Back From CSUN 2007

Just like in 2003, I've arrived back in the Bay Area from CSUN with a bad cold. It seems to just hit me the moment I relax.

I travelled down to the Marriot at Los Angeles airport last Tuesday. Five 1/2 hours but fairly uneventful. One thing that was obvious was that there were a lot of new crops and fruit trees planted in the fields on either side of I5 in the Central Valley, to replace those destroyed by the frost in January.

Setup for the conference was trivial this year. All our booth boxes arrived early and we had the stands up by 1:04pm on Wednesday (we don't normally start until 1:00pm).

It was a good conference and exhibition. Several talks on Orca and Open Source in general. I've included two small photo sets. One hosted on flickr and taken with my new Finepix camera and the other taken with my cell phone camera.

Here are a few notes to go with them.

• Two shots of the main CSUN exhition halls. Seeing eye dogs everywhere. More on that later in the week.

• Half of the Sun booth (off in one of the separate conference rooms so that's it's a little more private). We got a lot of traffic over the four days of the exhibition, mainly showing off Orca.

• The Mozilla.org Firefox booth, just over the way from ours. They too had a lot of traffic.

• The view from my bedroom window. Lovely isn't it? Lot's of potential Project Blackbox containers here.

• A One Laptop Per Child that I got to play with a bit. I failed the "how does this open?" test. I'm obviously not as smart as the intended audience. Or that part needs to be redesigned. Or there will be a lot of recipients asking "how does this open?"

• Sometimes, special consideration for people with disabilities also help the general public. For example, those wheelchair ramps built into the pavements sidewalks that are so useful for people with pushchairs and skateboards. Here's another example. This digital cube timer. I'll probably be ordering one of those for our family.

• And finally the product that most impressed me at the show. It's an Interactive Learning Station from Infocor (though I couldn't find this model on their website). A standard overhead projector focuses the computer screen down onto a 48" interactive board for people with gross motor skills. Wheelchairs can just slot right in underneath. There is already an extensive interactive curriculum developed for this product that you can just download and use that.

I traveled back on Saturday in 5 1/4 hours. It helps if you leave at about 6:20am. There's not much traffic on the road at that time. My manager mentioned that earlier in the week, as he drove up one evening to see his son at one of the universities in L.A., he was at a virtual standstill in traffic behind this brand new Ferrari. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of exotic sports car, toodling along at about 5mph, with nowhere to go quickly. Well I can beat that. Just outside Gilroy on the way back, I past 28 Ferrari's of different vintage going the other way. It must have been a local meeting of the Ferrari car owners club. And virtually all of them were red.

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( Mar 26 2007, 11:35:39 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [3]