Red Hat tour by a former journalism major who apologizes for the length

[Jared]

Red Hat Road Tour

Pretty exciting for a bunch of geeks. I arrived at about 3 thinking
I was late, and instead had an hour to spend in Lawrence before they
arrived. About 4 o'clock, a small crowd of about 30 people had gathered
in the front of Free State Brewery, most with a beer in hand.

Someone came out and said "everyone come on in!" So we amiably shuffled
through the brewery to the dining room toward the rear, set up with
a table full of food to snack from. Good stuff; no cheapo Hypermart
broccoli platter, but some pita with hummus, perfectly seasoned chicken
strips, thick bread, cheeses, and whatnot. I'm from Independence, so
therefore easily impressed with food.

The room filled... and kept filling... and finally there was at least
a person standing for everyone sitting, the room was packed, like a
KCLUG meeting with food, people talking about computer-related stuff.
I would guess about 100+ people.

Finally the four Red Hat folks strode in. They were gregarious, real
up-beat, and they started passing out keychains and CDs. They were
fielding questions personally, just being friendly grinning and
chatting about the roadtrip. After a bit, the lead guy (Jeremy
Hogan) stood up on a chair and said "We got some t-shirts and hats
we'll pass out to anyone who can stump the chumps with a question
we can't answer." The biker dude (James McDermott) didn't talk much,
and the writer guy (Jonathan Opp) I only saw a coupla times cuz
the room was so crowded. I later talked with the Bugzilla guy (Dave
Lawrence) for a while. The driver (Andy 'Cookie' Deacon) was
probably there, but I didn't see'm.

http://www.redhat.com/roadtour/meet/ <-- this really is an accurate
picture of what we saw, in tone and "flavor" for the whole event.

The first question was about IPTables and IPChains on Trustix and
they couldn't answer it, except to recommend IPTables, so they
threw a t-shirt across the room to the questioner. They soon ran
out of t-shirts and threw a few hats out to people who stumped
em. The silliest question was "what version of python shipped?"
and their answer 2.2.idunno wasn't specific enough so the questioner
got a hat. I asked "what is the best way to get samba working
with roaming profiles," and Steve from our KCLUG answered the
question with plenty of detail: locate the PROFILES directory within
Samba's tree, and remove the *.dat files, recreating them from
scratch if you've migrated from a Windows PDC.

The four guys did answer some questions, of course being geeks
they gave way more detailed information than probably necessary,
but everyone learned. They mentioned an upcoming security release
to look forward to in a few months; Red Hat is trying to make
sure they haven't just patched a kernel problem, but also patched
all related software as well. It's good to be cautious and
careful with security issues.

Then, they scattered again and started answering questions one-on-one
until the Free State Brewery manager dude came in and said he had
a line of people needing the room, could we re-convene to the
bar area? So we scatterd. Most people left at that point, but a few
of us stood around, getting to know the four more better. They
turned out to be genuine, friendly people who were not on the road
for slickety marketspeak reasons, but truly delighted to be
travelling across country meeting people. I was surprised to see
how Dave Lawrence did NOT just tersely end the conversation with
me and Hal and another geek named Hudson whenever there was a
lull; he seemed to be amiably enjoying the eccentricitys that come
with being a geek trying to talk to a Red Hat hero... He's a perl
hacker by preference.

Jeremy Hogan and Dave both like the FSB oatmeal stout alot.

They started out with 3,000 CDs for the whole trip, and they've
given away nearly that many already, asking for another shipment
to meet them halfway. They're better received everywhere than they
expected, 300 people showed up when 30 were expected in one city.
I found out that "Red Hat" got its name from one of the founders,
a campus computer whiz whom people referred to as "go ask the guy
in the red hat" when their computers broke; the name stuck.

They really like working for Red Hat; the atmosphere is casual.

They're looking for a set of curved bull horns to put on the
front of the bus.

I got to see some people I hadn't seen in a while, got to finally
meet Topeka-based Charles Steinkuhler and the rare Jonathan Hale,
as well as seeing Jim and Steve and Hal and others whose faces I
recognize but names I don't yet, and realized once again, same
as after every KCLUG meeting: geeks have no social skills. So
when you throw a whole bunch of them into a room, you get the
most interesting conversations, with people blurting, or rambling
on and on about their pre-1980 Unix experience, and ITS OKAY
THAT WAY. I really enjoyed the time there, and didn't even
have a beer!

I look forward to seeing the photos.

-Jared

Mark Hutchings wrote:

Either this is spam in some other language, or one of you had too much 
to drink yesterday @ the Red Hat Tour. How did it go anyways?

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