Re: KFest 2009 Report

[Kirk Mitchell <kirkmitchell@gmail.com>]

Whew!  Busy day today!  After breakfast (way too early after going to
bed way too late), Ken Gagne had a Focus group to get some ideas for
Juiced.GS.  Dunno if it was wise of him including a bunch of sleep
deprived geeks into the mix, but we did give him ideas.  I believe
he's going to incorporate a blog on the Juiced.GS website to start.

Martin Hayes very wittily supplied us with all the information we'd
need to hack the Apple II Monitor to include features that are so
useful on the IIGS's Monitor.  He certainly knows his stuff!

Sheppy had a Q & A session on Apple Programming, but I'd wandered off
in a daze and got back shortly before he'd finished, so I don't have
much to report here.

After lunch, Bruce Baker continued his long running series of sessions
highlighting various gems that can be found on the Softdisk series of
software disks.  There are treasures to be found on this collection as
well as the GS version of the same.  I think you can still find these
collections on the Syndicomm.com store.  With several hundred disks of
original programs, you'll have weeks and weeks of fun!

Geoff Weiss had a session on Sun's Virtual Box 3.0.  It allows Intel
and AMD boxes with the proper hardware virtualization features to run
different OS's on virtual machines.  Nice free program for home use
and education.  I've used it on the Mac's at school when I need to run
some Windows or Linux programs.

Stavros Koratsoridis (try saying THAT three times really quickly!)
demonstrated the obscure Apple II language SUPERPilot, designed for
teachers to write their own educational software.  Very powerful, but
being a teacher, I know that it wasn't all that successful because
we're already so busy that it's difficult to find the time to build a
project.

Vince Briel stunned us with his latest project.  Inside his Apple IIe
was a card with a USB stick installed, and stereo output connectors.
He then proceeded to play several MP3's using a simple BASIC program!
This wasn't a clever fraud like Ken Gagne's Maxter program from years
past, but actually used an MP3 decoder on the Apple II card!  Several
folks got excited about other possibilities besides playing tunes, but
I wasn't bright enough to follow their logic...

We wandered over to the Annual Banquet, which was nicely laid out, and
had some good grub.  We followed that with the Ugly Tie contest, Which
Vince soundly won.  Ken G. who is the MC for Life of the Banquet had
made a cute slideshow parodying the LOLCats craze, but using candid
pictures of KFesters both past and present.  They were hilarious!
Twist his arm and he may get it up on YouTube or something!

The rest of the evening was open, so many went to the nearby Apple
Store.  Not me.  Ryan, my soon to be deceased roommate needed a ride
to the nearest WalMart to get some stuff for his session tomorrow.  I
used Google Maps to find it, but unfortunately didn't pay sufficient
attention to the turns I needed to make.  My bad.  So instead of
WalMart, we took a tour of some very very interesting parts of KC.
When I finally relented to follow the instructions that Ryan's GPS
gave me to get to the nearest store...  It landed us in some warehouse
district in a train yard.  Duh!  2 hours later, we'd actually found a
store, got his stupid stuff, and got back in time to witness the
attempt to have a video conference with our Aussie buddies.  Bandwidth
was insufficient and it wasn't very successful.

Tomorrow is going to be especially busy, and KFest is abuzz with
rumors of new products and projects.  I'll try to get the last report
done a bit early, since we'll be going out to dinner and a movie.  I
usually get to bed at a decent hour then too, because I've found it's
not wise to drive long distances in a zombie state.

I tell ya, KFest is one doozie of a ride!

Take care!