As usual, I’ve gotten way behind on my blogging. So I’ll try to catch up a little bit, now that the conference is almost over.

For the record, whatever /dev/clue may say, this conference rocks, and that seems to be the consistent message that I’m getting from everyone, even those folks who don’t know that I’m one of the planners. I’m enjoying myself more than last year, too.

OK, so, Tuesday.

On Tuesday I spoke three times, so I was busy the entire day. I did my auth talk, which is tried and true, so went well. I did my performance talk, which is brand new, so was a little more rocky. However, I have so many examples there that it was really better than I expected. And I also did my URL mapping talk. Invariably, people expect it to be a mod_rewrite talk. I either need to drop the talk entirely, or come up with a new title. I think it’s a useful talk, but everybody gets the wrong ideas about it.

Tuesday evening was the Sams authors dinner. We went to a great italian place. in attendance was Daniel Lopez, Geoff Young, Chris Shiflett, Greg Stein, John Coggeshall, Shelly Johnson and Scott … um … what was Scott’s last name?

After dinner, we went to Red Square, at Mandalay Bay, but they were entirely full – at least too full for a table for as many as we needed. So we wandered around for a while and found another place. By that time, our group was much smaller – just 5 of us – and a good time was had by all.

I was pretty exhausted by this time, and had to get som e sleep, as I was going to speak the next morning, so I headed back for bed.

So I know that there were other high points of Tuesday, so I need to ponder and write them down. So many wonderful things happen at these conferences, and if I don’t make a note of them right away, I tend to forget. Which can be very annoying.

OK, I need to write something before I fall asleep.

Several highlights for today.

“The Guru Is In” was moderately successful, at least from my perspective, although I have no not spoken with the other folks that participated. I had two people come to ask me questions, and I think I was able to help them.

It looks like I’ll be cancelling the Lightning Talks, due to lack of interest. This is disappointing, but will give me time to go to the Sams authors dinner, so it’s not all bad.

I also went up to Comdex today, which is a high-tech flea market. Nothing new or interesting, as far as I’m concerned. Same old stuff, some of it in new wrappers, most of it not. I went around the Open Source area of the conference, asking folks to exchange gpg keys, and one company (OSSI, by the way) knew what I was talking about. Come on, folks.

This evening, we had Sander’s key signing, which was, in my opinion, a big success. I will gain more signatures on my key than the total I had previously, which is very cool.

And then, after the key signing, I went over to Simon’s, a restaurant at the Hard Rock, for the O’Reilly author dinner. Thank you, Tim. it is greatly appreciated. And thank you, Gnat. As pathetic as it may sound, this was one of my life goals, and I am enormously pleased with having attained it.

And I am very very full and tired. I had a chicken curry, followed by a crème brul´e and cotton candy. Yes, cotton candy. It’s one of the things on their dessert menu. How cool is that.

Oh, yeah, I meant to mention, I now have a copy of the book, signed by both authors. Very very cool. It’s such a relief, pleasure, etc, to actually have the physical results of our work in my hot little hands.

I’ll try to get some other copies signed by both authors. The last time I had this chance, I got an *entire box* signed by both authors, and it got lost in the mail. 🙁

I gave my announcements at ApacheCon this morning, and now we have 56 people on IRC, rather than the 8 that we had earlier this morning. That’s kinda cool.

Stefano gave a *great* talk this morning about how the ASF works. I expect his presentation will be up on the wiki RSN.

RIght now, John Fowler from Sun is talking about “Looking Ahead: Challenges for Open Software”. This is way better than the Sun keynote last year. He’s actually talking about useful things, rather than it being a product pitch for products I’m not interested in.

I did my Intro to Apache talk this morning, and it went pretty well, I think. Although I ran out of time, as usual. I had a fantastic attendance, with several people signing up at the conference registration table.

Lunch was very good, as it usually is on tutorial day.

And then I was in meetings after that – starting with the Apachecon planners meeting, and now the ASF members meeting.

There’s nothing particularly exciting to tell about today. It’s been extremely full and fulfilling, but nothing really remarkable. If that makes sense.

I’m in the Bluegrass Airport (LEX) waiting for the plane to ApacheCon. Hopefully this set of flights will go more smoothly than the last one.

I grow very very weary of the self-deprecation that happens on IRC and mailing list.

Example:

<morka_> i’m really dumb and need to set up password protected page, like with .htaccess and .htpasswd
<morka_> are there any tutorial for really dumb people like me?

ok, now what was accomplished by that? I suppose this person is trying to encourage people to help him/her, but what I find that this makes me want to avoid this person. By telling me that they are dumb, I end up thinking that I want to avoid helping them, because they are unlikely to do any of the work themselves, and I’ll end up doing it for them.

When I go into a new forum, whether it is IRC or a mailing list, I try to present myself as someone who needs help, but who has already done the requisite homework (FAQs, Google, documentation). I’m not dumb, and I suspect that morka_ isn’t dumb either. So I don’t tell people that I’m dumb. What good would that do?

This evening a certan Rodent called to say that the book is done. I’ve been under so much stress lately that this was like a mastodon being lifted off of my back. Of course, there are still 2 or 3 other mastodons on by back, but this was one of the bigger ones.

Thanks, Ken.

I just received email from an organization that is willing to put my book in the hands of 500 independent movie makers! I can hardly wait for the movie version of Apache Administrators Handbook. That should really keep the audiences on the edge of their seats!