And as if by magic the internet returned. Our cable has been down for a few days now and I was off selling the good fight at LUDE where we won the award for Best Linux Software. Which was fun. I really enjoyed myself in the .org village, just me a laptop and a sign saying ‘OpenOffice.org’, people came up and we just chatted, it was great. That’s the sort of thing that makes following 15 mailing lists worthwhile when harassed sysadmins come up to you and say things like: “We’ve got 100 computers in our school using OOo but one of our teachers wants to buy MS Office because Pivot Tables are a national curicculum requirement” and you can just say: “We have pivot tables but not under that name, we call them DataPilot, here, let’s take a look at calc…” and you know, just know that when he walks away you’ve made a difference. There were loads of cool things like that. Scary stuff included lots of people knowing my name, infamy it seems travels well. Worse was those who knew the face not the name.

Also a great talk by the Campaign For Digitial Rights on “Trusted Computing and Free Software” essentially if MS do it right OOo is stuck legally in both the US and EU. We knew this already but it’s still a bit scary.

If I owe you an email I’ll get round to it ASAP now I have bandwidth again. While the cable was dark I had to make my own entertainment, a scary prospect indeed. A couple of cables later I had the TiBook hooked up to the telly so I could watch episodes of Scrubs, X2, that sort of thing. Also a very good way to show iTunes visualisations etc.