The Day I Shook Hands With A Space-Man

Yesterday, I went to LUG-Radio Live, which was a most excellent day. Got the train up to Wolverhampton and found my way to Molineux Stadium and got to meet loads of people that I have only ever previously communicated electronically with (email, IRC etc.). And I got to shake hands with a real Space Man.

On arrival, I was met fairly quickly by Omahn, who runs the main server for our Enemy Territory games. We had a brief discussion about whether to refer to him as “Omahn” or as “Paul”, but very quickly everyone in the group settled on using IRC/online nicknames, rather than realnames. I guess these are the names people have grown into the community with and so are most comfortable for people to use.

The LAN gaming area was being setup when I bumped into MrBen and Neuro, who’d come down from Glasgow with pickle and (someone else?). Some people are pretty much exactly like you expect them to be from email/chatting and these two didn’t disappoint 🙂

Other people to name check are: Port7, Xalior and the Pete Best of LUG Radio, the great man Sparkes who I thought was short, but is actually really tall; also met the LUG Radio presenters. Yes, Matt really is as short as he sounds … but he really is a terribly nice bloke. 😀

I wandered around picking up a few bits of merchandise (a Debian T-shirt, a Tux-logo embroidered denim shirt and IRC Hacks from the O’Reilly stand). Then the first big talk of the day was from Mark Shuttleworth, the aforementioned Space Man. GingerDog managed to grab me talking to him after his talk. I think I told him that I wanted to talk to him “so that I could tell my daughter that I’d shaken hands with a Space Man“. This was incredibly naff but he didn’t seem to mind.

I’m gonna try to track down some more photos of the people I met – I didn’t have a camera there myself, but I do know that Neuro got a photo of a large group of us.

There were loads of others I met that I will try to list here, but I might not remember them all (apologies if I leave you out, it’s nothing personal): Aquarion, Bryn, kNo etc.

The live show recording at the end of the afternoon was good fun and I’m looking forward to listening to that in due course: my heckling call suggesting they “Bring back Sparkes!” was met with good-humoured profanity from Jono, which was quite funny … and during the competition and awards section, MrBen won the Best Contribution To The LUG Radio Community prize, which earned him loads of O’Reilly books and a rather strange-looking trophy that he’s gonna have to hide if he’s to have any chance of selling his flat. A well-deserved award, anyway.

All in all, an excellent day; I’m sure enjoyed by everyone who went. I was particularly pleased to finally meet MrBen and Omahn, with whom I’ve probably previously chatted the most. We’re all doing this again next year, yeah??