Day One: The Bazaar

By Paul Ferris
Editor, Linux Today

The Caffeinated Morning...

I wake up at 7:00 and snooze till 7:30. I can feel it, the excitement of being here. I know a lot of people are commuting to New York at this time of year to do Christmas shopping. I'm here for something that most of them will never appreciate. But I'm not awake yet, having coded some last-minute web site changes the night before. I can't wait to get to class, but end up scarfing a bagel and a cup of coffee before waiting in a cab line.

Traffic in New York City.

If this thing were a 10BaseT Network, the little collision lights on the hub would be lit up like a Christmas tree. I will never complain about traffic in Cleveland Ohio again. The traffic jams and wild traffic register as rank amateurs compared to this.

Simple things like getting here from there are not simple. You can't get here from there. The routes are all screwed up. So, I'm waiting in a cab line in front of the hotel, and I run into these three guys, and one of them turns out to be Miguel de Icaza. We talk a bit about Gnome, and I sit in the cab and think about the accessibility to the people here who care.

The people who make all the difference in the world. The people that make Linux special. The people who make Linux Linux.

It's a rush. My day is just starting. In the registration line, I run into a couple of guys from Santa Cruz and we spend a couple of minutes talking about Mozilla and VPN's.

I'm a social creature by default. I'm getting to converse with a diverse group of geeks whose products I depend upon for my everyday computing enjoyment. It keeps occuring to me over and over; this would never happen with any other aspect of my life so easily. Since Linux is a community I can actually meet the people who've made it what it is.

Linux is like an amazing art form to me, and these are the Rembrandts, the Bachs, the new sculpters of an obscure art form, the likes of which most people will only see the veneer. They miss the depth that a few of us appreciate.

I can't wait for what's ahead today...

More coverage of The Bazaar.