It has been an eventful December so far.
On December 4, I presented at Pumping Station: One's Pecha Kucha Night. My talk was entitled Setting Up FDCC Testing Environments on Non-Windows Systems (Or: How Nicolle Lost Four Hours of Her Life for Want of a Nine-Kilobyte Text File). It drew from my rather frustrating experience trying to get the FDCC Windows XP virtual machine image running on my Linux box on VMWare, since the federal government releases it in Microsoft VirtualPC format.
On December 5 and 6, nine of us from PS:One went on a weekend road trip to Detroit to visit i3Detroit, the hackerspace in Detroit. It was a fantastic trip! There are a lot of creative and talented people at that space, and they've set up such a nice hackerspace in a few short months. I'm so proud of them, and I'm looking forward to the next time I can visit their space for a few days.
From December 11 through 14, I was in New York City for Neighborcon NYC. I have been to all three Neighborcons to date, and all three of them have been fantastic. It's a chance to get together with a group of hackers from all over the country in a far lower-key environment than most cons. Neighborcon NYC was held in a bar called Local 138, on the Lower East Side. Both days featured a lot of socializing and casual exchange of ideas, as well as talks later in the day. I gave the first formal talk of the conference, a slightly expanded version of my FDCC Virtual Machines talk.
This week, I have been focusing on getting as much done on projects at PS:One as possible, since I leave for 26c3 on December 25. However, in the last two days I have found out about two very exciting things on the horizon for early 2009.
Yesterday, I was informed that I was accepted for Shmoocon Labs, so I will be helping to set up and maintain the network at the conference! This will be my first time on any kind of network operation crew for a conference. I will learn a lot about setting up networks, maintaining them, and solving computer and network problems under pressure, and I can't wait to make the most of this opportunity.
Then, earlier tonight, I found out that my talk proposal for Notacon 2010 got accepted! My talk is entitled Hey, Don't Call That Guy A Noob: Toward A More Welcoming Hacker Community. I've noticed that in hackerspaces and other organizations, there's a lot of emphasis on trying to find new people to join, but very little time spent thinking about what to do once these new people have found their way to a space or a club meeting. It will discuss ways to make someone new to the hacker community feel welcome and valuable there. I am really excited--it will be my first time speaking at Notacon, and I'm looking forward to discussing a topic that I feel so strongly about.
