After chatting with Intel’s (and formerly Sun’s) Danese Cooper and Debian’s Andreas Schuldei yesterday, I’ve decided that not attending this year’s DebConf (begins May 13) would be a fairly significant error on my part, and thus have made the decision to go. The only complication is that the conference is being held in Oaxtepec, just south of Mexico City, and while I’m excited to visit (I’ve been to the Caribbean and Belize before, but never Mexico) I find myself extraordinarily ill prepared to do so. Not only do I not speak the language (I took French in school instead of Spanish), but my passport had expired last June and I haven’t booked travel, lodging or transport. And of course it overlaps with JavaOne (note to folks attending that: don’t worry, I’m still going).
To remedy the passport situation, I headed down to the Colorado Passport Agency in Aurora this afternoon, to get an expedited renewal (at the absurd cost of $127). In theory, it should arrive late this week, or early next. And as soon as I book my travel, I’ll be hitting the Debian folks up for some assistance with the transport and lodging portions of the equation – at which point I’ll be set to go.
Looking forward to hitting the show, and please do drop a note if you’ll be there. I hope to have the opportunity to chat w/ many of you about the opportunity I see for the Debian community (yes, Ubuntu included) going forward, because it’s a significant one in my view. I’m also likely to ask for some travel advice as I get closer to the date, so suggestions are greatly appreciated.
