Penguin Breeding at Gnomedex

Linux put in a strong showing at Gnomedex, where the good times rocked and rolled.

The first sign that I had left my personal Kansas came on the plane to Des Moines from Denver.

I was trying to sleep at my window seat (3A) in the 737. Next to me (in 3A and 3B) were two young women talking quietly as the one in the aisle seat demonstrated a very interesting laptop that appeared to double as a writing tablet. I pretended not to be interested. I'm a lousy eavesdropper, since my hearing has always been useless in noisy places, but I could hardly miss it when the woman with the laptop said, "Doc Searls will be there."

I leaned forward. "Excuse me. Are you going to Gnomedex?"

"Yes," they said.

"I'm Doc Searls."

"Wow!"

That kind of thing has never happened to me before in my entire life, and I doubt it will happen again; but it was a perfect beginning to one of the most fun conferences of my life -- which is saying a lot. At 55 I'm sure I was the oldest person there, and since I've been going to conferences since the 70s, I probably held that record too.

The woman with the laptop introduced herself as Beth Goza. "I work for The Beast," she said.

"Microsoft?"

"Yep."

But she turned out to have a sense of humor about her work, which is with the PocketPC group, I think (I lost her card, like I lose everybody's card -- I have a positive business card valence). Her job involves playing with as many different toys as possible. This also goes for her husband, Phil, who loves Flash (which I'm willing to overlook, since he introduced me to Caffeine soap).

Her friend in the seat next to me was Chenelle Bremont, who is deeply into games, especially XBox. Both of them looked more like schoolteachers than tech types -- and it turns out that's what they both used to be.

As we talked, and later when I looked at their various Web sites, I was surprised to find Beth and Chenelle did not seem to be at war with things non-Microsoft; nor did they possess any Microsoftian paranoia about Linux and other "threats" from the open source world. In fact, they seemed very curious and positive about Linux -- plus pretty much everything else that looked like fun.

This was consistent with the embracing atmosphere of Gnomedex itself. There were plenty of Linux geeks there, including one Debian maintainer from Venezuela (now living in the U.S.) and two honchos from RackSpace, the San Antonio hosting service. (In fact, this very page is served out of RackSpace.) But most of the speakers at Gnomedex didn't seem loyal to anything other than fun & cool technology.

Setting the tone was Chris Pirillo, the 29-year-old whirlwind behind the show. The Gnomedex name derives from Chris's Lockergnome newsletters, which include Penguin Shell, the Linux newsletter by Tony Steidler-Dennison. Other newsletters cover Windows, Mac, Web development and other tech topics. All are driven to some degree by Chris's high profile as a celebrity on the TechTV cable/satellite network, where he does Call For Help and chips in on other shows, such as Leo Laporte's ScreenSavers.

Chris's nickname dates back to high school, when he was apparently small enough to fit in a locker. Or something like that. He's still small, and his face maintains the signature look that is in fact his own brand. When I met him for the first time, right before going on as a ScreenSavers guest (it was Linux Week on the show), I recognized him instantly from his caricature.

Although Chris and his wife Gretchen now live in San Francisco, Lockergnome was born in Des Moines, where both grew up. The seven-person staff is now roughly split between Des Moiines and the Bay Area, with the locals handling Gnomedex, among other things. Here's the crew:

The UNIX/Linux-oriented guys are Jake Ludington and Tony Steidler-Dennison. Jake is the one on the left with the BSD t-shirt, and Tony is next to him. That's Chris Pirillo in the middle.

Here's how Chris explained Gnomedex in his opening remarks at the show:

After short term memory eliminated most of what Chris just said, the one thing I remembered was the line about fun. And I'm sure I'm not alone. More than any other trade show I know, Gnomedex is about hanging out and having a good time. It's also inexpensive, which opens it up to a broader range of attendees, including a group I hadn't encountered much before and I don't know how to describe other than as fans of technology. Chris and keynoter Leo Laporte were the biggest stars, but the rest of the speakers seemed to be sprinkled with more than the usual glitter, whether they deserved it or not.

