Will I lose my dignity? Will you still care?

Okay, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say what it is or not, so this post is somewhat of a tease…

But I just played with something that was a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to see it get released!

Flew down via Tulsa International Airport to Houston (almost 3 hour layover) and then on to San Antonio. I got to meet Kostantinos Margaritis at Houston, when his flight got in. He had just come from the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Apparently the Genesi Efika Smartbook was a hit there.

I had to throw away my shaving cream, as I forgot the size limit on liquids. Tulsa has one of those xray machines, although I did notice you could request to not go in it. First hurdle I had to hop over was that I had to take my belt off since it is also a metal detector. This meant my pants, which are a few sizes too big, were pretty much falling off of me. Probably would have been fine if I was still in Detroit, but this was Tulsa. They were fine with my screwdriver set, which was the only thing I was really worried about. My roommate had already taken off by that time, and I didn’t want to ship them back to myself.

Flight was uneventful, although something I noticed about the airports is that there is a SERIOUS lack of Mountain Dew. Very uncool.

Arrived in Houston, which, is much larger than Tulsa’s airport, and as I had 3 hours to kill before my next flight, I set off in search of a place to smoke a cigarette. This was no small task. It is very easy to get lost in that airport. Anyway, after stopping every so often, I finally found the place to have a cigarette, so I did, and then I texted various friends and family members to let them know I was still alive

Kostantinos Margaritis arrived around 7:30PM (local time) so I got to meet him. He had just come from UDS, where he gave away almost 50 Efika MX smartbooks and smarttops. It was quite fun listening to him talk about the machines and people’s enjoyment of getting them. I’ve also never been outside the US, and he is from Greece, and it was his first time here in the US, so it was interesting hearing his take.

We boarded the plane around 8:22PM (local time) and headed off to San Antonio. This flight for me was on a larger aircraft than the one from Tulsa to Houston, and there was a bit less room, but the cool thing about the flight was that they had DirecTV on the back of each seat. You could pay 6 dollars for unlimited access, although the “free” time was just around 30 minutes, so I got to watch a little bit of Supernatural, since I was missing both Smallville and Supernatural while I was traveling.

We arrived in San Antonio, and Matt Sealey and Bill Buck from Genesi met us at the baggage claim. I’d never met either in person before so that was really nice. Matt and Bill brought us back to the conference center where we are staying, and showed us to our rooms as well as…

GIVING ME A SMARTBOOK!

Freaking awesome.

Tomorrow looks to be interesting, and I should probably head off and get some sleep.

So, on my laptop, if the display goes to sleep (blanks), if I ssh in, and tell it to reboot, or shut down, the display wakes up and shows me all the various services stopping and so forth… What controls that? Is it something in kernel? Is it something in a package? I ask because I have another machine that when I tell it to reboot, or shut down, the display doesn’t wake up, so I have no idea what the status of it is, without looking at it. Anyone out there know?