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Most of the technical talks were good.
One of the business talks was an
unabashed sales talk by a person with
a salesman personality and I left quickly.
The LinuxExpo shouldn't be pushing stuff like
this on us.
The main impression was that it's a conference
that has got bigger every year but the organisation
has not scaled from the first conference.
Some things worked well -
Stacy Doster, the main organising person
was available by e-mail and phone for setting up
the talk and demo and people were there to let
me in before opening at 7:30. The person setting
up the audion visual equipement was good and
brought out a second screen for view graphs
instantly. Also by some
miracle a large mobile loading cart just happened
to be available when I needed to move the portable
LVS for the talk (I was just lucky).
The rest of it was not well done. This was not
a large convention by most standards, however
it was the largest that had been put on here.
The exhibitions were on a different floor to the
talks (OK) but to get from the talks to the exhibition
and back you had to choose to go left or right
with no maps to direct you, and then going around the
corner you had to make another left/right decision
(again no maps) to go to one of the 4 sets of stairs
in the corners of the football sized convention center
(not OK). All of these stairs looked identical to me, but
they weren't labelled and at least one of them
lead to the administration, rather than the talks
and you had to go back up again and try another
set of stairs. This was bad enough for me -
a physically disabled person would have had a real
hard time.
The schedule was hard to find. The pre-release
schedule was on the webpage, which was not updated
for the conference. People were wandering around with
it not realising that is was incorrect
(it did have some talks which weren't in the
printed schedule). The printed schedule from
the conference had each track on a separate page,
the BOFs were on a sheet of paper, the exhibitors
locations listed alphabetically were on a separate
sheet of paper. The ExtremeLinux group had their
own stapled shedules. To find out what was on at
a particular time required keeping 4 or 5 pieces
of paper in register. This was just appaling
and I missed several talks because of it.
There was no schedule posted on the doors of
each room (just a sign saying "talk in progress
please enter quietly"). It was difficult to find
the men's room. To handle this, conference people
were standing at corners holding up signs
"ask any questions". They were answering questions
that were unneccessary since everyone there
could read.
There were large holes in the technical track. Only
1 session was scheduled for one of the mornings,
the other 2 hours were empty. There must have
been something they could have put in there.
The conference center is away from the main downtown
and there were no restaurants within walking
distance and so you had to sit through the
evening talks without having had dinner.
Coffee/tea/soda was provided at about 10:30
in the morning, but the munchies were only
heavily sugared donuts or candy bars (no
bagels).
The temperature in the talks was about 18C
(a temperature that no-one would accept in
winter) while it was in the high 20'sC outside.
I was freezing and had to go outside to warm
my numb hands.
Joe
--
Joseph Mack, NA3T, FM05lw EME(B,D)
mailto:mack@xxxxxxxxxxx
AZ_PROJ map server at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
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