SCaLE 4x Impressions

[Dennis Kibbe]

This past weekend was the fourth annual Southern California Linux Expo held at 
the LAX Radisson Hotel in Los Angeles.  This is an easy Convention for 
Phoenix area PLUGers to attend.  America West has direct flights to LAX for 
about $100 round trip if you book in advance and the Raddison is the closest 
hotel to the airport with airport shuttles every 15 minutes.

The Expo was very well organized and ran very smoothly.  Each day started with 
a keynote speaker and then broken up into four one hour speaker sessions.  
There were plenty of breaks so you had the opportunity to roam the Expo floor 
and spent time talking with a speaker or another attendee.  You can view the 
complete schedule at the SCaLE website at www. socallinuxexpo.org.

A nice thing about SCaLE is that it has become big enough to attract some well 
known Linux personalities, such as Hans Reiser (ReiserFS), Chris DiBona 
(Google), Jeremy Garcia (LinuxQuestions), Jono Bacon (LUG Radio), but is 
small enough that you can actually get to talk with them.  Also all the 
meeting rooms and the Expo hall are physically close so you're not spending a 
lot of time walking from one to the other.

Saturday night there was a Linux trivia game that included our own David 
Uhlman and two other PLUGers, Michael Crusoe (LOPSA) and Ted Gould (Inkscape) 
could be found on the Expo floor.  Michael being a hit in his utility 
kilt. :-)

The Expo was a good opportunity to talk with people from the LA area LUGs and 
to see what is happening commercially with Linux.  The organizers did a good 
job of impressing the marketing types that this was more a technical expo 
that a commercial/sales expo.

I can recommend SCaLE as a great place to rub shoulders with other LUG members 
and commercial users of Linux.

Put SCaLE on your calendar for next year!

Dennisk