For those that are curious, I have in fact arrived at DebConf. It was a mostly smooth journey, with the expected minor crises that seem to be a given when I travel. The first problem was time; for undetermined reasons, my Mexicana flight (American didn’t bother to tell me that I was actually flying another airline until I attempted to check in) took off and landed about 35 minutes late. As a result, I blew my opportunity to meet up with Warren from Mepis and ended up having to hop a cab down to Oaxtepec solo. At over a hundred bucks with fare and tolls, this was less than ideal, but not a huge deal.
The ride down here was fascinating; from my limited vantage point (the back seat of a taxi), I was able to see a bit of Mexico City (it’s very colorful – literally – and features some truly amazing graffiti), and the surrounding foothills. The latter remind me a little bit of Colorado, as the drive out here was somewhat akin to heading to, say, Keystone or Breckenridge from DIA. To add a bit of adventure, my driver and I passed through a rather severe thunderstorm on the way through the mountains, with a spectacular lightning show visible over the fog shrouded valley to our south.
After about an hour and a half, we arrived at the gate to the Vacational Center IMSS Oaxtepec. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t read the page describing just how big the vacational center is, so I ended up walking a little less than a mile to the top of the hill before stumbling across the DebConf registration center. After checking in, we (predictably) discovered that I was not on the reservation list. But with the very kind assistance of Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, a Debian maintainer and more importantly – Spanish speaker – we were able to straighten that out thanks to the confirmation number that I obtained via email just before boarding yesterday. On the way to the hotel room, I ran into Simon and Danese, who were assembling a group for dinner, and after dumping my gear I joined a motley crew of folks from Linspire, Debian, Intel, Canonical, and Sun for a dinner in the town of Oaxtepec. Good food, even better beer. Nice cap to a long day.
So far this morning, I’ve met the author of the nascent Debian Community Guidelines, and have been catching up on mail, feeds, etc. Later today, I expect to be catching Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu Annual Report along with sessions on Debian installers and resurrecting older hardware.
Should be a good day. More later, particularly on Shuttleworth’s talk.
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