During the last year, I have attended 4 talks on caldav and other shared calendaring topics. Closer to the start of the year, it was a neat idea that we might have some day. In the middle of the year, it was clear that they had some almost-working stuff that was actually very cool. At Educause, I was very impressed – it wasn’t quite there yet, but it almost was, and it was amazingly slick, with a concerted focus on interop above everything else.

Well, yesterday I went to Lisa’s talk, and was more impressed than ever. It looks like Chander is right on the edge of being usable by mortals, but even more excitingly – to me – is the Cosmo server and the Scooby web client application thingy. It looks like it might still be another year out, but just between you and me, I think she was just trying to be modest. They’re doing some amazing things, and it’s exciting to think that we’ll be able to solve all our calendaring problems in the very near future.

Wow, it’s been a long day. I just spoke three times today, and I’m very tired.

Last night we had the members meeting, and Julian took a bunch of pictures of the members. Very cool stuff. Then I was up way too late talking with David and Mads and Chris. So I was tired this morning to start with.

This morning I talked about DAV, and Greg sat in and helped me out a lot when I didn’t know the answers to some of the more technical questions. This afternoon, I talked about mod_rewrite, and Mads sat in and helped me with some of the technical questions. So in all, I got some very good assistance with my talks.

Also this morning, Cory Doctorow spoke, and he was great. His talk was entitled “Open Source Isn’t a Crime, Yet”, and he talked about all the ways that Open Source software is set to become a crime in many contexts, in many parts of the world.

And, he used the Magic Underpants Gnomes as one of his examples. Can’t go wrong with that.

Julian Cash is our photographer for ApacheCon. The man is a genius. He’s doing this cool thing called “painting with light” where he takes time exposures in a dark room, while playing with colored lights. The results are amazing. This and this are other favorites. I’d be glad to show you the rest of them, too. They’re more impressive in higher resolution. And I expect he’ll have the other ones he’s taking this week up on his website some time soon.

I don’t remember when I first came to San Diego. It was for an O’Reilly conference. There were two of them here, but I don’t remember what the years were. But it’s always been Summer when I’ve been here. This is the fourth time that I’ve stayed at this hotel, and it’s just a little weird to see the Christmas stuff everywhere. And “Jingle Bell Rock” is playing on the sound system.

Half the people here are in shorts. Which brought about a strange train of thought. It seems that I’ve now been in the US for long enough that it seems normal for Christmas to be cold. I’ll have to do something about that. Perhaps spend Christmas somewhere with a sane climate next year? 🙂

The folks across the aisle from me on the plane had apparently never been taught the difference between an indoor voice and an outdoor voice. Mom and Dad, and a little boy. The little boy was the best behaved of the tree, I think.

It was evident that they had not flown before, and the little guy wanted to explore a little bit before takeoff. He was forbidden to do so. He was also forbidden to speak, move, put his feet on the seat in front of him, look out the window, fiddle with the buttons, touch anything, or breathe. Ok, I made up the breathe bit.

Naturally, being 3 or 4 years old, this upset him a little bit, and he used his outdoor voice (actually, his football stadium voice) to let us all know that. His father promptly disavowed any responsibility for his welfare and looked the other way.

During the flight, the mother and father loudly disagreed about the timezone change, the lateness of the flight, whose fault it was that there weren’t enough toys for “the kid”, whether or not to call the person who was picking them up when they got there, and various other entertaining topics. Meanwhile, “the kid” screamed quite a bit. It was a charming picture of family unity.

I’m in SD now, about to go down for some breakfast. The view is simply amazing, looking out over the Marina. Kinda like this, but from a lot higher up and a little to the right.

I should be leaving for the airport in about 10 minutes to go to ApacheCon. Now that the moment is here, I’m getting rather excited about it. I’ve been too busy for the last two weeks to really fully realize that it’s almost here. Looking forward to a *great* conference.

There’s still time to register, if you haven’t already. Don’t miss it!

Once again, our *brilliant* weather teams at our local news outlets have predicted four to six inches of snow overnight, and we got *almost* enough to see on the ground, if you look really closely. So I guess any worries that my flight out will be cancelled were misplaced.

If you’re not registered for ApacheCon yet, you really need to go do it. Now. We’ll wait.

In addition to some amazing keynote speakers, we also have a great slate of talks, and fantastic events going on during the conference. And San Diego is much nicer this time of year than wherever you are. Just ten days to go.

Just one more day to get the Super Early Bird Special Prices for ApacheCon registration. Go on. You know you want to.