I offer myself as an example. Up until Gnomedex, I doubt I'd ever signed a t-shirt, or any other kind of schwag, but I'm sure I signed twenty or more items at Gnomedex, just because I was a speaker at the show.

The signature-signing peaked on the last evening, when I was guest on David Lawrence's Online Tonight show. David is an imposing figure whose head is shaved everywhere but his eyebrows, his goatee and the long ponytail that hangs from the middle of the back of his skull. I knew David slightly from way back in the 80s when we were both members of Compuserve's Broadcast Professionals Forum, and it was fun to finally hang out with him in person.

Even more fun was David's excellent producer Lili VonSchtupp, whose weblog is She-Whore and whose side project at Gnomedex was enlarging her photo gallery for SignMyBoobs.com. When she finishes putting the gallery together (it's still "coming soon") it will include the photo below.

Gnomedex is also the first show I've been to that keeps what we might call geek hours. Chris's welcome on Day One didn't happen until 11 in the morning, and the last events on both days ran from 8pm until midnight. Afterwards groups went out to parties and wild stuff, returning at 4am and later.

Among other after hours events was a Miss Gnomedex contest, won this year by Gnome-Girl. The contest site bragged, "The chosen 'Miss Gnomedex 2002' Queen will receive cash and prizes in excess of $10.00."

Pretty much all the speaking happened in one big ballroom. No breakouts or "tracks." All the speakers were expected to be themselves and, if possible, entertain for an hour.

Which brings me to my mission at the show, which was to hold forth on on The Future of Linux, but the nature of the show gave me an opportunity to play around more than I usually do, which is probably too much already.

I told the story of World Domination with a Penguin Pile-Up slide show.

Then I explained how World Domination had in fact been achieved, borrowing heavily from the visuals I had used in my talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, expanding on a variety of Linux topics, including the key role of Linux in the spread of Internet radio.

Earlier Tony Steidler-Dennison had been showing me his Sharp Zaurus (at which he is so skilled it's scary). I suggested he download a copy of zRadio so we could demonstrate how the two combined to produce a true portable internet radio. With a nice strong wireless ethernet (wi-fi) signal permeating the conference, Tony had no trouble downloading the shareware in an instant. Then I gave him my treasured pair of Sony MDR-CD780 headphones, so he would be ready to play KPIG on cue over the audience mike. He did it on cue, it sounded terrific, the audience went "wooo," and I called for them to support Linux-fortified causes like the EFF, the FSF, OSI and AOTC.

Along the way I found open source-type stuff to praise, even among folks who aren't coming from the open source camp. One was the Blogger API, which has done much to open up weblogging interoperability, and which is the brainchild of Blogger President and CEO Evan Williams, who followed me on stage.

Other speakers included Vmyth's Rob Rosenberger on virus hoaxes, Ed Ross and Terry Swiers on shareware authoring, Steve Gibson on the future of hack attacks and viruses, Beth Goza on wireless convergence, Fucked Company's (and Lucked Company's) Phil "Pud" Kaplan on how dot-coms succeed and fail, AnalogX's Mark Thompson on web development in a post dot-com world, and Leo Laporte on pretty much everything. Leo did the closing keynote, in which he frequently (and positively) referred back to stuff I had said a couple hours earlier.

After dinner that last night most of the speakers took turns sitting in the chair next to David Lawrence for his live Online Tonight show. It was a hoot.

What surprised me most about the whole event was how completely absent the push-back was about Linux. I'm accustomed to slightly negative questions like "Will Linux ever make it on the desktop?" But there was none of that. Instead there was a sense that, for the first time, the real platform for everything was the Net, and Linux played a huge and welcome role at that level -- while still being a very cool OS for anything else you might want to do with it.

With the platform burden shifted to the Net, the laptops people carried around were more like PDAs: appliances with little more brand importance than TVs or boom boxes.

And by far the coolest PDA was Tony's Zaurus.

So we didn't really see World Domination at work. But we did get to see where evolution was headed.