{"id":186,"date":"2005-06-26T20:49:38","date_gmt":"2005-06-26T20:49:38","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2005-06-26T20:49:38","modified_gmt":"2005-06-26T20:49:38","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=186","title":{"rendered":"The Day I Shook Hands With A Space-Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I went to LUG-Radio Live<\/a>, which was a most excellent day. Got the train up to Wolverhampton and found my way to Molineux Stadium and got to meet loads of people that I have only ever previously communicated electronically with (email, IRC etc.). And I got to shake hands with a real Space Man.<\/p>\n

On arrival, I was met fairly quickly by Omahn<\/a>, who runs the main server for our Enemy Territory<\/a> games. We had a brief discussion about whether to refer to him as “Omahn” or as “Paul”, but very quickly everyone in the group settled on using IRC\/online nicknames, rather than realnames. I guess these are the names people have grown into the community with and so are most comfortable for people to use.<\/p>\n

The LAN gaming area was being setup when I bumped into MrBen<\/a> and Neuro<\/a>, who’d come down from Glasgow with pickle and (someone else?). Some people are pretty much exactly like you expect them to be from email\/chatting and these two didn’t disappoint \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Other people to name check are: Port7<\/a>, Xalior<\/a> and the Pete Best of LUG Radio, the great man Sparkes<\/a> who I thought was short, but is actually really tall; also met the LUG Radio presenters. Yes, Matt<\/a> really is as short as he sounds … but he really is a terribly nice bloke. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n

I wandered around picking up a few bits of merchandise (a Debian T-shirt, a Tux-logo embroidered denim shirt and IRC Hacks<\/a> from the O’Reilly stand). Then the first big talk of the day was from Mark Shuttleworth<\/a>, the aforementioned Space Man. GingerDog<\/a> managed to grab me talking to him after his talk. I think I told him that I wanted to talk to him “so that I could tell my daughter that I’d shaken hands with a Space Man<\/i>“. This was incredibly naff but he didn’t seem to mind.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I’m gonna try to track down some more photos of the people I met – I didn’t have a camera there myself, but I do know that Neuro got a photo of a large group of us.<\/p>\n

There were loads of others I met that I will try to list here, but I might not remember them all (apologies if I leave you out, it’s nothing personal): Aquarion, Bryn, kNo etc.<\/p>\n

The live show recording at the end of the afternoon was good fun and I’m looking forward to listening to that in due course: my heckling call suggesting they “Bring back Sparkes!” was met with good-humoured profanity from Jono, which was quite funny … and during the competition and awards section, MrBen won the Best Contribution To The LUG Radio Community prize, which earned him loads of O’Reilly books and a rather strange-looking trophy that he’s gonna have to hide if he’s to have any chance of selling his flat. A well-deserved award, anyway.<\/p>\n

All in all, an excellent day; I’m sure enjoyed by everyone who went. I was particularly pleased to finally meet MrBen and Omahn, with whom I’ve probably previously chatted the most. We’re all doing this again next year, yeah??<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I went to LUG-Radio Live, which was a most excellent day. Got the train up to Wolverhampton and found my way to Molineux Stadium and got to meet loads of people that I have only ever previously communicated electronically with (email, IRC etc.). And I got to shake hands with a real Space Man…. (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}