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SFD sneaked up on WLUG, and we found ourselves with a box of CDs and balloons and stickers and no real plans. WLUG comittee decided to postpone our installfest until October 6th, so we'll have time to properly prepare and advertise. Lindsay (who had the box) and Bruce (who's writing this) decided that the day itself shouldn't pass without doing something, so we planned a mini-SFD celebration of our own.
I bartered a promise of Linux tutoring for a partial bottle of helium, more than enough for the 20 balloons we had, and we inflated them all Friday afternoon. (BTW; it takes 18 helium balloons to float a small Russ toy weighing approx. 70gms. )
Then we parked in the middle of Hamilton and walked around a little in the mall, giving a balloon to anyone who asked and taking the opportunity to explain Free software. We only gave away one CD before Mall Security told us we weren't allowed to do this, so we went across the road to a different mall and had something to eat. Tux ordered a Fillet-o-fish, of course!
After that, we walked through town to the rugby game. Unfortunately Waikato lost to Wellington but it was a pretty good game all the same. Lots of people mistook Tux for Pingu or Happy Feet and she would like to have passed out some CDs or WLUG business cards at this point, but we were a little concerned that the rugby ground would have rules against handing things out to people and we'd get kicked out. So we just smiled and waved to them.
Saturday morning we went to the PC Computer club workshop. This is a mostly-windows club, but we've encouraged many members to use Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org, and several members have started getting interested in Linux. About a dozen people turned up, and I think five CDs were given away.
Tux/Cairo spent most of the time playing games. I spent most of the time trying to install Ubuntu on John's old Celeron 700 which later turned out to have faulty RAM. We also discussed the OOXML/ODF saga, face recognition, privacy, Microsoft's recent WGA server breakdown, and a few other issues around open source.
Partway through the meeting I got a call from my wife who was in a bit of a panic. Apparently her sewing machine had blown up and all the power was off. I went home and it turned out that Destiny, my older child was plugging the machine in and received a rather painful shock, and when I got home she was complaining of chest pains and having trouble breathing so I called an ambulance. There wasn't much else I could do, so I went back to the PC club meeting, let them know what had happened, and spent the last hour trying to figure out why John's computer wouldn't run Linux. In all a very frustrating day, but I suppose it could have been worse.
(BTW; Destiny is fine, the hospital kept her under observation because of an irregular heartbeat and she came home about three hours later when it had settled down. One of the nurses saw the SFD07 t-shirt Destiny was wearing and seemed quite interested in Linux, so they suggested she check the wlug.org.nz website for more info. A pity they didn't have any CDs with them! )