FUDCon Blacksburg: Social track

(This is part 3 of my FUDCon odyssey, which I'm trying to split into smaller chunks as per Adam Young's suggestion. Part 1 is my Day 1 summary. Part 2 is a post on the topic of the talk I gave on the barcamp day.) One of the most fun bits of FUDCon is always the social track, so here's a quick recap of my involvement in that. On the first night I had dinner with a big group at an Indian restaurant, which was pretty good though somewhat under-spiced. I spent most of the time talking to those of Chris Tyler's current group of students at Seneca who made it to FUDCon. The project Chris runs, getting undergrad students involved with real-world F/OSS projects including Fedora, is a fantastic one, and it's amazing to see the amount of effort he puts into it. It has real results, as well - the current crop of students is responsible for building and maintaining the current Fedora ARM build farm, for instance. They were a bright group and it was a pleasure hanging around with them all weekend. Back at the hotel, I hung around in the lobby for a while, chatting with various groups. The evening wound up quite early for a FUDCon, though. Will Woods was fulfilling his traditional role of feeding people terrible, terrible liquor, a point which will become important later on: I don't remember what it was he'd brought this time, but whatever it was, it was awful. On the second night, There Was FUDPub. It was a pretty good time, with bowling and pool available, and decent food with two drinks a person. By the time I got up for my last drink, there was only Michelob Ultra and Coors Light left - that's right, they'd run out of beer! I spent the night bowling, because I rarely get a chance to do it (the last time was at the last FUDPub, actually) and I do enjoy it when I get the chance. The night was capped off by an epic showdown with Greg DeKoenigsberg, in which I bowled back-to-back strikes in the tenth frame, leaving me on 130 and needing essentially just about anything to beat Greg's 131...at which point I felt the pressure and sent down a genuine, honest-to-god gutterball. Sigh. Once FUDPub finished up, it was back to the hotel for the main event - poker. We have an informal Fedora Poker SIG of Red Hatters and Fedorans who are somewhat nutty about poker, and for the last couple of FUDCons, we've run a game. Before that, though, the Woods Saga had to come to an end. Revenge...had to be taken. I rolled up to the bar offering drinks to random people at the anaconda table, 'happening' to include Will in the offer. He fell for it hook like and sinker, and when offered a choice of drinks, uttered the fateful words 'surprise me!' Well, I studied the bar for a good long time, and eventually decided the most evil thing on offer was Bacardi 151. So I bought him a shot of that as his 'surprise drink', and the table chipped in heroically by telling him to down it. He did. The look on his face will keep me going until the next FUDCon. I like to think a straight shot of 151 had something to do with the subsequent merriment that involved large quantities of sparklers, because...it was Mr. Woods who wound up holding 'em. You're welcome, FUDCon. Poker then ensued. The first game, honestly, was not much fun: we had a table of ten people, many of whom hadn't played much before (especially live), odd chip values and stacks, and Greg deciding he was not going to play an especially friendly game. What with the nine-handed flops and Side Pot Math 406 courses, it took about two hours to play ten hands. I played tight then wound up all in with top pair and a king kicker against nothing much, until nothing much turned into a set and I was done. The game came down to Greg and John Dulaney, who won by the expedient of never folding anything and winning all his showdowns - hey, nice when it works. After that, though, we had a second game with fewer, more experienced players, and standard chip values and stacks. It worked out much better, and was a really fun game to be in. We were five handed for a while, then people dropped out due to tiredness or drunkenness, I went bust (my poker specialty: playing a perfectly solid game and always losing showdowns), and it came down to Casey Dahlin and a cool guy named Ivan who isn't on the signup list, so I don't know his surname or who he actually is. I played dealer, and they had a really well-played hour of heads up, which was lots of fun. We finally wound up turning in about 4:30pm. There wasn't much social track on the last day, as most people were leaving, including me. So that was pretty much it for Blacksburg. It was fun to catch up with people again, and FUDPub and poker night are pretty much my favourite things about FUDCon, most times!