Nearly everyone I met in person was quite welcoming and friendly. It was remarkably free from the usual dick-waving contests that often happen in the tech world. Even the back channel was civil and free from the the usual insecure snarkiness and rudeness you get in many online tech discussions.

I think some of the good qualities stem from the fact that people working in libraries are 1) often more socially/historically aware and 2) likely to encounter the same people repeatedly in their careers in the small-ish library technical community, so it really doesn’t make sense for them to crap where they eat.

Having said all that, I felt there were a lot of in-jokes being thrown around by some of the core members of the community as deliberate shibboleths to show they were part of the too-cool-for-school group and that they were not that OTHER group.

The more relaxed community-oriented aspect, smaller conference size and focus on code are refreshing, but seem to breed more cliquishness and in-group/out-group behavior than other conferences I’ve been to. I’m not sure why this would be the case, but it seems to be from what I observed.

I have written something similar my self which shows how to use Firefox via a Dynamic SSH tunnel. This can be very useful at college or university to unblock facebook, myspace and all the other social networking sites which are likely to be blocked.

You can find this post over at ssh tunneling via proxy it may be of some interest to your readers?

Regards

@Jonathan: your memory must be short because the comments in that crosstech post I linked to are j-rock all the way down