Wednesday morning

So that I don’t get behind, I’ll go ahead and write about Wednesday morning at ApacheCon.

OK, I admit, I skipped ApacheCon this morning. However, being a firm believer that conferences are primarily about personal interaction, I don’t feel bad about this. I spent the morning with Legobuff, going geocaching. We found 8, and had one no-find. And I crossed the 100 mark. Woohoo!

The only real disappointment was that I wanted to hear Doc Searl’s talk, and we didn’t get back in time for that. Perhaps I’ll buy a CD of it, or see if I can find a transcript somewhere. His talks – at least the few that I’ve been to – are very interesting and insightful.

Tuesday

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.

Apachecon Monday

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.

The book

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. 🙁

Announcements

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.

ApacheCon day 0

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.

One more for the road.

I just got done reading One More For The Road, by Ray Bradbury. I expect I’ve mentioned that Dandelion Wine is my favorite book, and that I read it almost every summer. “One More” is a brilliant companion to DW, although it’s a very different kind of book. DW is a collection of short stories, but is also a novel. They are all set in the same time and place and with the same characters. They tell the story of one boy’s summer. One More is a collection of unrelated stories, but they have a common theme running through them.

While DW is a story about being a kid, and discovering the world, and growing up, “One More” is largely about the other end of ones life. There’s an interesting afterword in which Bradbury discusses the unintentional metaphors in his writing. If that is to be taken at face value, it’s possible that no such theme was intended. But what I see is a book about looking back on a very full life, and wondering if it could have been better, could have been more significant, and whether he can persuade other folks to take advantage of the opportunities that come to them.

I expect I’ll be reading this one again, if perhaps not as often as DW.

After the first time through, I think that the best story is “the nineteenth” in which he encounters an old man picking up golf balls on a golf course. I think I mentioned this story in an earlier posting, but I’m not sure. Perhaps we just discussed it on IRC.

“First Day” is also a fantastic story, and makes me very glad for the friends I have, and very sad for folks that look back on a long life and have no friends that have been with them all that time. That must be very lonely.

So, if you have to pick between the two, pick Dandelion Wine. It’s much happier. “One More for The Road” made me rather sad a number of times. But it’s worth reading, particularly if you’re a Bradbury fan.

Oh, and “Beasts” … I have absolutely no idea what that story is about.

Going to Vegas

No complaints on the flight out here. I watched two John Wayne movies (“Blue Steel” and “Dawn Rider”), finished Ray Bradbury’s “One More For The Road”, and resumed reading “July’s People.”

I managed to not get much in the way of breakfast, and miss lunch, so by the time I got here, I was famished. And I didn’t have any real idea what time it was. So after I got my stuff stashed at the hotel, I went out looking for food.

Ok, a word about the hotel. That word would be “wow.” This hotel suite is bigger than my appartment. Downstairs, I’ve got a sitting room, toilet, kitchen table, and bar. Upstairs is the bedroom and full bathroom. And halfway up the stairs, there’s a hottub/whirlpool. It’s quite a bit bigger than the suite I had last year, and closer to the main hotel buildings. Very very nice. The only problem with it, so far, is that the internet connection in here doesn’t work. But, when they offered to move me to a room where it does work, I declined. I’ll have quite enough network at the conference, and I can wait half a day for that.

So, anyways … I went out to find some food. I found a Subway store which was also a convenience store and a pizza place, right across the road from the Hard Rock. And after being in there for just a few minutes, Mads Toftum came in to get some food. So we chatted a while and had lunch/dinner/something together.

Afterwards, I came back to the hotel with the intention of going out to do some geocaching. I ended up only doing one, and it was just a little lame.

In Kentucky, virtual caches don’t get approved unless you actually have to go there and do a little work to find the answers. Here, apparently, it’s a little easier. There’s a lot to see here, and evidently there’s a virtual cache associated with all of it. This was, quite literally, a “drive by” cache, which you could do without even getting out of the car, or, to be honest, slowing down. I expect that you could do it from the comfort of your home by looking up some stuff on the WWW. I won’t tell you which one it is, or we’ll have a bunch of people logging the cache who have never been here.

So, although it was pretty neat to see, I somehow don’t think it warranted an actual cache. I’m almost reluctant to even log it.

The Margin Is Too Narrow