I enjoyed a “Geekin’ Weekend” at South East Linux Fest in Spartanburg SC.

Four of us from TriLUG (Kevin Otte, Jeff Shornick, Bill Farrow and myself) packed into the minivan and made a road trip down to South Carolina on Friday.  We got there in time to see some of the exhibits and a few of the Friday afternoon sessions.  There was some light mingling in the evening, and then we all wrapped it up to prepare for the big day ahead.

On Saturday, we had breakfast with Jon “Maddog” Hall before he gave the keynote on how using open source can help create jobs.  The day was filled with educational sessions.  I attended ones on SELinux, Remote Access and Policy, FreeNAS, Arduino hacking, and Open Source in the greater-than-software world.  We wrapped it up with a talk on the many ways that projects can FAIL (from a distro package maintainer’s view).  But the night was not over… we partied hard in the hotel lounge, rockin’ to the beats of nerdcore rapper “Dual Core”, and then trying to spend the complimentary drink tickets faster than sponsor Rackspace could purchase them.

Sunday was much slower paced, as many had left for home and many others were sleeping off the funk of the previous night’s party.  But if you knew where to be, there were door prizes to be scored.  I ended up with a book on Embedded Linux.

It was a memorable weekend, for sure.  We learned a lot of new tech tricks, and we enjoyed hanging out with the geeks.