LUG Mauritius organized a meetup yesterday at L’Escalier.
I was supposed to deliver a short presentation on Project Evil Genius. Since my car is still kaput I opted to go by bus. Now L’Escalier is a far place from Providence. So, I went till Réduit and Avinash Seetaram (my colleague at Orange) got us a Taxi from Port Louis. Selven called me a couple of times to enquire if we’d reach on time.
The trip was kinda long but we managed to reach the Kambar Moonetra Kootham Hall sometime before noon. As we entered Avinash Meetoo was already delivering his speech. There was around a dozen of people I think but the presence of kids running here & there made it more beautiful. It was more like a family meetup – the Linux family. :-)
Of course, there can’t be a LUG meeting without beer. As we stepped in Selven handed Avinash & me a can of beer each. Avinash felt kinda weird since he attended the LUG for the first time. Having beer there was kinda odd for him. But what could be better than having a semi-chilled beer after the long trip by bus & taxi … just before your presentation! Héhé …
Selven really did a great job at the meetup. He arranged for the hall, beverages, laptops & other accessories … and without forgetting the praiseworthy briyani – oh yeah, he even cared for the vegetarian geeks.
Avinash Meetoo did his presentation, then Selven and afterwards it was my turn. Since, I had to travel by bus & I don’t have a laptop case I left the laptop at home. Yeah, I was also stupid to not have thought of bringing my presentation slides on a pendrive. One thing I did though was informing Selven to get a white board & marker prior to my coming. Those were enough for my presentation. After lunch I had another can of beer (it was free anyway) and was geared to start my presentation.
Photos available at lugm.org, courtesy of Ajay Ramjatan. Some photos by Avinash Meetoo are available on flickr.com.
My presentation comprised of what is Project Evil Genius and how it started. I continued and talked things about the .mu domain, a little bit about my blog, openSUSE and I was really happy when Jochen Kirstätter complimented the idea of having more development/programming projects within LUG. There was a mobile app idea that has been brewing in my mind for quite some time. It involved an English/French – to creole translator that should be useful to people visiting Mauritius. While talking about encouraging developer ideas, I just popped this thing. Yeah… I guess I’ll be giving it life soon.
By 14h30 the meetup was over. Everybody was happy! Kids were still enjoying. New members appreciated the give-away of Linux magazines.