death

COSSFEST, A Calgarian Tale of FOSS, Betrayal, and Murder

Submitted by wftl on Tue, 2010-04-13 00:00

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Okay, I might be exaggerating about the whole betrayal and murder thing. But this story is about FOSS in Calgary. And it is about COSSFEST 2010. We did, however, kill a few beer. Does that count? And we did have a panel about the death of somebody . . . or something. Muah hah hah!

Sorry, I'll come in again . . .

This past weekend (April 9th and 10th), I had the great pleasure to attend COSSFEST 2010 in Calgary. COSSFEST is the Calgary Open Source Systems Festival, a gathering of people whose passion is free and open source software, coming together to share information, exchange ideas, and otherwise talk about all things FOSS. Oh, and drink beer. And eat, too. Yeah, right . . . there's that karaoke thing we'd rather not talk about.

For me, this was a sort of Calgary Linuxfest v 2.0 since I gave the keynote at the first every COSSFEST back in 2006, then called (you guessed it) Calgary Linuxfest. This year's COSSFEST featured some great speakers including Aaron Seigo, Adam McDaniel, Adam Tindale & Jordan Tate, Brad "Renderman" Haines, Bruce Byfield, Dafydd Crosby, Joshua Schroeder, Kenton Smith, Martin Glazer, Richard P.W. Stobbe, Richard Weait, Stefan Steiniger, and Timothy Griffin.

Yellow Ribbons . . . Who's Listening?

Submitted by wftl on Tue, 2009-04-14 09:17

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Who's listening? Apparently not many.

This is a story about not paying attention, or choosing not to. I'll let the philosophers argue about which is worse. For the sake of this post, I just want to talk about the yellow ribbon campaign. You know the one. A soldier comes home from the war in Iraq or Afghanistan and people wrap yellow ribbons around the trees as a welcome. This morning I was chatting with a young lady, aged 25, who had no idea what the significance of the yellow ribbon was. If you, like her, don't know, then let me enlighten you. Then I'll tell you why it's nonsense.

Oh, and today, on April 14, 2009, CBC Radio reported that 21 year-old Trooper Karine Blais died in Afghanistan. She is the second Canadian female soldier to die in combat in Afghanistan. Ironically, yesterday, a local family dropped off yellow ribbons to all the houses in our neighborhood, asking us to tie those ribbons around our trees to welcome their son, 23, who is making it back.

About that song . . . It all started with a 1970s band called Tony Orlando and Dawn.