As planned, I woke up around 4 am and Kyle (along with Steve and Peter) were at my house around 6 am to pick me up. Journey started on scheduled and it was after a long time that I was sitting in the backseat. This (I mean sitting in the backseat) has its own advantages - one, I don’t have to wear seat-belt; two, I don’t have to drive; third (very important), I can keep napping We stopped at several different places and somewhere on I-75/US-23 I learnt about booting a Mac in Target mode. What this does is to show one Mac’s hard drive as an external storage in another machine. This technique was used to transfer very important data from Kyle’s Mac to mine. We reached Livonia around 4 pm or so, and this is only the second conference/meeting where I my name-tag had just my name.

To start things off on a lighter note, I attended Got Filk? and then moved on to serious things, Writing Techniques and such. After the opening ceremony, I happened to talk to Chris DiBona (Google!’s Open Source Director) for quite a while and then attended How’s Linux Doing? - a panel discussion chaired by Chris DiBona and Kathy Raymond. Amongst things that surfaced during my discussion with Chris was Google! AdSense issue. Chris has asked me to write to him and he would look into it. Hopefully, I will get to hear something positive this time around…

So far, I have been having fun at this conference - I see geeky nerds (or nerdy geeks - whatever you want to call them) and people dressed up in scientifically fictitious costume in every direction. Organizers have put in enormous efforts in making elaborate arrangements and what has impressed me the most is the continuous supply of food (bread, cheese, fruits, coke, coffee, …). What more can any geek/nerd ask? Upon browsing through the schedule a bit more carefully, I realized that this is a 24/7 conference! Though Holiday Inn (or Wayport, to be precise. I overheard the news that Wayport demanded $30,000 - thirty thousand dollars - per day to make it free for all!) should have provided free WiFi access, it would be hard to manage 1000+ hackers over a three-day period!! On a sleepy note, please note that this is one conference/meeting where you never want to seen (by anybody) working on Windows. Three such people were hung (to death) in the Holiday Inn lobby earlier in the night and it wasn’t funny at all Just kidding - though the treatment one receives for working on Windows is nothing short of being hung to death. Guess I have written a bit too much for the day; need to get some sleep now - I have some very interesting talks to attend tomorrow (or later in the day).