It’s the day before DEFCON and I’m depressed. I’m going to miss DEFCON for the first time in I don’t know how many years. These past months I’ve really started to feel distant from the community. (Mostly my fault. I haven’t even been blogging lately so no one has an idea of what I’m up to. Let me fix that. Again.) Part of me as a geek is slowly dying. I haven’t really done much technically in the past year. I’ve done a couple teaching gigs (forensics) and ethically hacked a government system (anti-forensics.. heh..) but other than that a lot of my days are spent in the trenches of decidedly low-tech projects.
I moaned about my slow techdeath to John Chamberlin, a Linux guru and fellow geek, and we came up with the idea to start a Linux User Group (LUG) in Jinja. So we did it. Here are the photos from our first meeting. We gave an introduction to Ubuntu and gave out free copies of 10.4. The attendance was small at first, with only HFC employees in attendance, but as the meeting continued, our audience grew to about 30.
Kyle and Simon came down from the Kampala LUG and through the training and the after-chat, part of me came back to life. It was great being able to chat in “geek” and for the first time in a long time, I felt invigorated about tech. It’s been hard work for the past year and somewhere in the dust, muck and politics that is my life here I had lost that.
But I’m back just in time to really really REALLY miss DEFCON. Enjoy the photos.
Fred’s amazed! A Linux User Group in Jinja! Wow!
John Chamberlin makes introductions.
Johnny doing that thing he does so well… talking and making faces.
John prepares to give an intro to Ubuntu.
HFC and Linux… a match made in heaven!
John’s into it now. We’re using the OLPC’s as test machines as well. We had these from Bugembe, as our staff is doing updates.
Here’s Simon and Kyle from the Kampala LUG making intros and talking a bit.
It is difficult to try to walk two different paths with one body. It always feels unfortunate when something that is part of you begins to take get less focus. It is good to see your attempts at reconnecting with it have turned into another productive project. Keep focused on what truly matters and why you were sent there in the first place.