I went to SCaLE 22x! Snow in March and Sushi at “GameStop”

Last Updated: 2025 March 16 (Sat Mar 15 2025)

• Cool Booths at the Expo Hall
• Meshtastic Sense Of Humor
• The thousand dollar joke, turned to $1500
• Silent Films at Hotel Dena
• Open Source Career Day
• SushiStop, a sushi place that’s branded like GameStop
• I’d go again

I came to the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) with:

• a heltec-v3 radio
• printed copies of my resume
• and a camera (obviously)

Warning: I am not paid off by the businesses mentioned in this blog. :D

SCaLE takes place in the Pasadena Convention Center within the nice part of Los Angeles (Pasadena). Last year was the first time I had gone, but I could only do a day trip. This year, I still missed the first round of discounted hotel rooms, but I caught the second round of discounts and stayed for Saturday and Sunday.

A drive from northern San Diego to Los Angeles is typically unpleasant. Traffic becomes needlessly stop-and-go, and San Diegans have to be careful not to drive into toll roads. Recently, it had rained, thus the LA smog wasn’t as heavy. Along the way, there was a nice view of snowy mountain peaks, not common for March.

According to other attendants, Friday had more activity than Saturday. As expected, on Sunday, the convention winds down and ends.

Cool Booths at the Expo Hall

Meshtastic Sense Of Humor

Meshtastic is a mesh network for long-ranged, low power communications using little $20 radios. The radio can be connected to a smartphone with Bluetooth, and through a Meshtastic app from F-Droid, messages can be broadcasted and emoji-reacted.

At SCaLE, the wifi wasn’t doing so hot, but the Meshtastic booth opened a chat channel called SCaLEtastic. Here, anyone with a little radio could read or send messages to one another. Most messages were quite quirky.

Fun note, I met both of the people running the Meshtastic booths at Irvine Underground last month.

The thousand dollar joke, turned to $1500

Arm Holdings (Arm = Advanced RISC machines) makes appearances at SCaLE.

Last year, I walked up to the booth of three Arm employees and asked.

“Are you guys compromised by the NSA?”

The three employees quietly stared like deer in headlights until one of them broke the silence.

“No! We’re British.”

The two other employees, still shocked and haven’t said a word, looked at the guy with “what are you doing” written over their faces.

“We’re compromised by the GCHQ!” the same guy continued.

Then the rest of them took it easy and laughed.

Later in the spring of 2024, I bought around $1000 worth of $ARM at $100-110 dollars each. In the same year, $ARM skyrocketed to $150-170 depending. There was a stressful week around the summer in which the stock was making $10 moves either up or down each day. I sold around $154 and told myself I wasn’t going to bother stressing over the charts or whether it was going to make another crazy move higher. But it just so happens around the late summer or early autumn the market crashed over the “yen carry trade”. (I barely understand what happened.) So I was lucky that year.

This year, the same guys don’t seem to be representing Arm, but there was an English employee (that or he had serious voice acting talent).

“Ah yes, we are compromised by the GCHQ,” he laughed to last year’s story.

He also chucked about the stock price fluctuations, stating that $ARM is around the $120s price range now. Disclosure: I now hold Arm stock.

Silent Films at Hotel Dena

When discounted rooms were offered, the Hilton Hotel appeared to have filled up, and SCaLE organizers resorted to making reservations at Hotel Dena. Compared to the Hilton, Hotel Dena is closer to the convention center and has side entrances adjacent to the alley between it and the convention center. Thus, going from Hotel Dena to the convention center doesn’t involve walking through traffic. So I don’t know how it wasn’t the first pick.

The lobby was decorated with antiques. During my stay, an old, silent film was playing on the projector.

I didn’t have any complaints about the room with two queen sized beds. The place was clean, and the tables had handy power outlets and USB ports to charge devices from. My room was on the same floor as a small gym which had a squat machine. Intentionally or not, the squat machine had elevated handlebars which could be used for pullups.

After a day of walking and talking, I quickly emptied the complimentary large bottle of water that comes with the room. Conveniently, the gym has a water dispenser. I didn’t bother with the coffee machine, but my travel companion complained that the coffee machine in the room was dirty.

The overnight stay doesn’t come with a light breakfast, but there was cafe at the end of a lobby that serves lox for breakfast. Orange juice was overpriced however ($7).

Slight Confusion over Parking

We arrived at Pasadena before check-in and needed to park. Therefore, we got a parking pass before getting the pass from the hotel. However, parking comes with the hotel stay, and we were worried we paid twice for parking. However, this solves itself in that we had to scan only the pass from the hotel on our way out.

Open Source Career Day

Open Source Career Day (OSCD) is on Sunday to help people with career goals. It typically comes with resume reviews, interview practice, and workshops. OSCD is free with SCaLE registration. They also give a 50% discount code (JOBS) on tickets for SCaLE as well. (I didn’t know about this before.) From the workshop, I got the feedback I needed for my resume, perspective of the interview process, and what companies want to hear about a candidate.

If you told me a resume is a marketing document and to highlight my achievements with nothing to delineate the advice from saying “to brag”, I would naturally avoid bragging but still have a hard time writing. The result would be honest but plain or uninspired.

If I heard the words I needed to hear,

• to be unique
• illustrate a compelling narrative
• explain the effect a project had (or the effect on the company through a role)

I can do that, but whether my revised resume results in a new job is another story.

According to them, my interview was stronger than my resume, and my resume was underselling myself. The story an interviewer needed to hear (or a story at all) wasn’t being told. But a few minutes is more room to go into detail about projects than a few sentences of space rationed between sections on my resume. I guess I’ll lower the font size?

Their words not mine: I’m also “playing on Ultra Hard mode” for not having a LinkedIn account. I ought to write down the things I miss out on for the sake of privacy as the “cost of privacy” some day, or just fold and join like an ordinary person. Overall, I left OSCD workshop with more confidence than I came in with.

SushiStop, a sushi place that’s branded like GameStop

We go here because SCaLE hosts dinner but not lunches.

Ryan Cohen and his legion of Reddit investors would never have come up with a sushi cafe at game store.

(This place has no actual affiliation with GameStop as far as I can tell.)

SushiStop is a restaurant within walking distance from the Pasadena Convention Center. A friend and I found it after wandering around Marengo Avenue, and so far, we go there whenever we visit Pasadena.

This time, I ordered Shiromi Trio, Gunkan Trio, and a Bluefin Hand Roll. The hand roll has some wasabi in it. I skip wasabi when going for sushi, but the roll was good regardless. Out of the Gunkan Trio, I was reluctant to try what could be finely shredded meat covered in an unknown sauce. The stuff turned out to be some kind of shellfish. The sauce was light.

Did I eat with my friends? (Get my order filled at the same time as everyone else.) Not this time.

I’d go again

At SCaLE, I…

• got new clothes from SCaLE and the EFF
• shilled my blog over Meshtastic
• met friendly people and new acquaintances from OpenSUSE
• got ideas for a better resume
• took way too many photos

The hotel rooms were $195 per night (=$250 after taxes and parking, expensive), but I’d still go for SCaLE 23x. Maybe I’ll get there on Friday and spend one night sleeping in a car? Next time, I would join the Birds of a Feather sessions.

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