On the second day of Penguicon, the furries came out. Luckily, they weren’t drawn to the technical track, so for the most part, we were safe.

Most of the morning, Rick and I hung out. There weren’t any sessions that we wanted to attend, so we headed out for a few hours and wandered the local mall, which was roughly the size of the UCLA campus. It was two massive structures connected by a skyway over West Big Beaver Road¹. Astonishingly, it was filled with…nothing. Well…nothing for two computer geeks on the prowl. To be fair, there was an Apple Store, but even that felt half-assed.

Heading back, we met back up with Cmdln for his afternoon sessions. The poor guy looked like something out of Infected, his head cold threatening burst out of his skull and wreak havoc over the con. He held the beast at bay with liberal application of Dayquil. He and I headed off to his three panels.

I have to say, his Third Wave Power² was sorely tested by the panels he had that day:

• Avoiding Obsolescence: How to insure technology does not leave you behind, both personally and professionally.
• Beyond Silicon: Exploring alternatives to using silicon-based computer systems. Examples: Quantum computing, data storage at the atomic level, etc.
• Secure Computing: This was originally supposed to be about trusted computing and hardware security, I believe, but Vernor Vinge took it in a whole new direction, pointing out the single point of failure that transistors will become within the next 20 years. The example was that, if something wiped out all the transistors³ today, it would be Very Bad. People would die, vehicles would cease to function, etc. Imagine how bad it would be in 20 years, when computers are small and even more integrated with our lives.

We headed back to the room, caught the Tesla Coil concert, played a little Arkham Horror, and called it a day.

Sunday morning was pretty laid back. Bagels and coffee, conversation, then Rick headed off to hit some sessions he was interested in. The best session of the whole con, The Future of Programming Languages, was at 11am, followed by the OLPC roundtable and Math and Elections.

Following that, time to head home.

On the whole, it was a decent con. I enjoyed myself, and learned some interesting things. My one disappointment was that, for an Open Source conference, there was no discussion the philosophy of Open Source, methods of working in teams on Open Source projects, no talks on specific pieces of software or code. Other than waving the Linux flag, there was no real discussion of the core of the movement: The Source.

Penguicon 7.0 is moving to a larger venue next year, and I’ll be watching their progress. There is tremendous potential for a truly interesting and engaging con there, for both the younger geek set and the older geeks, the professionals who want to help carry Open Source forward. The Guest of Honor is Wil Wheaton and that should prove to be quite a draw. There is discussion of an expanded podcasting track, as well. All in all, it sounds promising. If all goes well, I’ll be returning next year.

Recommend on Mahalo

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1. No joke. I’m not making that up.[back]
2. Cmdln’s Third Wave power is the ability to as intelligent on the last day of a con, after having little sleep, as he sounds on the first day. Personally, I think this definition needs to be refined thusly: he has the ability to sound intelligent no matter how tired he is.[back]
3. With an EMP, etc[back]

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