Debconf6 day 6: Main group photo

May 19th.

Fallback from the dinner and Ted's expulsion hanged over the morning of this day, but by the lunchtime it was mostly forgotten and people moved on to more interesting topics.

... for example, Sponge Bob! I mean I18N, of course. A big discussion about the future of Debian's I18N infrastructure was the highliht of the morning for me as I expected to later become the mentor of the respective Google SoC project. In some ways need of Debian translators are simple and very similar to the need of all other translators worldwide, but other need are quite different. Coordination with Wordforge to detect both those subgroups of our need was one hot topic, need that are related to OLPC use was another.

People went on hacking, but I went towards the pool to plan forward towards the group photos. I needed to check the angles and lighting levels, test the lenses and settings.

When 18:00 (the time of the main group photo) approached, clouds covered the sky and it went dark. At 17:58 it started raining. At the last moment Mark took a jump from the 10m tower. He later reflected that the decision was between jumping or remaining the highest point around while the air crackled of ever increasing electricity.

People slowly gathered under the roof nearby and waited as told. After around ten minutes most people were gathered and the rain stopped. People ran out into the field and I ran up the diving tower to my selected photography place 10 meters up from the ground. I took a bunch of pictures, more people came, I took some more pictures, others came, I screamed to people to say "Tequilaaaaa" and took loads of pictures. The group photo was done.

After that we had a quick and painless keysigning party (only two hours is quick). The trust network grew again.

After that there was a lot of dancing on the veranda of the hacklab. It was very cool thing to watch, but gave not so good pictures because of speed and low light. Those two dancing instructors were just great! With this number of DD's we have an expert in anything - dancing, photography, security, religion, patents, biking, ... ... We share their knowledge and we all become better. Inspiring.

One minute after midnight around 30 people sneaked into the room of sleeping Andreas and started to sing "happy birthday" ... because it was. Andreas looked very surprised. Very sweet idea. Cudos to the organizers. However it would be nice to turn on the light so that flashes of the 20 cameras would be less blinding. ;)