[plug] CommIT Day 2, summary

[Leon Brooks]

HANDOUTS
~~~~~~~~

By the end of Day 2, we had given out 500 free OpenOffice CDs (provided 
by http://www.digitaldistribution.com/) and over 200 of the 
Leon-designed LinuxIT-printed, SLPWA-sponsored brochures mentioned in 
my last message.

Scott did some manning and yakking in the morning. Senectus rolled up 
and I got to meet him. Trent helped is to close the day, and dragged 
proXy along with him. Ran into a few more old friends, probably none of 
whom you'd recognise.

In the early afternoon when the crowds peaked, Harry McNally gently 
pounced on stand visitors while I did street patrol. The blurb went 
like this:

    "Good {morning,afternoon}, would you like a free office suite?"
    [CD is already on its way to the recipient's hand]
    "This works like Microsoft office, reads and writes its files
    including broken ones, so keep it around. It writes PDF files
    if you want it to, but doesn't do macro viruses. It has a
    vector drawing program for doing floor plans, flowcharts and
    the like, as well as as the usual word-processor, spreadsheet
    and presentation programs, and it edits HTML files - web
    pages - instead of scrambling them. This CD has versions for
    Windows, Linux _and_ Mac OS X. Unlike most software, this is
    completely, utterly free, so if you want to make a thousand
    copies and give them to all of your friends and rellies, it's
    not only legal, but encouraged. Have a good day."

The last line got some laughs and comments about how unusual *that* was, 
and I hope the laughers really got the point.

Some people I varied this for, partly out of boredom, and partly because 
they looked grumpy. "Have I offered you a free office suite yet...?" 
Even if they're in a mood to say "No," they get a CD. (-:

A surprising number of people were interested in the PDF writing 
capability. A couple were pleased that you could cobble up a web site 
in it (and you can, home-grown HTML only fails the Validator on a 
couple of unimportant points).

About five percent recognised Open Office, and a handful said, "Oh, Star 
Office" or something like that, so I stopped and explained the 
relationship between them. About half of those who recognised OOo 
already had it but nobody seemed to have the latest version. A few 
people asked for an extra CD to pass on.

Three asked me how the people involved made money on the deal. It seemed 
to be important to them that it not be completely altruistic. The 
response I gave was along the lines of:

    As a member of the Linux club, I'm giving you something which
    works just as well on Linux, Macintosh or Windows, enabling a
    decision to switch based on preference rather than whether it
    can be done or not. The guy who had these CDs done gets to
    spread his name around. Sun, who sponsor OpenOffice, get other
    people working on their software for free, and get their foot
    in many doors. The people working on OpenOffice for free get
    to put in the stuff most important to them first. Everybody
    wins.

Nobody said "no" or gave that puzzled/being-polite look which means 
either I don't understand this or don't like it so I'm going to nod, 
smile, accept the CD and move on.

Harry, where you're connected to these lists, I'd also value some 
reports on the reactions you saw from the people you spoke with.

ORGANISATION
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Being the second expo ever held there, we saw considerable 
disorganisation. For example, Day 2 was supposed to end at 4:30PM, but 
when I pinged a guard about it at 4:45PM, he told me that they were 
tossing up between 17:30 and 18:00. All of the guards and expo staff 
got CDs.

COMMUNITY-BUILDING
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I loaned my laptop to a very bored lady on the AusTrade stand, who not 
only got relief from boredom, but was able to produce edits for a 
dictionary I'm refining, play a game *and* go out of her way to greet 
potential visitors.

I also managed to fetch a cold drink for Gavin Tweedie, the man 
literally at the core of WAIX, and sell a wad of brochures to the ACS 
bloke so he could hand them out at their AGM next month.

We probably gleaned 2 or 3 more SLPWA members and double that in new 
PLUG members on Day 2.

TRINKET COLLECTING
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On day 2 I augmented my junk collection with some little blue torch-mice 
from Telstra's stand. They have a cast metal casing and two batteries 
so they should last well, and even better, the logo rubbed off in the 
course of a few minutes' demo use. (-:

I also managed to snag Scribe a proper stress ball from Optus, who also 
had squishy penguins (one of which graced our stand for the whole show) 
and dolphins. Master 5 liked the penguin, and Miss 3 liked the dolphin, 
so for once there was no squabbling (maybe the massive overload of 
lollies from various stands helped that).

I was given little tin box with a four-head screwdriver keyring in it, 
and a 4-port USB hub, which I passed on to one of the Oracle dudes 
adjacent to us. TAFE had some little red plastic torch-mice, and 
everybody wanted to give me a pen (I think the total was around 14).

INTERESTING STANDS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Telstra ran Rally Australia footage. Tafe had a big-screen video DJ 
kaliedoscope thingy, a plotter-style PCB drilling rig and a camera 
system which (with software) recognised specific objects and added 
virtual object to the picture which were correctly oriented to them.

Our own stand had one of Andrew Warenczak's little Motium boxes on it. 
We also shared with Novell (big time), Oracle and a handful of others. 
And gave out penguin mints. (-:

Novell was running Linux across the board, and Oracle ran mostly-Linux.

I was pleased and impressed that I could drag files from a local 
Nautilus (or whatever GNOME's file manager is called these days) window 
and drop them onto a fish:// Konqueror window, and it all Just Worked 
(I did it without thinking since DnD is pretty endemic on KDE, my 
normal desktop).

One conference stream out of 3 was on Open Source, and Fearless (SLPWA) 
Leader Jeremy Malcolm was a featured speaker. Open Source was very much 
the buzzword of the day at many stands.

Motorola were showing a wireless LAN system named (unfortunately, if 
you're following the SCO Group circus) Canopy. The small-lunch-box 
sized clients nodes do a few km as-is, and 50km with a pair of 
Galaxy-sized (but thicker) reflectors. $1k for a client and $1.7k for a 
concentrator (which can also relay). You can plug Ethernet/IP cameras 
straight into a client node and it All Just Works (centralised DHCP, 
methinks).

3 had a stand there and seem to be able to send SMSes at 200kb/s for 
less than the cost of constantly holding a GSM account open and using a 
GSM modem. Their PCMCIA widget cost $140 vs $225 for a serial GSM 
modem, the SMSes are 15c apiece and there's no monthly charge (so I was 
told).

One of the other stands was offering an hour's hire of the complete 
indoor go-kart track in Belmont as a "door prize". Another stand was 
offering free charicatures.

One stand was throwing images onto frosted glass from projectors. It 
seemed to need a fairly hunky projector to do a 1x0.6m piece of glass. 
They also had little wireless push-on-the-glass real-estate displays, 
where you could touch any of the property cards all over the window and 
be shown a video clip of the place.

FIN
~~~

I didn't stay for the grand finale, as I had other things to be doing 
and hadn't planned on being there anyway, perhaps Trent or someone else 
who was there at the time can fill you in?

Cheers; Leon