Jeff's Professional Side

The second annual Atlanta Linux Fest took place this past Saturday, the 19th September 2009. IBM was gracious enough to provide the facility, and Canonical and eApps also provided major sponsorship. The show was a success by all measures, well exceeding the organizers’ expectations. The official attendance numbers have not been published, but I have heard numbers between 600 and 700 — not bad for a show only in its second year and that fell on a very rainy day!

At Nick’s request, I had convinced Tarus to give a talk, and I pretty much unilaterally decided that OpenNMS would also be an exhibitor. We scored an absolutely prime spot in the exhibit area and drew in lots of traffic. Our good friends Mita and Robbie at Presentation Rentals (which sponsors ANSMTUG monthly) got us a great deal on a big monitor on which we ran our loop. My amazing wife volunteered to help out with the booth, her first time ever “wearing the shirt” though she’d hung out with us last October at a show in London. We always like to have as many community members representing as we have OpenNMS Group employees, so I recruited local friends Bobby and Robert to help man the booth. I’m confident that each of them fully earned a 100% commission on the free software he sold that day.

A plethora of Papa John's pizza pies, constituting lunch at Atlanta Linux Fest 2009

This show was the project’s first in Atlanta, and as happens in every new city, people came out of the woodwork who use OpenNMS to keep the IT infrastructure running smoothly at local companies that we previously had no idea were part of our user community. It turns out that Georgia Tech, which hosted last year’s Dev-Jam, is a user, as is Georgia Power. Less widely known users that we learned about include the company that provides the data underlying Google Maps‘ and other providers’ integrated roadway traffic services. I hope that some of these people will join the Order of the Blue Polo, especially since both my wife and Bobby were modeling the shirt in question. It’s fitting, and a testament to the show organizers’ excellent taste, that lunch came from a company represented in the OBP.

It was such a busy day for us that nobody had time to snap any pictures of our booth! We were fortunate enough to have, in the booth adjacent to ours, shutterbug Jane Ullah, who captured three of us loafing during a lull in the show traffic. If some images emerge that paint us in a less idle light, I’ll update this post to include them

Food, Geeky, OpenNMS atlanta, atlantalinuxfest, atllinuxfest, canonical, family, Food, ibm, linux, Network Management, OpenNMS, opensource

I like to shoot. I’ve been lucky enough so far never to have needed to shoot an animal for food or a fellow human being out of self defense. Although I consider myself a moderate on most issues, the right to keep and bear arms is a freedom that I cherish. That’s probably due in part to the fact that I grew up in a fairly rural area, and from a fairly young age tagged along with my father to the gun range for target practice. I was probably ten years old when I first personally shot anything, and I seem to recall having reliably hit a target at that age. After a few years of no shooting at all, I pretty easily earned my Rifle Shooting Merit Badge at Boy Scout camp. That was more years ago than I like to admit, and unless you count paintball I haven’t discharged a firearm since.

That is, until last weekend, when I visited family for a wedding. (Insert hillbilly joke here.) My uncle, who is a part-time competitive marksman (and father of the bride), took dad and me to the pistol range for a few hours of turning neatly cast bits of lead and brass into irregularly flat ones.

My guest pass to Bluegrass Sportsmens League

This trip was my first time doing practical shooting, in which time counts as much as accuracy. It turns out that from the holster at thirty yards I can reliably hit four rectangular steel plates, each about the size of an average Dell notebook computer, and then a larger fifth plate, in just over six seconds. That’s about a second slower than my dad and about three seconds slower than my uncle, but not a bad time for someone who hasn’t handled a loaded weapon in about 536 million seconds. More amazing is that I can do this with no damage to that flap of skin between the thumb and forefinger of the dominant hand, a part of the less experienced shooter that Glock actions seem to take particular delight in biting.

I’m now going to have to join my wife in applying for a Georgia firearms license (Georgia, my home these days, is one of the few United States that requires a license to carry openly) and see if I can get that time under six seconds before my next visit to BGSL.

Geeky 2ndamendment, family, marksmanship