Memoirs of a Roadie

LUGRadio Live 2006

I've been wanting to upload my photos from LUGRadio Live 2006 for sometime, but just haven't had the time to sort through them. The event, organised by the presenters of LUGRadio, was great and I got to see several people I knew and even more that I didn't. I was asked to speak at the event, as I was in 2005, when I had already planned to speak in Toronto for YAPC::NA, and did a presentation about how MessageLabs use Open Source Software. The talk happened after I picked up Ade and took him to a WolvesLUG meeting and we talked servers all the way there. He was quite taken aback with the idea that we manage over 3,500 Linux servers in our infrastructure.

Unfortunately no-one took any photos of me during my talk, but I did get to take several of everybody else. I'll be speaking again at this year's event, so I hope to be a bit more organised and get someone to take photos of me too. The event took places over 2 days with a "disco" on the saturday night. It was a fun packed weekend and lots and lots and LOTS of Linux and Open Source related stuff to talk about. The guys put me up against Mark Shuttleworth, so I didn't get to see all of his talk, but I was quite pleased that I still got a decent audience. Obviously not everyone was that interested in what Mark had to say ;)

Anger, Bald, Beard & Ging

The second day of the event ended with recognition awards for various members of the community and the crew, leading up to the finale of the live recording of LUGRadio Live And Unleased, which went down rather well. With that the event was over for another year. The Four Large Gents has specially commissioned T-Shirts for the event, and seeing as it was a sunny day, Big Ron, Seth and myself grabbed the lads and took them outside for a fun photoshoot, with the idea that they could use the photos for promotional material in the future.

I've booked the hotel for this year's event and am looking forward to speaking again. This year I'll be talking about Selenium, which I've been presenting at various LUG groups on the Birmingham Perl Mongers World Tour. The benefit of doing it on the tour is that I've been able to see what works and what doesn't and improve the talk all the time. Plus as I've got more familiar with Selenium, I've been able to add more tests into my live demo. All being well it should be all shiny and slick by the time of LUGRadio Live 2007. Hope to see you there.