I've never been to PenguinCon, but it'd almost be worth going just to see if they do!
Most geeky gathering I've ever been to was a W3C technical conference, and if people were comparing regexes, it was by IM or email - absolutely everywhere you looked, inside and outside the conference hall and seminar rooms, people were typing away on their laptops. I rather suspect, though, that most of the stuff they were saying on IM was more along the lines of "Know anywhere we can go for a drink afterwards?"
