The evening plans didn’t wait for talks to be done. The IRC channel (#oscon on irc.freenode.net) was alive with talk of prospects for dinner and drinks after the conference. I myself was torn between a group going out for Lebanese and another going to Henry’s, but opted to go with my buddies from home to Henry’s.
It was worth it. If you haven’t been, Henry’s Tavern boasts 100 beers and hard ciders on tap (oddly, the beer list is the only menu *not* online - guess it changes too frequently). There are a ton of local beers that you can’t even get on the east coast just waiting for you to try, but there are also some rare treats, like the Belgian Lambic beers, which you don’t often see on tap. The food is a little pricey, but is really good, and the staff is very friendly.
A couple of us were in a rush to get back by 7 for the BoF sessions, and when we asked the waittress how easy it was to catch a cab, she immediately informed us that she would have the hostess call one for us. About 2 minutes later we were in a cab on our way back (we wouldn’t have made it back in time if we had to walk back to catch the light rail).
I was not one of those rushing to a BoF, so I did a little poking around the area near the convention center. It was getting dark, and I didn’t want to stray too far, but I did find a couple of points of interest. First, there’s a bank right across the street from the convention center. I’d be willing to bet that the ATM there is less than the $3 the ATM inside the center charges.

Beyond that is a paintball place. It was closed by the time I found it, and I don’t know if they run every day, or anything else, but interested parties might find it open during the lunch breaks or something if you wanted to check it out. The paintball place is located behind a building that is directly across the street from the conv. center. If you see the bank, it’s on the other side of the side street the bank sits on.
Tonight appears to be low-key from what I can tell. There’s currently no chatter on irc, the hotel bar had a few people chatting, and I might go down to catch the rush of people as they return from dinner and BoF sessions. Stay tuned tomorrow for more!
addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.protocolostomy.com%2F2008%2F07%2F21%2Foscon-evening-1-begins-and-more-portland-tips%2F'; addthis_title = 'OSCON+Evening+1+Begins%2C+and+More+Portland+Tips'; addthis_pub = 'jonesy';I think I have pictures of most of the basic parts of the conference at my OSCON Flickr set, and I thoroughly enjoyed day 1 of the conference. Of course, while *day* 1 is over, *night* 1 has yet to even begin. There are lots of BoF sessions, and maybe even more smaller meetups going on, as smaller groups take to discussing things over dinner and a beer or three.
I have to say, that I occasionally pop into irc channels for conferences I’m not even at and follow up on that because I’m involved a bit in conference planning as part of my work with Python Magazine (I’m helping to organize the PyWorks conference in November). This conference seems to have a pretty happy audience, if IRC chatter is any indication (and it usually is). Sure, there are a couple of weak spots in the wireless network, there are some fuzzy projectors, and there was a little confusion regarding breakfast this morning, but the important bits have been well-covered by the OSCON organizers and the “boots on the ground” here on site. Kudos to them all.
This afternoon I hopped to a couple of different talks: one on Memcached and MySQL, and the other on A/B testing. Both contained good content. Of course, I’m a systems guy primarily, so I sort of wanted more of an overview of memcached from the point of view of an admin who is deploying it rather than a developer implementing their code around it. I still got plenty of value out of that talk, and this *is* really more of an open source *developer’s* conference, so the expectations of 99% of the people in the room were met, I’m sure.
A/B testing is just not an exciting topic, and I would imagine that peoples’ bosses made them go to that talk whether they liked it or not. Not to say the talk wasn’t good - the parts I saw (I came in after the break) were good, and I learned from it, and that was the goal. If you’re a QA/QC person, I’m sure the talk was riveting, and there were a lot of good ideas and things I’d never considered flying by in the slides.
Overall, Day 1 is a win. I’ll cover more about this evening’s events in the pre-breakfast hours tomorrow. Stay tuned!
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