The OSCON experience

So I had the pleasure of going to OSCON this year and seeing a few hero's in the OSS world. I got to meet one of the people that inspired this site, Dan Langille. Though he said he'd never heard of this site (ok this isn't really a big site at all), it was fun to finally meet him. He was the one who I learned a lot of my basics on FreeBSD on via freebsddiary.com years ago (like late 90's). This was probably my first conference like this I'd been to and it really opened my eyes and gave me more of a sense that there is a huge community out there working on FreeBSD, Linux, PHP, Perl, and and tons of other Open Source projects. I guess since I've created my own irc server and hang out on my own site all the time, it's easy to think that the community at large isn't as big as it really is. I know now that there are many people out there, and probably more people than I think visiting my humble site.