This week: HP Tech Forum in Las Vegas
Goal: spread the Open Source love and recruit more people to help us in our vision of building SkyNet. I mean, err, simple and clever open source management software.
Monday kicked off with the Expo, where you could find QLogic giving away a Ducati and Novell giving away green SuSE-branded M&Ms. I went away with the M&Ms, not sure of my odds on the Ducati. I gave a quick teaser season on Cobbler at the booth for Tuesday and Wednesday’s session and met a lot of people from a wide range of industries. The official Cobbler talk happened on Tuesday and Wednesday. Met some good folks from people who work in the military, paint business, universities, banking, and consulting. There’s definitely a different cross section of users than you get from FudCON and Red Hat Summit — HP-UX shops, Windows shops, mixed shops, all kinds. We also gave away a lot of F10 DVDs we had left over and told a lot of people about “yum install preupgrade” 
Laura Chapell gave an outstanding talk on Wireshark where I did learn a lot. I went to various other cloud/virt/management topics but didn’t learn a whole lot that I didn’t already know. I did hit some network provisioning/security topics that were interesting and got to see more of some of the HP Management tools. Meeting people and being able to tell more folks about Cobbler and Spacewalk was the best part. They also had a backup-power-in-a-shipping-container setup that I was drooling on. Flywheel (yes, flywheel) UPS and a 1/2 megawatt diesel generator that would look like it could easily belong on a WWII submarine. Nice.
Michio Kaku gave the closing keynote which was outstanding. Apparently he thinks Crocodiles fit the Elves-from-LOTR definition of Immortal, so I’ll have to follow up on that. His talk was basically about what the future may look like in 30-50 years, and also showed a trailer for his Science channel show coming out in November — which looks to be exceptional. The audience all received a card for a free copy of his book. (Thanks HP!). I wanted to ask a question but didn’t ask a question because I’d be asking a question because I felt like I wanted to ask a question. I should have asked more about the crocodile evolutionary path or lack thereof, apparently. He also made some Star Trek references to the “Q”, which were well appreciated by only about 15% of the audience. Hmm, there might be a lot of business people Funny speaker though. Good talk.
Along the way I did have a chance to do some of the typical Vegas things (mostly on the first day or at night), like see the strip. I’ve been there before not too long ago, but took quite a few pictures — up later. Hopefully they don’t suck. The faux-Eiffel-Tower was nice. I also caught the Bellagio Fountains doing “Viva Las Vegas” which is the best one. Mandalay Bay’s aquarium was small but very well done — the smiley faces permanently stuck on the bottoms of sawfish and the green sea turtles were the best — great final shipwreck room in that one (you’re in the sunken ship). I also did the usual walking around — Flickr uploads later. Took a fair share of cabs — death to the monorail. Was staying at The The, which is hard to say and also fun to say, especially if you mix the various pronounciations of “the”. It was quite decent. Had to walk through Luxor and Excal some when the tram died. Those suck. Not a big fan of about half of Vegas, though it has some nice parts.
The greatest disappointment was that FAO Schwartz was remodelling the 3rd floor, so I couldn’t play Close Encounters on the Big Magic Piano. That’s why I /came/ guys. *sniff*.
I also went and saw Ka one night — I keep comparing Cirque shows against Varekai. Varekai is freaking awesome and it’s not fair to keep judging things by it, and I basically had third row seats for that (and everyone was basically an Olympic class gymnast). Anyway, Ka was pretty good — my favorite part being the shadow puppets. Extreme Shadow Puppetage. That’s probably hard to explain unless you’ve seen it. My Cirque advice is just figure out where Varekai is going to be and go there. Anyway, Ka was pretty solid despite some slow parts. Great theatre. Crazy weird stage. Trippy Kung Fu action-sequence at the end too. Probably better with drugs.
HP had a really solid cover band playing the opening and closing session and before the final band got underway. They managed to play both “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys”, so good job HPTF. The Closing concert I was not super-excited about — the Beach Boys, or, well, the Mike Love Band, but the Mandalay Bay wave pool is a hell of a venue and you could stand in a foot of water 15 feet from the stage. I’m not sure what it was about tech crowds, whether they basically have no musical interest or what, but there were *two* people in the water watching the opener. Two. Sad. Anyway, a shout out to the other guy. Anyway, the Beach Boys weren’t too bad, killer venue — and John Stamos (from Full House and formerly-married-to-that-blue-chick-from-X-Men fame) was playing with them. I resisted yelling “Bob Saget!” or anything like that. Good time.
Thanks to HP for putting on a very good show and I look forward to being back in the Carolinas and finding a Bojangles again Actually I just keep putting in Bojangles references to annoy people like Mr. Katz.
Next week, we return to building SkyNet. I need to do more to create the future sooner. As some future uploads say, Michio thinks we’ll know before robots are dangerous and will have a chance to stop them. I think it should be our goal to prove him wrong.
Laptop battery is draining down, so I’m going to turn it off and watch these birds jump around the airport. I’m not sure how they got in the air port but I think they are appreciating the air conditioning.
The Beach Boys Rule!