Notes from Open Source Mecca at LinuxWorld
Ah, the throngs of geeks, the stylish old T's, the ungroomed beards, the booth babes, the joy that is a tech expo.

Yesterday was spent at LinuxWorld in San Francisco with most of my company there pursuing interests at the show. The sales folks were continuing the take over of the now ex-vp of sales who left a wide but mostly unfocused trail of contacts in all the companies. Our research director had finally gotten up to a show, any show as he'd always been recalled at the last minute for crunch time in the office before. Our new marketing manager and P played hawker outside the Moscone Center wearing shirts that said "Want $100? Talk to Me" in order to collect names, email addresses and companies for our panel. And I delivered a package of press kits detailing our latest news about the Linux universe.

The best part about shows to me, other than spending the day up in the city and getting some networking going on with a few press pals is observing how people interact. Watching the show within the show, as it were.

Like the silent battles for position and computing time at the Email Garden where waiting people circle the two islands like a freakish bastardization of musical chairs. When one computer becomes available as the user wanders back into the pack of the show, at least two of the circlers will begin to charge over, accelerating their movement until one or the other has displayed enough of a lead to the open machine to convince the other to peel off. I saw two geeks have a short face off as they arrived at the machine at the same moment and things became tense as one shouldered past the other and took possession of the prize.

When I was checking my email and coverage (15 more hits for the company yesterday! yeeha!) there was a guy standing next to me lamenting the abuse that CostCo was being served in the market for coming in under estimates and the stock was down over $6 a share. A minute or so later another geek stepped up to him and asked if he could check his email even though this guy was obviously not done yet. The guy was puzzled and confused and that confusion led him away, who could say no to such a brazen frontal assault? Of course, the intruder guy had a point, the Email Garden was for checking email, not for surfing the web and reading news and the like.

The other thing that was actually a drag (pun grenade launched) after the second time. Like many places, there's no smoking inside the building so all the smokers have to go out front. And everytime I had to go in or out to check on the signups, I had to run the smoke gauntlet (pun grenade impact and explosion). It was kind of nasty to have to walk through a cloud of stink each time I entered or left. I don't see why the Moscone Center doesn't do something about smokers, maybe giving them another space to puff away in and kill themselves without soaking everyone else in their fumes. By the end of the day I'd probably smoked two cigarettes or so just passing through the crowd. And it was funny that I began to recognize the same people out there, each and every time.

It was a good trip for us as we signed up a good number of people to invite for our surveys and it was a good day for the PR side as the coverage continued to hit even without me pushing the news at all. The world's hot for Linux news, it wants some controversy and we gave it to them, backed up by a strong methodology and set of data. Today will see follow ups and lots of data entry from all the forms we got filled out.