Tomorrow will mark the day most folks in the United States celebrate Thanksgiving. It’s the official holiday. I try to remember to be grateful more often than once a year. I don’t remember to give thanks everyday, but when I do I remember that I have much to be grateful for. This week I traveled to Rochester, New York for the NYSCATE 2007 Convention. I was able to present on “Open Source Opportunities in K12 Education.” Through my presentation I was able to meet a number of other educators who are working with open source software or are interested in it. I met folks from all across New York State and I’m grateful that I was able to learn from many of them. I was finally able to meet and talk with Chris Shively who regularly reads this blog. Chris, Frank Pirrone and I worked together for our presentation on open source software opportunities. Our preparation for the presentation was completely carried out with email, and IChat.
One of the attendees at our session walked away with a brand new Certera desktop PC from Great Lakes Electronics Inc. in Buffalo, New York. Great Lakes donated a beautiful new Core2Duo desktop. It was a real beauty with 2 gigs of RAM, 160 gig SATA drive. We had installed Ubuntu 7.10 and Virtual Box installed on it. Using Virtual box we had installed Fedora 7, Open Suse 10.3 and PCLinux OS so that the winner could get a real taste of Linux and open source software. We also distributed over 50 CDs that each contained dozen of open source software titles.
While we were at the convention there were many sessions. Most of the sessions were one hour long but we also heard several keynote speakers including Will Richardson and Gary Stager. Monday evening we had a lovely dinner at the Eastman House which is also in Rochester and following dinner we had an opportunity to tour the home. This was my second visit to the house and also the second time to see the gingerbread contest that is hosted there this time of year. I took a picture of one of the gingerbread home with my cell phone camera. The aroma of the gingerbread and the holiday decorations combined to make this an enjoyable evening and a wonderful treat for me.
