Thanks to the encouragement and support of a great many people and organizations (a huge thanks to Walter, Pia, Martin, David, Greg, Tabitha, Google, and multiple people named Chris) and recent events which caused a sudden lack of any schedule conflicts, I have acquired plane tickets (and learned how not to acquire plane tickets in the future), stuffed an eigenset of belongings into my brown backpack, and started to repeat the mantra “I am young and foolish,” because… really, how else do you describe the decision to spend your severance pay on a last-minute trip to a hemisphere you’ve never set foot in? (“Educational,” perhaps?)

I’m attending as a volunteer for two projects – OLPC and Sugar Labs. Last-minute plane tickets mean I’ll miss the miniconfs, but I still plan on, among other things, getting over my long-held (vague and irrational) “Here Be Dragons” fear of kernel hacking by finally mucking with my own. I’m also looking forward to meeting a good number of people (including many LinuxChix) in open-source whom I’ve admired for quite some time and asking them lots and lots of questions once I get excited enough to forget that I’m shy. And I will, for the second time (in 2 weeks, too) miss a keysigning. Oh well. I’ll make one someday, I’m sure.

Suggestions for things to do, people to meet, and events to document are very welcome – I’m playing most of this by ear, and my transcription skills* are open to anyone who needs ‘em.

*Old journalistic habits die hard; I type, sketch, record, or photograph everything I go to. As Ed McNierney said at FUDCON: “I’ve discovered a new form of communication. It’s called the Mel-a-gram. If you want to document something, you send Mel there, and then magically, you know everything.”