Sun Jul 22 15:41:26 UTC 2018

Oh goodness, yesterday was a bit off the rails. I'll make a special
entry for Circle of HOPE Day Two, but this is about my personal
experience. phlog-in!

=== Running into friends ===

For HOPE this year I ran into two people who I know at least online
for a long time!

When Linux Outlaws was a podcast going strong I was a regular
listener, and if I could tune in to the show during a live recording
or something I would. The hosts were also using the GNU Social
precursor identi.ca as a twitter alternative.  The community was
strong and identi.ca was a wonderful tool to communicate and share.
There was one guy who had a monkey holding a banana like a gun who
was always active and posting stuff.  We got along alright on
identi.ca but when it was shutting down I ended up back on the bird
site for a while. Good ol' @NYBill kept up the good fight and moved
onto mastodon.  During the conference we found one another using
the #hope tag on mastodon.  Talk about a trip! You can see the post
history if you're that curious but it was pretty neat. We met up
in Vaughn for a talk, and then NYBill pointed out a couple other
guys from online. We shared a beer and it really made the day.

The last few years I have made an effort to go to more free software
and Linux conferences. I'm a fan of the FSF, Free Software Foundation,
and have visited Libre Planet for the past few years. I've also
been going to Texas Linux Fest & SeaGL.  If I had the money and
time I'd go to more, but I think that three a year is a good amount.
Frequently at these conferences I'll run into mattl and it was a
real pleasure to see he was rolling with the FSF crew that had come
up from Cambridge. A few club mates and many more beers later and
I'm making a phlog post about how cool it is to run into people at
a conference that you didn't know where going to be there.

I don't know if I've worded this the best way, but I am making this
post from the Ft. Lauderdale airport on a T500 and some kids were
astonished at how large it was. Keep on hacking out there! I'll
post another update later tonight or tomorrow.

-mnw- cc-by-sa