LincolnBlogs

Friday:
* Up at 2am to do the 3 S’s and drive to meet up with Allan and Pat in Easton, so we can all drive to Columbus together. We rented a Kia minivan, which drove really nice and was much more comfortable than a plane trip would have been. We left around 4am-ish and arrive in Columbus around noon. First people we run into are Russ Wenner and his dad. We say a quick hello and head over across the street to Max and Ermas restaurant to grab some lunch. We marvel at the testosterone challenged ineptitude of the wait staff there. After lunch we relax for a few until everyone else starts to show up, then we start congregating and checking out each others geek gear. The Acer Aspire One’s boot the fastest by the way 🙂 Around 6pm we all head over to BD’s Mongolian Barbeque. I love that place – the food is sooooooo good!. This was followed by the OLF pre-show party, held at Barley’s across from the convention center. This is where the real meet-n-greet starts and the drunken debauchery begins. Dann had a really, really good time. 🙂
Saturday:
* The convention begins at 8am and we have to unpack. Boy oh boy did we have a lot of Swag to give out this year. Special thanks go out to our fantastic sponsors Pearson Education, APress and O’Reilly for sending us some fantastic books to give away and also to Neuros for providing us the grand prize giveaway, a Neuros OSD (v1)! There were easily 500+ people at our booth for the giveaways and I have seen estimates on another blog of 1000. It’s hard to tell from my perspective each year because the audience always seems to wrap around the corner where I cannot see them 🙂 Either way, there were a lot of people and it was great to meet not only our long time friends there, but make new ones as well. The conference was ended by Jono Bacon‘s keynote, which I really enjoyed. Dann was even called forward during the keynote by Jono to be part of the “demonstration”. All I have to say about that at this time is Dann has got to have balls of steel the size of boulders, and if he had turned around, I bet someone would have a picture for proof 🙂 After the show was over, we went to The Happy Greek, which is another restaurant we cannot miss each year, where I really enjoyed the Chicken Shawarma over Hummus. This was followed by the post-show party, where many of us gathered to enjoy a little geek socialization and swap stories about Dann.
Sunday:
* Not much to say about Sunday other than I was sad that the fun was over. Allan, Pat and I packed ourselves into our Kia rental and high-tailed it out of Columbus. During the trip we called into Dave Yates’ first Lotta Linux Links Dot Com Linux Users Podcast call-in episode that he was recording on his drive home. We all swapped some stories and our impressions of the show. Once I finally arrived home, I dragged my poor sorry behind into bed to relax and watch tv for just a few minutes around 6pm, and promptly found myself waking back up at 2am this morning 🙂

All in all, I really enjoyed the trip, just as I do each year. I love to meet all the show listeners and really love to have the opportunity to hang out with our peers as well. I can’t wait to get to the next con and do it all over again.