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Stereotypes

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: April 20, 2009 at 3:04 pm

I am sure many of you have heard the quote, “Gentoo is for Ricers.” For those of you who are unfamiliar with the word ricer, here is what Urban Dictionary says about it:

A person who makes unecessary modifications to their most often import car (hence the term “rice”) to make it (mostly make it look) faster.

There is also a list of these unecessary modifications and one such modification is:

Lots of after-market company stickers they don’t have parts from, but must be cool

Here in Chicago we see a lot of these, and they are typically slammed with stickers, more than the hideous Red Bull Cars we see driving around here quite a bit.

OK, so I am hitting on the stickers portion of this, because yes you can make all kinds of modifications to Gentoo, but they typically are not useless modifications, so lets just concentrate on the stickers. Well, I had noticed at a recent open source event here in Chicago, the people who were using Gentoo on their laptops didn’t have stickers plastered all over them, and those with Ubuntu did. Odd, you would almost think that Ubuntu was for Ricers.

Just to prove this, here is a query I did on Flickr:

And the results:

We found 2 results matching gentoo and laptop and stickers.
We found 112 results matching ubuntu and laptop and stickers

What a huge difference!

I meant to blog this back in December after UDS, because I had witnessed more stickers per square inch on many laptops, most notably Jono Bacon’s laptop. People always say I have a lot of stickers on my laptop too, which I do.

Anyways, this useless post was to let everyone know that I have just busted the Gentoo is for Ricers stereotype. Now that this post is finished, I want to see some groovy laptop stickers. Link me to them. I did find one on Flickr with a Notice to Law Enforcement that was totally great, but I can’t find it now.

Full of cuteness

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: April 5, 2009 at 6:09 pm

The new puppy, aka Sasha, is a Maltese. Here are some pics of her.

If you can see the attached video of Sasha playing with an air vent, click HERE

Posted in Personal | 4 Comments

Flourish Conference 2009 Wrap-up

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: April 5, 2009 at 2:24 pm

Yesterday the Floursh Conference wrapped up. What an exciting two days. I kicked off Friday’s events by giving a presentation on KDE and Kubuntu, and I was really impressed with the Friday morning turnout. With all of the people sitting in on the conference, I am sure there was a bit of revenue loss in a couple of Chicago companies

This years conference had some really awesome speakers, and I sat in on a couple of talks that really impressed me. I got to meet some really great people, and before the pictures start showing up, I got kissed by a Spanish guy. I love you Roberto!!! Last night they held a social mixer where everyone, 21 and over, hung out and enjoyed some pizza, beer, and good conversations.

I was able to meet and talk to:

Massimo Banzi who co-founded the Arduino Project
Christoph Lameter of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board
David Heinemeier Hansson who created Ruby on Rails
Steve Coast who created OpenStreetMap
and others…

Christoph has recently moved to Chicago, so that puts 2 Debian “old-timers” near by and Christoph came up with a good idea that we need to run past the other old-timer, Dirk Eddelbuettel. He brought up the idea of starting a Debian Users Group here in Chicago, and yesterday after speaking with a few of the other Linux hackers here in Chicago, they were interested as well.

Like I said, the talks were great. One of my favorites was the OpenStreetMap talk that Steve gave and it was absolutely brilliant. I would have to say his talk probably motivated more people into contributing. Chicago even has a Map Group who meets up. This Thursday they are having Mappy Hour at the Map Room. I think this summer you will see a bunch of us on our bikes with our GPS units touring the greater Chicagoland area.

Another talk that I really liked was the one by Daliah Saper, an attorney, of the Saper Law Offices. She broke down open source licensing and explained how to use it legally and broke it down to where morons like me could understand it.

In closing yesterday there was an Open Source Panel in which it was Christoph Lameter, Daliah Saper, David Heinemeier Hansson, Cedric Hurst, and myself. We took questions that were asked during registration and through Twitter as well as fielded questions from the audience. Great responses. I think my favorite exchange during the panel was when someone asked “What dynamic language do you think will be the big one moving forward?” Of course David responded “RUBY!” Christoph of course responded “C!” Cedric went wild with a few languages. I sided with Christoph and C, but had to poke some fun at David and said “NOT RUBY! The only thing I got from it was the fail whale. My honest answer was of course both Python and Ruby, as the buzz around them today are big, especially here in Chicago.

I want to say thank you to all of the Flourish organizers, sponsors, speakers, and attendees. It was a great conference this year and I am definitely looking forward to next years!