From a hotel in Ottawa

Each conference I've attended this year has its own unique flavour. So far BSDCan has been the polite and intelligent hackercon. Shouts out to Dan for organzing this wonderful conference and including apples, not chips, as part of the boxed lunches. (Yes, even though I can't eat apples I'm still impressed that there's fruit being forced into the mouths of geeks at a hackercon.) There are literally fewer than 5% women at the conference (including girlfriends) but because of the women-tend-to-cluster phenomenon (see also the RHCF) it feels like there are lots of interesting and dynamic women present.

Leslie's presentation went really well and a whole new crew of people (including myself) have been edumacated on Google's Summer of Code. Did you know there are fewer than a handful of people that make that entire program run? Sometimes we forget that corporations are divided into little tiny parts. The Big G isn't one huge and massive blob capable of taking over the world, it's a search engine company (that uses ad words for its revenue) with an impressive suite of Side Show Bob projects. Of course the funding for SoC comes from a hugebig company, but the ethics of the program are fiercely protected by Leslie. I'm grateful there are good people making sure that good projects happen.