Day 0, Fedora APAC Budget Planning FAD: Pre-Release Party and a lot of Tom Yam Soup!
These months have been very busy for me on the Fedora front and for a change, my involvement in Fedora has been very non-technical. After years of shying away from it, I finally became a Fedora Ambassador and have been involving myself in a lot more non-technical things like organizing events and attending meetings. One such meeting I was looking forward to recently was the face to face meeting of some APAC ambassadors to plan for the budget for FY16 at Phnom Penh, Cambodia. This series of posts is a report of the event as I saw it.
My travel itinerary for Camboda was fairly packed; I was to fly in on Friday night and then fly out early morning on Monday. I would have ideally liked to conduct some workshops around systems programming but it seems like the aversion to any kind of low level programming is even worse in Cambodia than in India. Maybe the situation will be different in future. However, my packed schedule also meant that I would have missed the Fedora 21 release party (F21 is not out yet, but the party was already planned and the organizers did not want to shift it or rename it) on Friday.
But Somvannda would make sure I didn’t, at least not all of it.
I reached the hotel room in Phnon Penh at about 9PM and immediately, Somvannda had arranged for me to be taken to the DAI office for the Fedora Release Party. The cake, talks and a lot of the food was over, but the people and drinks were still there. I got a very warm welcome from Somvannda, Nisa, Tuan, Izhar, Danishka and Sirko and they also introduced me to Greta, the host of the party. After quick introductions, we had a few informal discussions about what we were going to talk about over the next two days, but we were mostly just drinking and eating whatever was left. I nibbled away even though I had been stuffing myself with food (Tom Yam soup FTW!) at the Bangkok airport while I had waited for 5 hours for my connection to Phnom Penh; the dry pastries were amazing!
The only remaining member of the party was Alick and he was not expected till about midnight. All of us waited up till he arrived, said our hellos and then turned in for the night. The next two days were going to see a lot of action, but we didn’t know it then.