LISA'10 is over and there are stories to tell. There is a new program started up with LOPSA and the training sessions were great. The hallway track was quite good although this year it suffered a bit from the incessant tweeting that was going on. It’s hard to make progress on something when the pop-up indicator on your screen is (almost) constantly lighting up with a new comment.

There are two additional conferences happening in 2011. PICC in New Jersey and the Cascadia IT Conference in Seattle. These are sponsored by sysadmin groups, like the LOPSA-NJ chapter and the Seattle Area System Administrators Guild there is obviously an audience for these conferences, so if you have the time and inclination, check it out and possibly attend. I have also been informed that BSDCan will be going ahead this year, with the older format of two days of tutorials and two days of presentations, the second being on a Saturday. I’m the volunteer coordinator again, so if you want to assist in the setup, let me know.

LISA'10 was a lot of fun and a there were lot of later nights and way too early mornings. The clocks rolling back an hour on the starting day of the conference and making a 3 hour time adjustment on top of that was brutal. Wanting to sleep by 11:00 and waking up at 4:00 just wasn’t fun. At least I have that mostly conquered now and am waking up at 5 or so now. I still want to sleep by 10:00 but manage to stay awake longer. I still have a week of this and then I have to skip forward 3 hours. At least I have a day to recover.

I went to 3 days of training and three days of talks. The training was very good, pretty much what I expected and I’m glad I did it. The talks can be a hit or miss thing as there are refereed papers, practice reports, invited talks and guru sessions. I managed to attend a bit of everything but the guru sessions this year. Normally I try to get to those, as they are quite interesting. I missed out on a couple of great talks due to other sessions, so I didn’t get everything I wanted live. At least it’s all recorded so you can see what you missed.

DokuWiki as a technical documentation system is still on the “soon to attempt” list. No time to get it done properly, but this week may be just the right time. No actual interruptions from walk-ins since I’m in a different office. There was another system I was looking at as well that I need to locate. Wordpress makes a great blogging engine and short article system but makes for lousy tech documentation. Drupal is better for that but has it’s own problems, especially in the upgrade area.

Worst case is that it won’t be suitable, best case is that it will be better than what I have. Time will tell.