I had a great time at OSCON this year, and it is going to be a challenge to take all the of the technology and inspiration that I have after going to this conference and pour it into work. Some random notes:

• why the lucky stiff put on quite an interesting show. Even though there were many glitches, I was highly entertained.
• Ruby, driven largely by Ruby-on-Rails, got the most buzz of the show. Driven by great speakers like David Heinemeier Hansson and the aforementioned lucky stiff, I was compelled to go to all of the Ruby talks that I could. I bought the Rails book online, and am currently trying to come up with a way to use Rails at work.
• Dick Hardt's talk was brilliant, and now I'm interested in identity management. I went to a LID talk, and that was a bust, so I think that I need to check out OpenID instead.
• This was a hard conference to blog. A lot of information comes at you pretty quickly, and it was hard for me to synthesize it all into what I wanted to write down. I tend to just copy down the slides, which is a pretty dumb thing to do, since they tend to appear online after the conference. So, I need to get better at listening, understanding, and regurgitating -- all in realtime.
• Planet OSCON was a huge success (IMO). It allowed me to keep track of what all of the other OSCON bloggers were saying, without getting noise from the entire Internet.

All things being equal, I definitely got a lot out of OSCON this year. But, there were still somethings missing. Namely, I'm pretty interested in Blogs, Wiki, and other forms of social software. So, I'm wondering if there is a different conference that I should be going to (ETech, maybe?). We'll see how OSCON applies to life and work, and that will guide my decision about wether-or-not to go next year.
-Andy.