Scale7x was very enjoyable this year and I would have to say that it topped my experience at scale6x. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that I put out for a hotel room this time around. Last year for scale6x I drove back and forth between days and I did not partake in the festivities at then end of the day. So here are some of my observations from my time at scale7x this year around.

Show Floor: The exhibit hall this year seemed to be toned down some this year. It seemed that everyone had the same size booth, except for IBM. Which is cool in the fact that the local and smaller exhibits did not get overshadowed. My first impression on Saturday of the shwag from the booths was that it was lacking, but it greatly improved on Sunday. This could be for two reasons, I take a while to actually get comfortable and engage in conversation with the people at the booths and it was the last day, so people might of wanted to unload there shwag so more willing to get rid of it instead of using it as a device to entice people to talk to them. More posts to follow on my shwag/booth reviews.

Talks: The speakers this year were great, and I enjoyed all the talks I went to this year. There was a better selection of topics this year and I found myself in conflict a couple times while trying to decided where to go. The some of the talks I went to were:

• Keynote 1 - Bradley Kuhn: When Software Is a Service, Is Only the Network Luddite Free?
• Shawn Anderson:Introduction to ruby for writing small tools and applications (Try It Lab)
• Jono Bacon: Building Belonging
• Keynote 2 - Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier: Reaching the masses: 10 ways to improve the reach of your FOSS Project
• AEleen Frisch: Getting Started with System Monitoring
• Ken Gilmer: BUG Update: Building open source gadgets with Linux
• Eric Hammond: Amazon EC2 Linux for Beginners (Try It Lab)

Try It Lab: Now I didn't do the "Try It Lab" last year so I have nothing to compare it to. The lab is a bunch of thin clients, and the speaker provides an image that is customized to their talk so everyone is on the same page, which is cool. But there were some issues in both of the labs that I attended. The first was the very first lab of scale and there were some bugs getting it started, but after everything got going it went fine. The second lab I went to was the last lab of the expo and they did not have issues of getting everything running, that part went smoothly. There was issues with the internet connection, everyone was having trouble logging in and kept have to do so on Amazon.com. The issue seemed that it was similar to when you have a load balancing router with two separate internet connections. Each request is going through a different IP and the SSL connection breaks forcing you to relogin. The problem here though seemed like everyone was trying to log on to amazon from the same computer, which we technically were, and every time someone logged in, another person got logged out. This made class difficult and most of the time was just helping people get logged on to amazon.com EC2.

Beer: The festivities Saturday night were not about beer but they were enjoyable there was this game show thing that was the called "The Weakest Geek" which was fun to watch. The reception was nice, each person was given a drink ticket and the tables had some munchies. There was a raffle and a guy at my table won a book and another won "crackheads" which is some type of coffee bean candy. As the night progressed they started giving away 5 drinks at a time in the raffle and two guys at a table next to us won, and I guess neither of them drank (maybe because they looked underage) so they gave them to us. This started a pattern and other people ended up giving us tickets, so the four of us all had at least 5 beers on scale's dime (thank you scale!). Here is a picture of our table that night: