KFest 2009 Report

[Kirk Mitchell <kirkmitchell@gmail.com>]

I had an uneventful trip to KC, and arrived around 3 pm.  Many folks
were already here, which was sweet.  Nice to see old friends.  Lots of
new folks too!  The thing about KFest is that the new folks fit in
just as well as us old timers, but they tell tales that us old fossils
haven't heard before.  B-{)=

A few had car problems on the way here... Hang in there, Margaret...
and won't get here until later tomorrow.

It was nice to get here and have Ken draw a prize for each
participant.  I got a nice 4 port USB hub just for showing up!  Much
thanks to Howard Katz for getting the treasures!  The other side of
the prize ticket had the username and password to hook up to
Rockhursts wifi and ethernet, which was extremely pleasant since in
years past, we had to wait for some head honcho to arrive before we
could connect.  Ken gets kudos for this!

Activities of the day were going to Sweet Tomatoes to ingest "greens",
AKA "rabbit food".  It's actually quite tasty in moderation.  The soft
serve ice cream helped make the experience complete.  I didn't choose
the chocolate because the machine made it look rather unpalatable...

Afterwards, I took the suckers who'd accepted a ride with me in Moby
Van on a shopping trip.  I'm Head Kook for the Kookout tomorrow, so I
had to get the rather large quantity of potential food poisoning
agents ready.  Two vegetarians made it difficult, and I had to go to
another store to find supplies for them.  Next year, I may just grill
them a bag of carrots.

Now, folks are doing the traditional "room roaming", which includes
introducing oneself to the new guys  (no new gals this year... darn)
and distracting the others in the room who are glued to their
laptops.  I like tying their shoelaces together... although there seem
to be lots more sandals being worn lately.  I guess the word is out.

This years attendance appears to be well above the "Oh crap, can we
get enough people here to keep KFest going another year?" mark, which
is gratifying considering today's economy.  And it's the 20th too...
Explaining it to outsiders tends to be difficult though.  You either
get the dull look of stupidity when you mention we like Apple II
computers enough to gather in a small group in Kansas City once a
year, or the "Surprised Look! from those who love Oregon Trail in
their youth and are astonished that the Apple II still lives on.

I really want to get back to visiting with old friends and meeting the
new ones, but before I do, if you are on Twitter, Ken Gagne talked me
into taking control of the Kansasfest account to report whenever I
felt like it.  If I'm having too much fun, you won't hear about it
from me, though.  You may however want to go to http://www.kansasfest.org/twitter/
to hear firsthand from those tweets from here that are using the
#kfest hash tag.

I'm also exploring the possibility of setting up my iSight and
ustream.com to allow you to watch a streaming video of an empty
room...  I'm not likely to be there, because only HackFest
participants hang out in their rooms.

In any case, 4 hours of sleep the night before (sleep deprivation
training), 7 hour drive, massive shopping trip...  Yet I'm still
pumped...  Gotta go roam.

Take care!