After 10 hours in the car, we (5 other MTU LUGers and myself) made it to Livonia and checked into the hotel and got our badges. The night started off pretty well after I found the Ars room (Penguicon is an annual gathering for a number of the Arstechnica #linux people).

It was good to see all the people I’d been talking to online for a couple of years for the first time (with a couple of exceptions, a number were at Penguicon 2.0, which I attended). Kattni, tm, road, uberkludge, docah, Adam, Jorge, Kyle Rankin, evarlast, Flav, Glenn, mmx, Bill, JohnF, and a few others made it out and many of them presented (I filled in for a missing presenter on the Sun Ray and thin client panel); overall, we filled probably 90% of the programming in our room.

Talks ranged from mono, DVD authoring with Linux, Ubuntu, Knoppix, thin clients, PHP application security, security fundamentals, SSL to backupPC. The quality of the presentations was excellent, and though I didn’t get around to see many of the other presentations I heard that they weren’t nearly as good as the ones the Ars crew put on (a notable exception in my mind is the Keynote presentation put on by a guy from Google).

It was most certainly a good time, and I really look forward to coming back next year. I’ve known these guys for a while now, and any get together promises high quality conversation (geeky and non) and a chance to make it to restaurants I never would have before.