KFest 2005 report

["kirkmitchell@gmail.com" <kirkmitchell@gmail.com>]

I'm just going to give a brief overview of today's events...

Breakfast at the Rockhurst University was good.  Scrambled eggs done
just right, lots of crispy bacon, biscuits and gravy, pancakes, and
cold cereal were available.    Coffee was very welcome after we stayed
up fairly late.

I was in charge of the KFest Kookout, and screwed up by buying charcoal
that wasn't presoaked, so I had to run to the store quickly to get
lighter fluid.  It didn't even delay the meal though, as folks were
snarfing hamburgers and hotdogs (and unspeakable vegan stuff) in the
nice air conditioned lounge while I suffered outside cooking.  I have a
nice lobster coloring now from sun and heat.  B-{)

No cases of food poisoning reported.

Dave "The Man" Miller gave a great session on hacking the Linksys
router (wireless or regular).  Interesting that most such routers run
linux and how expandable they are.

Ryan Suenaga's session demonstrates the he and Syndicomm don't suck.
Ryan wrote CheckIP, a SideClick addition.  The first such third party
utility, I believe.

Syndicomm announced Volume 1 of the GS+ magazine, with searchable text,
disk images and more for the price of $25.  KFest participants get it
for $20.  Since I didn't subscribe to GS+ until much later, it'll be
nice to get this and see what I missed.

Dinner was chickenfried steak, or grilled chicken.  I wish I'd chosen
the grilled chicken, but the steak was OK for what it was.  One item
missing was the ice cream that was served so generously at Avila.

Our keynote speaker was Ray Merlin, who regailed us with his adventures
in the army during the pre-NSA era.  He continued through the early
computing era, until the Apple II caught his fancy.  Ray's quite the
story teller, and always worth hanging around.  He's Syndicomm's
Tuesday Night RTC host currently, but has been involved with Compuserv,
AOL, GEnie, and Delphi as host and moderator.

After Keynote, some of us scrambled to get things working for our
sessions for tomorrow.  I helped Greg Nelson get his gatorbox
configured for his session.  B-{)

Syndicomm sprung for pizza at 10:00 pm,, feeding our brain cells for
yet another long evening of wandering halls chatting with each other,
or inspiring our Hackfest programmers to higher heights.

The night is young, and the sight of geeks wandering the halls and
lounges with notebook computers in arm, is a common sight.  The
wireless connections are great throughout the campus!

More tomorrow!

Kirk