Obviously not in touch with the Open Source®™© world
O'Reilly is holding their annual Open Source™©® convention in Portland (again) at the end of July, and when I found out about it I thought that it might be a good idea to go (I know and/or know about a small subset of the presenters from soc.motss,soc.bi, and talk.bizarre, so it might be a good place to do some networking.) But the convention is a whole lotta p*rl, a whole lotta p*th*n, all the M*sql you can eat, and lots of advertising presentations by g**gl* (lots of presentations by g**gl*; I suppose that one of the advantages of being an early Linux adapter is that the high-level staff gets to take junkets to Portland and talk about how wonderful p*th*nville is) and their ilk.
I can't do it. I'm sure it would be good for my business prospects to go out there and press the flesh (it's not as if Open Source®™© is about technical prowess any more; the tools infrastructure has reached the point where, provided you've got enough horsepower to run them, it's pretty easy to put together code that does anything you might want to do [except for documentation; the state of the art for Open Source©®™ documentation {including the documentation I've written} is, um, insufficient] in a fairly timely matter. So all that's left is networking and self promotion,) but, to be perfectly honest, the idea of attending bores me stiff.
And if I want to be bored stiff, I can attend more meetings at work (where we use Linux! For business! And I get paid to do Open Source™©® programming!), where they pay me to attend. If I went to OSCON, it would cost me around US$2000, and I'd have to pay extra to buy the forks I'd subsequently plunge into my eyes.