Day one of the FISL conference (at least for me, as I arrived on Thursday) was mostly spent in airplanes. My flights took me from Dulles to Orlando to São Paulo to Porto Alegre. (Nothing is better than having a flight attendant wake you up at 3:00am to feed you and airline dinner, right?) When I landed in Porto Alegre, Leo and Rafael were kind enough to pick me up and drive me to the FISL conference. I was impressed with the size of the conference and the variety of the booths.
I have to admit — I was a bit stunned when I saw the Fedora booth. It looked absolutely gorgeous! I had no idea when I walked in whether we were sharing Red Hat’s booth or would have our own; little did I know that we’d have the best looking booth at the show. The location of the booth was perfect — we were right on the corner where people would pass by on their way to the big lecture hall.
After shaking hands with the Fedora ambassadors and volunteers and saying hello to the folks in the Red Hat booth, I gave a quick impromptu speech (in Spanish, by request) to the crowd that had gathered around our booth, and then sat back and watched as Toshio gave a great talk on packaging RPMs for Fedora, with a lot of additional explanation in Portuguese from Rafael and Leo. (We had several other presentations right there in the booth as well over the course of the day.) At that point, we had about fifty people gathered around the booth, so we handed out media and stickers and helped answer questions.
After the show wound down for the day, we went to dinner at a traditional Brazilian churrascaria. The food was delicious — I ate too much food, and forgot how much I like the Brazilian soft drink called Guaraná. It was the perfect way to end the day. On the way back to the hotel, I got to see a bit of the city of Porto Alegre.
