OSCon2k6 Day 1 - Business, PG Gang, and VIM

It turns out the complimentary breakfast bar is actually pretty darn good! Cereal, toasted bagels (w/ butter), orange juice… tommorrow I’ll be having waffles..yummy! I got into the conference a bit late ( I swear this had nothing to do with the breakfast bar) but eventually I made my way into the “how your business can interface with open source” talk. I thought it was a good talk, and helped give a nice overview of the types of problems people have when trying to work with. One perticular Robert Bernier was there as well, giving his best effort to steer people away from gpl projects to bsd ones. After lunch I was planning to swing into the Rails talk, but by the time I got there there were no seats left, and as it turns out there were so many laptops plugged in that the power kept going out on the projector. Sitting on the floor in the back of a room, watching a talk on a familiar topic from someone with no slides, just didn’t sound fun to me, so I snuck out and headed downstairs where several postgresql folks were gathered for a chat (I think I have run into all of the regular gang at this point.. if you’re here and we haven’t said hi, drop me an email) After we chatted for a while, they brought out some snacks for the conference goers, which seemed like a good enough reason to break things up. I grabbed some snacks and headed into Damian Conway’s Mastering VIM talk. This talk was actually pretty amazing (actually I am still in it). As I was explaining to a friend of mine, this is the kind of talk where you’ll get a lot of ideas about things you can do that you never even realized. Sure enough, within 5 minutes I learned 5 things I never really knew I could do before. My firends argument was that you’d never actually use that stuff (else you’d have looked it up by now), so we’ll see just how far I go with it… the built in dictionary and thesarus options in VIM seem pretty handy though.