Day 2 started with Chad and I missing the first round of presentations, cause neither of us can get up that early. The first presentation I made it to was Linux Media, Security and Automation which was an interesting talk about setting up your house with security cameras and motion sensors and light dimmers, all controlled by Linux. Unfortunately I thought he spent too much time talking about the costs and the interoperability of the different items, than talking about the hardware and how to set it up and stuff. Next I went to HOWTO: Start an open-source radio station presented by Michael Place of utah.fm. This was a cool talk about what it takes to create an online radio station. It was a surprisingly relatively inexpensive project.

There was then a lunch break followed by that days keynotes. Friday’s keynotes were by Michael Place and Joe Brockmeier. Michael Place is the author of Schlock Mercenary and talked about how he’s making money off of a free comic. He was a great presenter and I’m going to have to add Schlock Mercenary to my reading list. Joe Brockmeier is the project manager for openSUSE and talked about where openSUSE is today and where its going.

Things at the conference got a little out of whack after the keynotes and presentations ended up getting pushed back or something so I spent the next presentation slot hanging out in the exhibiters hall talking to people like mindjuju, fungus, and John Taber. Next I went to the Vim and Python presentation which the presenter didn’t show up for so Kevin Kubasik tried to fill in and was able to talk a little bit about vim but unfortunately I didn’t learn anything new.

After the presentation there was a geek dinner over at Tucanos in The Gateway. There were like 50 some odd geeks and geekettes there. The food was great and the conversations with all the other geeks were interesting. UTOS payed for Brazilian Lemonades for everyone, which were delicious. After the dinner Erik and I managed to catch the last train of the night.

Saturday I started off the day with an Ubuntu keynote. Christer Edwards talked about using Ubuntu in the enterprise. Next up I went to a presentation by Kevin Kubasik on Writing Web Crawlers. The way he was doing web crawlers was quite advanced and way better than the way I used to do it. Then I went to Tools for Video and Images which talked about the various programs for dealing with images and video on Linux. After this we had lunch provided by The Smokehouse.

After lunch there wasn’t any particular presentation that I was intent on going to see and I was quite tired so I called it quits. I went home and promptly crashed on the couch for about 3 hours.

Overall I had a great time at UTOSC this year. Got some nice swag. Learned some new things. I’m looking forward to next years.