SELF - satisfied.

Oh, get your minds out of the gutter. I'll get to that later, I'm sure. I'm considering turning this whole thing into a tech blog -- and coming out of the closet. Yeah, there'd still be recipes and the occasional book quote, but I'm considering getting even more serious about my relationship with the open source community.

C and I just attended the Southeast Linux Festival (SELF), and it was amazing. We're very likely going to volunteer our time next year. I'm getting all fired-up about re-purposing one of my old (like, dirt old) laptops to run SUSE or Ubuntu or Fedora. Or maybe it will dual boot. This was such an awesome group of people. And it's a community that's open to whatever you can do -- you don't have to be a coder. I didn't expect that.

I got to talk to a whole bunch of folks about this. Most of the interactions were awesome. Some of the interactions were sad (a young lady wearing a "She Blinded Me with Library Science" t-shirt -- yes, I have one -- was just there because her boyfriend was there -- and she certainly wasn't a librarian). Some interactions were hilarious (another woman told me, "Look at all these men! It's cheaper than speed dating -- and it's not like I have anything else to do. I'm single.").

I got to hear Wendy Seltzer speak about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier talk about OpenSUSE. And Chris DiBona discuss the future of open source and Google. And Chad Wollenberg gave an excellent presentation on why schools should embrace open source software. And Paul Frields told everyone about the Fedora project.

So, yeah. At the after party, when I got to talk to Paul Frields about librarians and open source -- and he was interested in what I had to say -- I felt a lot like the people in this video:



So, I'd like to see this stick. I'm interested in becoming strongly involved in this community -- any one out there want to join me on a big free software adventure?