Peguicon 8.0 writeup
This year, Penguicon was held at the Troy Marriott. Since it was again within striking distance, I decided to attend...and once again wrangle Geeks with Guns. GwG ran well, if perhaps not quite as smoothly as I would have liked. Including Guests of Honor, we had about 20 people show up to the Double Action Indoor Shooting Range on Friday morning. Everyone seemed to have a good time; people drew targets with Star Wars stormtroopers, zombies and even Pedo-bear on them. I got to shoot my new .40 cal. pistol, which was literally a blast to shoot. All together, we had a wide variety of firearms on the line that day, everything from .22LR revolvers, pistols and rifles to 1911s in .45ACP, with a lot of 9x19mm and .40 pistols in between. One of the .40s was my new-to-me (and very gently used by its previous owner) XDm-40. Needless to say, I like it!
I've frequently described Penguicon as a "sci-fi convention with a much smaller technology conference bolted on to the side." This year did not deviate from that description. faceless_wonder tried to increase the amount of tech programming with her two talks, one on making music with the Arduino, and a panel on hackerspaces and how to form them. The Arduino talk was standing room only, and perhaps because of that, the hackerspaces talk was moved to a larger impromptu venue at the end of the hotel's main corridor.
Afterwards, we hung out in the hackerspaces room set up by i3 Detroit, "the Canadians" (who brought a keg of Labatt Blue, an "Epic Growl" booth and copious quatities of maple-leaf emblazoned swag. One of the Canadians scored a complete & fully functional 386 IBM luggable, which turned out to have not only Slackware (kernel version 2.0.7) Linux on it, but a DOS partition with Zork on it! As a result, I spent some time sipping some Labatt's, playing Zork and teaching "the kids" in the room about text-only adventure games (I'm not old, I've just experienced enough to be well-informed!)
The final highlight of Penguicon was i3Detroit winning the award for "best room party" possibly due to several efforts on the part of faceless_wonder and me. Though opinions differ on that last one.
This post has been brought to you by the Bourbon and LJ party at i3Detroit
I've frequently described Penguicon as a "sci-fi convention with a much smaller technology conference bolted on to the side." This year did not deviate from that description. faceless_wonder tried to increase the amount of tech programming with her two talks, one on making music with the Arduino, and a panel on hackerspaces and how to form them. The Arduino talk was standing room only, and perhaps because of that, the hackerspaces talk was moved to a larger impromptu venue at the end of the hotel's main corridor.
Afterwards, we hung out in the hackerspaces room set up by i3 Detroit, "the Canadians" (who brought a keg of Labatt Blue, an "Epic Growl" booth and copious quatities of maple-leaf emblazoned swag. One of the Canadians scored a complete & fully functional 386 IBM luggable, which turned out to have not only Slackware (kernel version 2.0.7) Linux on it, but a DOS partition with Zork on it! As a result, I spent some time sipping some Labatt's, playing Zork and teaching "the kids" in the room about text-only adventure games (I'm not old, I've just experienced enough to be well-informed!)
The final highlight of Penguicon was i3Detroit winning the award for "best room party" possibly due to several efforts on the part of faceless_wonder and me. Though opinions differ on that last one.
This post has been brought to you by the Bourbon and LJ party at i3Detroit