I have long wanted to fly Aeroflot. I figured that, since I was flying to Moscow Air France, I would be giving up my one chance to fly Aeroflot. Well, I just picked up my tickets, and the Paris – Moscow – Paris portion of my flight is handled by Aeroflot. I’m so stoked.

I realize that to a lot of people this is kinda meaningless, but growing up on James Bond and related books, flying Aeroflot was perhaps the most exotic thing I could aspire to. And now, not only will I be flying Aeroflot, I’ll be flying Aeroflot into Moscow.

I only hope that my presentation at the conference will be worth the trouble and expense they are going to to get me there.

In case you wonder, the address of the Russian Consulate in NY is 9 East 91 Street, NY NY 10128. If you find somewhere that lists 9 E 9 St as the address, it is wrong, and your visa application will come back undeliverable.

Bah, bah, bah.

We’re on the way home from Ohio LinuxFest, and I wanted to add a few things to what I wrote earlier.

I had more fun at this conference than I’ve had at a conference in a long time. I may have somewhat covered up that fact in my earlier notes about the conference. I met cool people that were a lot of fun. I had a nice chat with Maddog, which would be pretty hard to orchestrate at a larger conference.

And then there was Dave & Busters. Wow that was fun. We played video games until about 1am. There was this 18-wheeler game that was just *insanely* fun. I think Skippy got some pictures of me playing. That should be fun. 🙂

I should have my pictures up pretty soon, but I didn’t end up taking very many.

I just gave my Apache 2.0 talk, and it’s a darned good thing I cut a bunch of the material last night, because I would have run way over. Now maddog is doing a raffle for a bunch of stuff, then (I think) he’s going to do his closing keynote.

This has, on the whole, been a really good conference. I really like grass roots, regional conferences. They have much more of the feel that I used to get at tech conferences, like the first Perl Conference I went to, in (I think) 1999 or 1998.

Some of the talks were somewhat unpolished, and some of them were a little light on content. But the backchannel was good, and the hallway track was good. And, of course, most of the talks were pretty good.

I was planning to talk with the conference planners about conference planning issues, but I’m pretty tired, and might just leave that to email. We’ll see how the evening goes.

I’ve had several confirmations in the last 24 hours of my belief that conferences – or lots of things, I guess – tend to deliver, to some extent, what you expect them to. I go to OSCon expecting to meet a bunch of people excited about Open Source code and community, and I almost always find them. The few people that I meet who are obviously there to see how they can exploit the community for their own ends, I tend to disregard. Likewise, while many people seem to view the Foo Camp phenomenon as a largely self-congratulatory event, it seems that the people who go there expecting to find community cooperation and real progress, find it.

I’m not talking about deceiving oneself, or the power of positive thinking – at least, I don’t think I am – but it certainly is the case that your attitude has a lot of effect on whether you’re able to make the best of a situation, or whether you sit smugly back and nitpick the folks that don’t quite Get It. If those folks are the ones that you expect to see there, you’ll tend to focus on them, rather than simply ignoring them, as they deserve.