and Marcelo from Red Hat. By the time their presentation was done, it was 9:00pm and we were all hungry. Luckily, some of the Fedora folks had organized a pizza party, so we weren’t hungry for long!

FISL, Day 1

Day one of the FISL conference (at least for me, as I arrived on Thursday) was mostly spent in airplanes.  My flights took me from Dulles to Orlando to São Paulo to Porto Alegre.  (Nothing is better than having a flight attendant wake you up at 3:00am to feed you and airline dinner, right?)  When I landed in Porto Alegre, Leo and Rafael were kind enough to pick me up and drive me to the FISL conference.  I was impressed with the size of the conference and the variety of the booths.

Fedora booth
The Fedora booth at FISL

I have to admit — I was a bit stunned when I saw the Fedora booth.  It looked absolutely gorgeous!  I had no idea when I walked in whether we were sharing Red Hat’s booth or would have our own; little did I know that we’d have the best looking booth at the show.  The location of the booth was perfect — we were right on the corner where people would pass by on their way to the big lecture hall.

After shaking hands with the Fedora ambassadors and volunteers and saying hello to the folks in the Red Hat booth, I gave a quick impromptu speech (in Spanish, by request) to the crowd that had gathered around our booth, and then sat back and watched as Toshio gave a great talk on packaging RPMs for Fedora, with a lot of additional explanation in Portuguese from Rafael and Leo.  (We had several other presentations right there in the booth as well over the course of the day.)  At that point, we had about fifty people gathered around the booth, so we handed out media and stickers and helped answer questions.

Fedora booth at FISL
Crowd around the Fedora booth

After the show wound down for the day, we went to dinner at a traditional Brazilian churrascaria. The food was delicious — I ate too much food, and forgot how much I like the Brazilian soft drink called Guaraná. It was the perfect way to end the day.  On the way back to the hotel, I got to see a bit of the city of Porto Alegre.

Tales of a Road Warrior

I’ve spent a lot of time travelling in my career.  In fact, I’m a bit ashamed to say that I’ve spent at least one week out of every month on the road for the past five or six years. To put it mildly, I’ve seen a few airports and slept in a few hotels.

This month is no exception to my travel routine.  Next week I’ll be travelling to FUDCon in beautiful Santiago, Chile.  I’m very much looking forward to the opportunity to return to Santiago and take part in the FUDCon conference there. After that, I’m headed to the FISL conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil.  This will be my second trip to Brazil this year, and another chance to gain weight by drinking too much guaraná soda.

If you’re going to either FUDCon Santiago or FISL, be sure to stop by and say hello.  I can’t wait to see you there!

Update:

Sorry for the broken RSS feed — I think I may have triggered a bug in WordPress.  It should be fixed now.