The event has about 30 programming tracks, each one of them a little convention in its own right. If it's the crowd that bothers you, all you'd have to do is look at the schedule grid and find something that looks interesting, then go. Alot of the panel discussions, movie screenings, etc. take place in meeting rooms (classroom-sized). Once in there, you can forget about the other 30,000 wandering around outside.
Because of the level of weirdness of the event, even just wandering around aimlessly can be interesting. I've been at conventions and gotten the feeling that everyone else is having more fun than I am. That's when I go have a beer while giving my copy of the schedule another looking-over.
I think maybe DragonCon (and similar events) needs its own thread here.
BTW, there's another Hans Reiser article on Rotten. Don't have the address for it at the moment. Now he's offering to tell the police where the body is in exchange for a lighter sentence. That douchebag!
