On Tuesday night Ken and I drove down to Pikeville, KY, for the conference put on by the Pikeville Kentucky Professional Linux Users Group.

I’ve got to admit that my expectations were not very high. After all, Pikeville isn’t exactly the center of the universe, taking a significant amount of time to get to from anywhere of consequence. But there were 63 people in attendance, and some pretty impressive speakers.

Kym Buchanan, of the Open Options Project spoke about getting free software into schools, and about school IT folks generally making wiser decisions about spending their limited budgets.

Ian Lynch of the OO.o project was there, speaking about using Open Office in the schools of England, rather than Microsoft Office, and thus including those students who can’t afford to buy the Microsoft products for home use.

There were speakers from N+1, Asbury College, Sun, and a variety of local businesses.

Despite a few scheduling problems (our table for 20 didn’t get held for us at lunch, causing a 30-minute delay on lunch, and one of our reserved rooms was given to another organization at the last minute), the day was, I think, a *HUGE* success. Major kudos to David Bumgardner for all the hard work he put into this, despite his vice president bailing out at the last minute, and having to pretty much pull this all together by himself.