[penguicon-general] A couple of thoughts about programming

[W Craig Trader]

For what it's worth ...

My wife is definitely a SF fan, but not overly enamored with most SF 
conventions (she finds debates about the technical inaccuracies of Earth 
2 to be a bit boring), and she gets more than her share of Open Source 
geekery just living with me.  She wasn't really thrilled about the idea 
of going to Penguicon (too much flying and we only knew 2 people at the 
con before we went), but she humored me and came anyways.  She really 
enjoyed all of those marginally related things -- the food, the sword 
demonstrations, the self-defense demo, 'how to get organized to do X'.  
She even enjoyed listening to Bruce Schneier talk about the future of 
spyware. 

These sorts of activities are features, not bugs!

She had a really good time, and wants to come back next year.  She 
probably had a better time than I did, but that's not Penguicon's fault...

- Craig -

Rob Landley wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 April 2007 11:57 pm, Matt Arnold wrote:
>   
>> Since the two main tracks of Penguicon are computers and science
>> fiction, a more restrictive definition involves events at the
>> intersection of real-world technology with inspiration from futuristic
>> imagination and vision.
>>     
>
> Just to comment on this: the "open source community meets traditional fandom" 
> provides an excellent structure to hang other stuff on.  Open source is good 
> at gathering and energizing volunteers, pitching in, tracking and mobilizing 
> necessary resources, etc.  The science fiction convention model gives us a 
> model to work with, structure, and permission to do things purely for the fun 
> of it.
>
> But at this point, we've hung so much marginally related stuff on it (food, 
> gaming, filk, anime, biotech/nanotech, chaos machine, ln2 in the pool) I'm 
> not sure "main" is quite the right word.  The balance between SF and open 
> source provides us our identity and our core structure, but at this point 
> launching our own space probe wouldn't really be outside our mandate.  (In 
> fact putting a hot fudge sundae into orbit would be pretty darn in character 
> for us.)
>
>   
>> Others definitions are more restrictive, but no evaluation of the
>> state of crossover programming can be effective without an
>> understanding of what one means by the term.
>>     
>
> How about "stuff that's in more than one track at the same time"?
>
>   
>> -Matt
>>     
>
> Rob
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