Baby, if I could.

NOTE: Posting this a little late since I didn’t get to my hotel until crash time.

As I write this, I’m about 40,000 feet over Ian Weller’s house in Kansas, on my way to Utah for UTOSC 2008. My keynote is more or less ready — knowing me, less, but I very much enjoy extemporizing and thinking on my feet for speeches. Note this is not at all saying my audience enjoys it, but I really do try my best. But if it’s a subject I’m very passionate about like free software, I can work up a pretty good head of steam.

The theme for UTOSC 2008 is “How To,” so I figured I’d try to include some facet of that theme in part of my keynote. I decided to go for something subtle and low-key, and ended up with “How to Change the World.” Ahem. Well, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, and all that. I remember Max telling me many times that he would routinely rewrite his whole keynote right before giving it, so I fully expect UTOSC mastermind and Fedora Ambassador extraordinaire Clint Savage to inform me at dinner tonight that the audience will be expecting many more monkeys (drum-a-drum-drum**).

While the first leg of my flight through Cincinnati was excruciatingly cramped, the second was an improvement — aisle seat in a 3-seat exit row, with the middle unoccupied. If only it hadn’t had those stupid solid partitions between the seats. I ended up seated right across the aisle from a very pleasant young man, who was a BYU CS undergrad, and who asked me right after we got situated, “So I saw your shirt — do you work for Red Hat?” Wardrobe FTW (“Spacewalk Hacker” T-shirt to be exact).

I’ve been away from email since about 11:00 this morning and am jonesing a little, to tell the truth. I’m sure that once the airlines figure out a wireless scheme for air travel, they’ll charge an arm and a leg for it. Ah well, time to go spend some time on one of the git-based projects I have sitting around on my disk waiting for spare time and love.

_{** Parental reading list joke; ignore if you are fairly confident you have no children.}