Un Posto al Sole: Finding My Place in the Sun

^ attendees filling in surveys

As sponsors of the SC09 Broader Engagement initiative, and because we gave such a great party last year,  we were asked to sponsor a party again this year for students attending SC09. For a number of reasons we weren't able to commit to this until the last minute, so thanks to Tiki Suarez-Brown and Tony Baylis of the Broader Engagement program for their patience and considerable effort in making sure this took place.

Because it was so last-minute, this year's party was much more low-key than last year's, but seems to have been appreciated by the ~250 students and educators who attended. They arrived around 7 pm after a full day of other activities, and were mostly glad to relax, eat a good dinner, and chat.

Everyone who attended had the option to fill in a brief survey in return for an OpenSolaris t-shirt and the chance to win an iPod in a drawing later in the evening. No one minded doing the "work" - we used up almost all of the 250 surveys we had printed.

For entertainment, we had two rented Nintendo Wii systems, which many enjoyed.

The event was also an opportunity for Sun folks to meet and talk with students and educators (potential future collaborators and colleagues!). The Sun folks introduced themselves from a small stage at the end of the room, and, as last year, stayed busy all evening conversing with our guests.

Above, Sun's Josh Simon's plays Wii archery with students. As you can see, some people put on their OpenSolaris t-shirts immediately.

Recently realized that a dumb spreadsheet error (mine) was causing a serious undercount in the total views of my videos. My video stats for 2009 now read:

• 100 hours of video shot to date (and more to come before the year ends)
  
• 35 hours of video edited (mostly by me) and available (some of it only internally)
• ~16 events/locations shot

Total cumulative views on all "my" videos through the end of October is 88,672.

Technologies & topics covered have included ZFS, open storage, community, Java, open source & the law, e-discovery, HPC, Solaris cluster, high availability, virtualization, performance...

I'm sitting in a hotel room in Baltimore, listening to a meeting while monitoring the live stream of Bryan Cantrill's presentation at LISA '09. As you can (partly) see on my screen, I've been using the video blog, Twitter and irc (#opensolaris) to let people know this is available. Which has resulted in 26 people on the live stream, at the moment.

The technicalities and camera work of the stream are being done by the merry (and very competent) crew at USENIX - Sun sponsored the live video stream and recording, so I'll be able to use their files afterwards to produce final, edited videos.

^ social media in action: you can see the video stream going out on the right

On October 29th, Brendan Gregg spoke at the Front Range OpenSolaris User Group meeting on "Little Shop of Performance Horrors" (a Halloween theme). Yes, we taped it.

George Wilson and Jeff Bonwick Of the comestible items which fuel engineers, the only thing missing in this picture is caffeine.