jtodd August 1st, 2008

Astricon is next month!

The announcement of the two keynotes went up on the mailing lists yesterday, and I’ve had a few people ping me in email who have expressed surprise at the fact that we have someone from Skype (Stefan Öberg) giving a keynote.  I think it’s great that they’ve decided to send someone out - it should be interesting to hear what their perspectives are, since there is a very different mentality Skype uses as compared to that of much of the Asterisk community when it comes to code and network.  Skype has certainly been successful, and we should all look at their methods.  The contrast of Brian Aker (MySQL/Sun) as the other keynote should be a good one.  I had breakfast with Brian the other day at OSCON, and he’s got some pertinent insights as to how some of the MySQL experiences might also apply to Asterisk.  His comments of the other day about Microsoft being “irrelevant” certainly stirred up some dust. I suspect he’ll have more interesting things to say during his keynote.

There are 60+ speakers lined up for Astricon - it’s quite a list.  There are a LOT of tech talks on many in-depth topics - take a look at the Carrier/Large Scale and Advanced #1/#2 tracks on the schedule.

My initial query on doing a pre-conference (Tuesday AM) balloon trip was fairly quietly received (aka: no interest) so I’ll abandon that plan for a social function.  I still like my idea of going to a machine-gun range in the desert and shooting up some old legacy PBX equipment (that you’ve replaced with Asterisk!) but I think the waivers for that might be tough.  I’m open to other suggestions!

Someone suggested a few Phoenix tourism sites on the VOIP Users conf call call this morning - if you’re going to the conference and not attending the tutorials, maybe take Monday or Tuesday and tour around to these geek-friendly locations:

http://www.titanmissilemuseum.org/ - Titan missile silo
http://www.pimaair.org/ - Air museum
http://www.pimaair.org/view.php?pg=16 - Aircraft boneyard tour
http://www.lowell.edu/ - Lowell Observatory
http://www.b2science.org/ - BioSphere 2

If you’ve not purchased your Astricon pass, now is a good time to get things lined up before it starts getting late and schedules get compressed.  Meet many of the Asterisk core developers, hear the talks, get to know what’s going on in the community and in the VoIP world in general.  See you there!

JT

• AstriCon