Matt Jones' Blog

When I got back from SCALE on Sunday, I decided to let it digest a little before posting anything about it. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I’m really excited to present my findings.

The Good:

1. I met some amazing people. My faith in humanity went up a little. After my daily-dose of people that just don’t care, it was very refreshing.
2. Untangle presented their all-in-one network. It has everything you need to run a small business or home network: Firewall, spam filter, virus scanner, phishing filter, email filter, web filter, et cetera. And the best thing is that it is trivial for non-network admins to configure. I’m very anxious to set this up at my home. I just need to assemble a low-power machine that has 2 NIC cards.
3. The “A Quick and Dirty Intro to User­Centered Design in Open Source Development” presentation by Celeste Lyn Paul was very interesting. I’ve always been interested in usability, but sadly it is like still a foreign language to me. You can see the presentation slides on her blog.
4. The “Linux Entertain Me!” presentation by Cecil Watson was a good showcase on how much more usable MythTV has gotten. I’ve been blowing it off for a few years and anxiously waiting for Elisa to get a little more polish. But I’m definitely going to give it another go on a media center box.
5. There were tons of OLPC XOs and Asus Eees floating around. I brought my Eee and had to give everyone my little review on the unit. I wish I had brought my XO too. I could have done some testing with the mesh network collaboration.
6. There was free WiFi! My Eee has about half the signal strength of a normal laptop, but it was still usable.
7. Again the people were bad ass. I met tons of new people (If only I could remember all their names), and had a good time just chatting-it-up in the sitting/dinning areas.

The Bad:

1. The name tags were crap. They were the kind that hangs around your neck on a lanyard. The problem is that the tag was connected to the lanyard by a swivel, so the tag would always flip around backwards. The text was also way too small. I can’t tell you how may times I had to scan someones torso from a few feet away (front and back) to find their name. As you could imagine, some women were like WTF after I did that a few times. Forever awkward Matt strikes again.
2. Parking was almost non-existent at the Westin Hotel. I first tried parking in their self-parking, but after driving up and down both sides of their bee-hive I had to use the valet parking. Even thought the structure was full, it still let me in, and charged me $5 on exit!
3. The expo floor was very crowded. I only walked though a few times to check out some booths that I had passed due to crowding. I really hope they find a venue that has more space (Part of the reason why I paid the full $70 was to help fund this thing as much as I can).

I hope that gives a good taste to the people that didn’t make it. I would definitely recommend SCALE again.