A Diamond in the Rough

If you’re ever in the state of Oregon, take the time to visit the  Rice Mineral Museum. I took a trip there today, and it was eye-opening, staggering, and simply wonderful. This is a world-class museum, a Smithsonian-level collection hiding out in the middle of nowhere, also known as the north end of Shute Road in Hillsboro. Their website and photo gallery simply do not do them justice.

Most of the pieces were so staggeringly beautiful that they far outdid commercial art that’s sold for megabucks. Amongst the very cool things, a slice of the collection comes from Pashan, Pune, one of the several places on this planet I call home.

LPC keynotes announced!

So here’s the news – we’ve invited Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO to keynote at LPC, and we hope he can make it! This should be really interesting. If he makes it, it will be via a remote, interactive, real time video session.  If you have any suggestions or questions for Vivek Kundra, or how the LPC team should set this up, feel free to post comments here or on our LPC blog!

Chairing LPC 2009

I’m doing a lot of things this year – and for the hundredth time, I find myself discarding my previous life and blogs and starting anew.

Last October, in a chocolate-induced haze of post Halloween self-satisfaction, I somehow thought it would be a good idea to volunteer to run the Linux Plumbers Conference in 2009. Portland continues to host the event, which makes it possible for me to help out, along with an extraordinarily strong local Linux development and business ecosystem. Last year’s crew did a heck of a job creating the event for the first time. We’re coasting on their toil and troubles, this year, frankly.

Despite the continual incoming dripdripdrip of somber economic news, tightening budgets, market collapses, layoffs, disappearing finances and individual anxieties, we are somehow crafting together what will be a rather interesting and productive conference.

The outstanding news today was we got a lot closer to signing up another big name for our keynote! It won’t get announced anytime soon, unfortunately, but it will be fantastic if we can get them.  We have already lined up Keith Packard, X Window genius and all round great guy to give one of the keynote addresses.

We will also have Linus giving an advanced tutorial on git.  It pains me to impose on Linus, but I’m personally very grateful that James Bottomley did the heroic arm-twisting for us.  After losing the video of Linus’s git tutorial in 2008, we badly wanted a chance to reassemble our dignity and geek cred.

If you’re a Linux developer in Portland, OR (or for that matter, anywhere else), what are you waiting for? Register already!

Linux Plumbers Conference will run from Sept 23-25 in 2009 at the Downtown Portland Marriott.