Coswell Productions

Libre Graphics Meeting 2007 - The Coswell Productions Report

What, no undies?

Universite de MontrealLGM 2007 was my first Open Source conference, and my first time speaking at a conference. MenTaLguY and I left from the BWI Amtrak station at 4:30am. In case you’re wondering, that’s pretty freaking early. Amtrak was surprisingly good, but we did get into Montreal much later than we expected to. That first night, he and I went to dinner with a bunch of folks, including fellow Inkscape developer Jon Cruz.

The next morning was the start of the conference. I got to meet a whole host of other Inkscape folks—Ted Gould, Bryce Harrington, Bulia Byak, Andy Fitzsimon, Cedric Gemy, and Jon Phillips were the ones that I knew of, but I’m sure there were others that I didn’t know. The presentations were, on the whole, very good and informative. I’ll admit to not keeping up on the Open Source scene as much as I probably should, so seeing what Inkscape and other projects are up to in a conference format helped to bring me quickly up to speed.

Stop in FrenchStudents at the University of Montreal must have the strongest legs in the world…that’s one hilly campus! The walking up and down the hill to the hotel wore me out pretty quickly, but I had enough energy to put on a really sweet presentation with mental on “Creating Comics in Inkscape,” which you can view here (or get the wallpaper or shirt!). The presentation went really well, and we had a great time interacting with the audience during and after the show.

There was a lot of time spent meeting with other folks and talking about the future of Open Source graphic design software. I followed along as best as I could (again, I don’t keep on top of it like I should) and learned a lot from everyone. We had a couple of great lunch and dinner get-togethers. Beer and quesadillas at Brutopia with some of the Inkscape folks was a blast. That’s one of my favorite places to hang out in Montreal. The Indian restaurant Le Taj was also really awesome.

One really interesting presentation was Michael Terry’s about ingimp, a version of The GIMP that records user activity for usability studies. mental, Jon Cruz, and I had a couple of long chats with Michael about the implementation and theory behind the project.

I also talked a lot with the artist behind a Webcomic adaptation of 1984. Good stuff…and now all done in Open Source. Check it out!

John and a KangarooThe train from Montreal got in to Penn Station late, so we missed our connecting train. We got new tickets from a guy who remarked that my birthday was right at the end of the disco era. I said, “I know—I killed disco.” It was a beautiful moment.

I’m already saving up for LGM 2008. See you there!

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