First things first: It’s a safe bet that Ruth Suehle could read the Raleigh phone book and make it sound interesting, with or without accompanying Lowenbrau slides. So it would come as no surprise that of all the great keynotes that have been given at the Southern California Linux Expo, Ruth’s Sunday keynote makes anyone’s SCALE short list as an all-time great.
Generally, many who attend three-day — excuse me, a four-day — event like SCALE start to wear down during the marathon grind. However, Ruth’s keynote injected a much-needed boost to kick off the final day.
I can say that, knock on wood, we have already had what I hope is going to be the only “black-cat-walking-under-the-ladder” glitch-of-the-show moment a couple of weeks ago when the idiot serving as the publicity chair — okay, that would be me — pulled the wrong list of speakers (the ones not chosen) to start doing speaker interviews with the Publicity Team. Thankfully, I found the error before any interviews were done, but it was a considerable amount of orchestrated work that was thrown out the window and redone with the right list.