FOSS.IN - Day 1

Tuesday, December 1st 2009,
NIMHANS Convention Centre,
Bangalore, India

As usual I woke up late, not very late, but late enough to miss the cab that took FOSS.IN speakers from Pai Viceroy Hotel to the FOSS.IN venue. I had to take an auto rickshaw to the venue. Not surprisingly the rickshaw dropped me at NIMHANS Hospital and said that "there are wards inside". I paid him 20 bucks and asked/walked my way to the Convention Centre.

There was a line for delegate registration starting to form outside one of the gates. I went straight in. Kishore Bhargava was waiting at the door. I went in. There was a group of early arrivers that formed a huddle just inside the gate. I recognised Ramkumar Ramchandra a.k.a artagnon whom I had met once before in Barcamp Kolkata and had been following on Twitter. It was cool that I knew a lot of folks almost personally, although had never met them before just through Twitter.

I caught up with Kartik Mistry and Pradeepto, whom I had met before. Soon I found myself a part of a BoF on the 1st floor (also in the sense that we were sitting on the ground).

Then we went into the Opening ceremony where Atul Chitnis was speaking. I kinda spend most of his talk trying to mimic the "Talk is Cheap, Show me the Code" style into my spoof poster (meet me if you want to see how it stands). Me and Rahul Sundaram had the idea of making a T-shirt out of it, but that did not happen (yet).

Atul was being quite strong in his opinions which was kinda OK but not necessarily necessary(you know, just for the effect!). Atul was followed by Sayamindu's talk on "Reading, discovering and publishing e-books". It was ok. I was hungry because I had skipped breakfast. So me and Vignesh went out and got egg-puffs.

After I came back the talk was almost over. After that I was kinda roaming about when I found myself in Anant Narayanan's "Making Identity on the web rock" session. I was planning to attend the workout, but did now know it would be staring so early and without informing me (??!!). Anyway the audi was so full that Anant decided to make it into a talk. It was interesting. Siddhesh Poyarekar came in with his libyahoo workout next. But I went upstairs to participate in Anant's workout. We were meant to hack Weave. This is what I chose to work on.

Soon it was time for the day's keynote by Dimitris Glezos. The talk was ... wait for it ... Legendary. I was sitting on the last seat of the auditorium, twitting and following the #fossdotin search trend. Glezos was all over!

After that we had lunch at the venue. When Sheela came and asked whether we wanted to leave or not, I thought it was 11 p.m. or something, turned out it was just 7:30 p.m. We came back to the hotel.

Rahul Sundaram is already asleep. A lot of us are in Pradeepto's room, having a BoF of FOSS.IN Day 1, and me blogging.

Enough. Bye.