So, Astricon 2014 is over and behind us, so now I’m now sitting at the Holiday Inn in Chicago. I have to admit that moving from the RedRock resort and Casino to the Holiday Inn in Chicago – talk about a mind blowing change. Just to give a general idea, the bath room in Vegas was roughly the size of the entire room here (mental note to self – next time order something better via BA miles).
So, this years’ Astricon was, at least for me personally, one of the best I’ve been to. Various topics that I’ve started talking about years ago, had finally made their way to the public’s ear, and the community and adopters are finally picking up on these. Security, privacy, cloud computing, proper usage of Linux and virtualization – these are now become the predominant subject people are confronted with.
Unlike previous years, I decided to talk about Cloud computing and some tips from the Cloud front line. Cloud computing, specifically cloud based servers are and infrastructure that many want to use – but very few truly understand what it means. What kind of impact does SWAP have over your instances, what is the swapiness value? and why the hell would I choose one cloud over another – aren’t they all the same at the end?
This year, we had the first ever Astrion Hackathon. I’ve participated in several Hackathons in the past, but this was very special to me. While in most Hackathons I’ve participated the participants never knew each other (well, at least 95% of them), here, most participants knew each other – some on a very personal basis. As you know, my latest Open Source passion is my own pet project – phpari. My hack for the contest was a phpari sandbox, imagine it to be a cross between jsfiddle, Asterisk and PHP. A simple use playground, where you can try various parts of ARI in general and the toolkit in particular. Much to my surprise (as there were other strong candidates), the phpari sandbox won the “Asterisk Developer’s Team” Award, for best use of Asterisk during the Hackathon. To me personally, it means a whole lot. I’ve been dealing and working with Asterisk for over 12 years now, in fact, I was joking around with Corey Mc’fadden that we are currently, probably the oldest Asterisk community members around – well, probably oej, joshc and a few others are as old as us. We never had a chance to actually see how we work together, how we think about various problems and challenges. This was the first ever time we’ve got to see each other work, how we work, how we look at things – it was exciting. Looking at Tim Panton as he battles the various concepts of Respoke and he’s application – trying to figure out exactly why “Respoke” didn’t work as he expected (amusing to say the least).
So, after Astricon, we spent the last evening going out to the Vegas Strip. I have one thing to say right now: “I don’t think I like Vegas all that much”. It’s just too much of everything. Too much “Putti’n on the Ritz” facade, too much commercialism of everything and anything, just too much for me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an interesting place to visit, but I don’t believe that being there more than 2-3 days is required in order to appreciate the place. Be it the lights that are always bright, making you believe it is day light, the hotel that literally had no windows to the outside – so you won’t know if it’s day or night, the entire system gets screwed up totally.
So, during the night of the “geeks take over Vegas”, the following group of people decided to head to the strip:
- Allison Smith
- Peter – Aka: Mr Allison (hey, what do you want, you’re married to the voice of Asterisk)
- Ben Klang (Adhearsion/Mojo-Lingo)
- Evan (sorry, can’t recall the rest)
- Steve (Mojo-Lingo)
- Dan Jenkins (Respoke)
- Eric Klein (My partner in crime)
- Correy McFadden (Venoto)
- Beth – Correy’s Wife
- Steve (From South Africa)
So, here we are sitting at the cosmopolitan waiting for our table to the STK. Once we got it (at 10:45PM), we sat down at the stools waiting for our table. At the table next to us, a man and two young ladies were definitely getting it on. To be more descriptive, apart from actually going at it in front of us all, they were all over the place. As they say, what happens in Vegas – stays in Vegas. But what happens at a public restaurant, don’t be surprised to find it on Twitter. Coming to think about, we should have videoed the entire thing. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m as much a man as the other guy, and I admit that the display was interesting (so say the least) – but comm’on, we’re a public place – get a bloody room. The funny bit was that Peter came back from the rest rooms, saying that he was delayed due it being occupied. When the door opened, two girls walked out of the same compartment – and I’ll let your imagination continue from here. So, as Eric commented on Trip Avisor – the music was loud, the service was slow – but the Steak WAS PERFECT. In deed, one of the finest steaks I’ve had in a long time.
One more thing I need to mention in our dinner (Eric and Myself) with John Draper – aka: Capation Crunch, but that’s a whole different story all together.