Another use for Evernote: Collect conference material

Before I’ll leave for DrupalCamp Vienna on Thursday night, I’ll have some preparations left to do. Where should I gather all the stuff — the hotel confirmation, the train reservation, links to places in Vienna I’d like to see? While many items land inside my email inbox, there also are website snapshots and other documents. And then, there’s the material I’ll collect at the conference itself: photos, notes, slides etc.

It’s great timing that Michael Gray just published his article, How to Use Evernote to Create the Ultimate Post Conference Reference Guide.

Although I’m already an Evernote premium subscriber, that’s a use case I haven’t thought of until now. But of course: Evernote will willingly store all the stuff I drop into or email to the notebook “DrupalCamp Vienna” that I just created. With my iPhone, I can shoot snapshots of presentation slides with my iPhone and have them made searchable through the Evernote text recognition mechanism. I’ll even be able to record sound snippets to transcribe later. This really makes sense.

Thanks for the tip, Michael!

Coming to OSDC

On April 29th and 30th, I’m taking the “opportunity to meet with Open Source professionals and insiders, gather and share information over 2 days of presentations, hands-on workshops and social networking” by visiting the Open Source Data Center Conference.

Talks I’m especially interested in are:

• Luke Kanies: Using Puppet for Unix automation and configuration management
• Alexei Vladishev: Open Source Enterprise Monitoring with Zabbix
• Florian Haas: Virtual consolidated HA: Virtualization with KVM, Pacemaker, and DRBD
• Balazs Scheidler: syslog-ng 3.0, opening new possibilities
• Kristian Köhntopp: Using kickstart and puppet to automate system administration
• Kristian Köhntopp: MySQL database architecture and performance in big environments
• Florian Forster: Performance analysis in big environments with collectd
• Michael Prokop: Open Source and enterprise: the attempt at convergence
• Marco Knüttel: Load balancing with Linux Virtual Server
• Jens Bothe: Design of CI classes for data centers in OTRS::ITSM
• Dr. Michael Schwartzkopff: Linux-HA Version 2
• Dennis Stücken: i-doit / Open Source CMDB
• Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Cluster
• Benedikt Stockebrand: IPv6 in the data center — but not without Open Source

I’m looking forward to getting insight into current developments and even more to meeting up with other IT executives. Are any of my ex-colleagues (apart from Kris, obviously) going to go to OSDC? I’d be happy to get together with you for some beer in the evening!