Older blog entries for epcraig (starting at number 3)

Nine hours to download Helix-Gnome. Maybe I need a real job.

Well, the only person I know here hasn't posted an entry since my last one, and I'm therefore uncertified. Oh well.

OK, the only previous entry was before the Oregon Country Fair, which EUGLUG attended in as organised a fashion as this anarchist crew gets. The Oregon Country Fair is one of the last ongoing Hippy Festivals, originally founded as the Oregon Rennaisance Faire to raise money for a local Waldorf school (still doing nicely, thank you) and renamed after some nasty comments by Rennaisance Faire trademark holders. The Oregon Country Fair's become more eclectic in its charities, tending more towards funding libraries and ecology interests these days. No longer is it a major drug festival, if it ever was. In these days of Zero Tolerance the OCF has gone to enforcing a policy of "No Drugs, No Alcohol, and Cover Those Genitals!" Well, at least when/where the public can see.

In EUGLUG's case, "anarchist" is descriptive of the operating philosophy, not the philosphical bent of any large part of the membership. The real "Eugene Anarchists" whom our beloved mayor and the Seattle police blamed for the WTO debacle appear to use Windows or Macs on the rare occasions they get online, Open Source is still beneath their radar. So far EUGLUG members have disappointed each other by not getting busted at any demonstrations or protests. Second hand experience of police brutality is really preferable to actually getting gassed, clobbered, and arrested one's own self. (Besides, I already did that back in my Vietnam protesting days).

Anyway, a half dozen of us went to the 31st Oregon Country Fair as "official" Open Source advocates, where each of us showed up on time (despite my organising this, at least one EUGLUGer is still unmet by me, but he apparently showed up on time and did his shift) and had fun giving away CD-ROM's, T-shirts, and tiny (3") Tux's with suction cups on strings running out of the tops of their heads. We ran out of Tux's , ran low on RedHat T's, made a dent in the thousand or so CD's we took out there. Had a great time playing with Eugene Free Net's Linux laptops. Well, we were sharing the Communications Booth with Eugene Free Net and Psychiactric Survivors and one or two of several underground newspapers in Eugene. None of us wanted to take our own boxes out there, not being too sure of the power/connection situation, which turned out to be precarious indeed.

So here we were, a bunch of geeks feeling a bit crowded by the psychiactric survivors and Freenet nerds (several of whom are also in EUGLUG) at the (newly renamed) Doors of Expression (with actual door signboard) booth, coming to the reluctant conclusion that not bringing our own boxes was a good idea, although we may well do that next year, now that we know we could succeed with the idea with a bit of planning. We're bringing Linux to the Hippies! Well, not really, most (but by no means all) of the CD's we gave out turned out to be for upgrades. Hippy nerds are actually pretty often clued in. While it was a bit weird joining the Mad Pride festivities, somehow feeling there might be falses pretenses involved, it was an undeniably fun experience.

Next year will be better.

Next project is The Eugene Celebration in the middle of September.

Got word today that, indeed, the passes to the Country Fair for EUGLUG's presence are in the mail. Seth, of course has acquired lots of goodies for us to pass out.

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