I’d better write this up now or I’ll never do it at all. LRL2007 took place in Wolverhampton at the weekend and was, as expected, Most Excellent. There were some good talks, some excellent freebies and plenty of people to chat to and geek-out with.
After a rather frustrating drive up (during which we had The M40 Experience), the goodie bag we received upon arrival more than made up for it: a Red Hat hoodie-without-a-hood, OpenSolaris DVD, Google notepad and a whole lot of other stuff which I’ve forgotten. And as a result of a couple of purchases I made later at the O’Reilly bookstall, I picked up another T-shirt too. Just as well we were travelling by car, or I’d never have been able to carry all the goodies home.
Friend Matt drove us up (thanks Matt!): it was the first time he’d been to Lugradio Live. I think he enjoyed it.
There were some interesting talks: Alan Cox did a good one about different ways of contributing to the open source community. I think he’s been reading my article; Kat Goodwin gave an interesting account of a (mostly) successful attempt to teach teenagers HTML, CSS and PHP; Nat Friedman from Novell gave a pleasantly amusing talk about, bizarrely, the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, pointing out that it was the first massively-collaborative project (people were asked to send in words, together with their definitions); many more too.
(View of audience during the recording of Lugradio Live And Unleashed, courtesy of Loudmouthman; Xalior in the red T-shirt front left, me just behind him, Kat behind me, David Goodwin and MrBen both in yellow, Bruno Bord to Xalior’s right)
It was of course great to meet up with a number of people again and to make one or two new acquaintances: MrBen, Xalior, Schwuk (very tall), Neuro (very Scottish), Nik ‘Loudmouthman’ Butler (very loud, obviously), Jono (very beardy), Bruno (very French), Pinkoi (very pink), David and Kat (very pregnant – Kat that is, not David, although I believe it’s his fault), Russ and Jen (ditto)…
Oh, and there was Curry too.
(Shot taken during The Curry, courtesy of Loudmouthman)
The Saturday evening party was good fun; Matt was suitably amused to be worshipped by someone upon discovering that Matt works for We Make Flash Audio Kit For Studios.
I even managed to find Subway for a sandwich in the middle of Wolverhampton this year, too – bonus!