Will's blog

I went to the convention center to check in today and run some errands. I have an Expo pass, so I'm not able to go to the tutorials, sessions, keynotes or some of the other things that were happening Monday and Tuesday. Even so, there seems to be plenty to do.

Amongst other things, I talked to someone about his Eee PC, I did some Miro hacking, I drew a Charlie Brown stripe on my laptop cover (it came out awesome!), I talked to iSneeze on IRC about plugins (I need to write up a post about plugins), and I discovered that there are 5 Starbucks locations on the 8-block walk from the convention center to one of the nearby Kinkos locations.

I was going to help Jay with the Mozilla booth setup, but they finished before I got in contact with them. Instead, I went to the FSF Portland Pizza Party which was really great. I talked with Mako and Asheesh both of whom I've known for many years from PyBlosxom. I also met Karen and Aaron from the SFLC and Deborah and Joshua from the FSF. I also met Gerv from Mozilla, too. And John Eckerman and a man named Charlie and a man whose name I think was Craig.

Everyone I talked to fell into one of two groups:

1. Either hadn't heard of Miro or had, but didn't use it
2. Avid user of Miro

I didn't meet anyone who had heard of Miro and didn't like it. It sounds like people are happy with Miro and look forward to the future of Internet video with open standards without gatekeepers that we envision. Also, several people mentioned that the content on the Channel Guide just keeps getting better.

While at the FSF pizza party, I became an associate member. The work that they're doing is really beneficial to us all. They're pushing for open media standards adoption, pushing for fixing the patent system in regards to software, fighting against DRM, and a variety of other causes. It's important work that needs to be done for video on the Internet to be open to everyone.

I'll be spending the next two days in the Mozilla booth. If you're at OSCON, drop by and say hi!