Report on the September TechTV Meetup in Toronto

Last night I rode the bus up to Toronto for the September Tech TV meetup. It was nothing like I expected. A friend who had been at the last meeting told me that there was hundreds of people, cameras and podcasts everywhere, and lots of celebs.

The bus down ran 45 minutes late. As soon as the bus hit Mississauga, traffic slowed to an ant crawl. The driver didn't seem much in a hurry either, there were lots of opportunities for him to make a break for a large opening.

When I arrived at Union station it was a short walk to the subway and in a matter of minutes I was at Fiddler's Green. One problem, I must have got the 'new girl at the bar,' because she didn't have a clue about the meetup.

I dialed up Kevin Norwood, but the only information he could find was something about a September 11th meeting. At this point I was stressed, I'd made it all the way from Kitchener, and no meeting? I was sure there was a meetup on the 14th, so I pulled out my notebook, right there on Wellesley street.

I thought things were pretty bad, until my notebook started doing a file systems check and then produced a prompt telling me to do a manual fsck...argh, 20 minutes later and I was still waiting for the check to finish.

Finally, good old pen and paper saved my fanny. I'd written down the telephone number for Fiddler's Green. Whomever I talked to knew there was a meeting on the third floor - at last, things were looking up.

As soon as I stepped into the room I regretted being late, Howard Carson of Kickstartnews.com was giving a presentation on podcasting. I really regret missing the beginning!

I had a good discussion with Paul Rochford and met quite a few other truly cool geeks.

What made the night for me was the HP-UX book I snapped up for a very cheap donation to the club. Most of the auctioned books went for next to nothing, brand new books that should have fetched at least a $20 bid. Anyway, a big thank you to Howard Carson for bringing the books.

I appologize to readers for lack of Linux-related content, but there is a point to all of this. My notebook sprang back to life after the file systems check I did inside, and I managed to hook into Fiddler's wireless (thank you Paul for wiring the place) and check out the kickstart podcasts.

The HP-UX book comes at an interresting point in my life, a point of incredible learning. In the past few weeks I've been tackling a lot of both hands on and book learning. On the bus ride down I was reading the Idiots Guide to Solaris 9. The HP-UX book will come in really handy because I'm starting to compare all the UNIX-like OS's.

I'm also starting to pick up some pretty unusual hardware. I bid on and won 3 SCSI hot swappable drives for a Compaq Proliant 1600 server which will eventually either become the backup samba server for Computer Recycling, or the new database server.

It will be another week before the drives arrive, but when they do I might consider one of the DEC Alphas the same auctioneer was offering... mmmn...64 bit Linux!