As I am fond of mentioning, I really like regional Linux conferences. This weekend we are proud to be a Platinum sponsor of the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) which is being held at the airport Sheraton in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Usually the first day consists of classes with the weekend reserved for presentations, but this year my talk was on Friday afternoon. As I’ve been suffering from a sore throat for about a week, this worked out well, since I doubt my voice will make it through Sunday (hard to believe, I know).

I did my “Open Source is Dead” talk from SCaLE with a few revisions, and I was happy that only one person had seen it before. I made a few changes to the slides (Red Hat’s market cap is up a few hundred million from February and I removed my slide promoting the OnePlus One handset since I can no longer recommend them due to horrendous product support). I think the talk was well received. Christine Hall from FOSS Force wrote about it and even included my “Ché Stallman” graphic in her post.

We have a booth staffed by Jesse and Jessi (and me), and it’s right next to the GlobalVision table. GlobalVision is providing the network for the show and they are also a VoIP service provider. They had a cool phone from Ubiquiti. It looks like a sleek executive phone:

but what’s cool is that it is based on Android. They’ve replaced the default phone app with a SIP client, but otherwise it is similar to any other Android device, and so it can do things like play YouTube videos:

Day One was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the rest of the weekend. Hats of to the organizers, including Jeremy Sands, who needed a little break come Friday afternoon.