The first night in Amsterdam, I went straight to sleep, so yesterday was pretty good. Last night, I was up almost all night, or so it seemed, and today I am exhausted. Which is bad, because I have to talk all day long. I’m going the second day of the “Apache Nuts To Bolts” training class. JimJag did day one.
The presentation bit is here. Yeah. I know. Comic Sans. Get over it.
Lunch was great, but now I’m tired *and* full, so the afternoon is going to be a little long. Just 3 hours to go.
I’m in Amsterdam again. ApacheCon starts tomorrow, and I’ll be doing a two-day Apache HTTPd Server training class with JimJag.
I slept quite a bit on the plane, which was unexpected. So I’m going to try to stay up instead of napping, so that I can sleep tonight. Perhaps I’ll take a stroll downtown – perhaps as far as Rembrandt Platz. But now that I’m deciding to go somewhere, I’m starting to feel … very … sleepy.
This year, preparing for ApacheCon has been unusual. I guess it changes every year, but this year I really would rather be staying home. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that the conference will be fabulous. It always is, both as a technical conference, and as a time to catch up with longtime friends. But the trees are just starting to green, and it’s warming up, and I will miss my family an awful lot. And I’m just not that exited about Amsterdam. I’ve seen Amsterdam. I’ve seen the bits that truly interest me, and may try to go to the Van Gogh museum again this year, if I have time. But I don’t care for the red light district, and I don’t care for the coffee shops, and I don’t have a lot of cash laying around to spend on the admittedly amazing restaurants, so I expect to spend most of the time in the hotel working on long-past writing deadlines, which I’d really rather do in my own home.
That said, I’ll say again that I’m sure the conference will be amazing, and as soon as I get there and get immersed in it, I’ll have a good time. Just not real fired up about it right now, with just 4 hours left before I need to leave for the airport.
I wonder if I packed my toothbrush …
The ApacheCon Europe 2009 poster is available now. You should print it out and post it in all sorts of prominent places where geeks hang out, so that they can come have fun with us.
Shameless Plug:
ApacheCon EU is just a few weeks away. I’ll be doing a two day training on the Apache HTTP Server, along with Jim Jagielski. He’s listed as the instructor, but we’ll both be tag-teaming on this.
Day one will be an overview of the entire server product, and day two will be hands-on, recipe-based examples, showing you how to do specific tasks that come up every day as a web server admin.
Here’s the training description.
Here’s the conference website.
Come see me in Amsterdam. It’ll be lots of fun. And I’ll be going down to the Van Gogh museum on Wednesday afternoon. You should come with me.
ApacheCon EU 2009 registration is now open!
23-27 March — Mövenpick Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands
http://www.eu.apachecon.com/
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Registration for ApacheCon Europe 2009 is now open – act before early bird prices expire 6 February. Remember to book a room at the Mövenpick and use the Registration Code: Special package attendees for the conference registration, and get 150 Euros off your full conference registration.
Lower Costs – Thanks to new VAT tax laws, our prices this year are 19% lower than last year in Europe! We’ve also negotiated a Mövenpick rate of a maximum of 155 Euros per night for attendees in our room block.
Quick Links:
http://xrl.us/aceu09sc See the schedule
http://xrl.us/aceu09hc Get your hotel room
http://xrl.us/aceu09rc Register for the conference
Other important notes:
– Geeks for Geeks is a new mini-track where we can feature advanced technical content from project committers. And our Hackathon on Monday and Tuesday is open to all attendees – be sure to check it off in your registration.
– The Call for Papers for ApacheCon US 2009, held 2-6 November
2009 in Oakland, CA, is open through 28 February, so get your submissions in now. This ApacheCon will feature special events with
some of the ASF’s original founders in celebration of the 10th anniversary of The Apache Software Foundation.
http://www.us.apachecon.com/c/acus2009/
– Interested in sponsoring the ApacheCon conferences? There are plenty
of sponsor packages available – please contact Delia Frees at
delia@apachecon.com for further information.
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ApacheCon EU 2008: A week of Open Source at it’s best!
Hackathon – open to all! | Geeks for Geeks | Lunchtime Sessions
In-Depth Trainings | Multi-Track Sessions | BOFs | Business Panel
Lightning Talks | Receptions | Fast Feather Track | Expo… and more!
This week I’m back in my other life.
At home, I have two lives. From about 8 in the morning until about 5 in the afternoon, I’m an IT manager, with a team of 5 very talented and productive programmers and designers, writing web applications and designing websites. This is extremely busy, and sometimes stressful, but for the most part I enjoy it thoroughly.
The rest of the time, I have a wife and two kids, and a lovely house, and I enjoy that life thoroughly too.
I do the first of these in order to pay for the second of these.
But then a few weeks of the year I do conferences, and this is truly a different existence. This week I’m at ApacheCon in New Orleans, with about a hundred of my third life friends, and a bunch of strangers that have come to hear us talk about Apache technologies. Yesterday and Today, I hung out in a board room with 10 of my friends to plan the next one, which will be in Amsterdam next spring, and I think we’ve put together a pretty great schedule for it.
And this time around, my Best Beloved has come along with me, to see what it is that I do at these things, meet some of my friends here, and generally enjoy this other part of my life that she doesn’t get to see much of.
I used to spend a lot more time on Apache stuff than I do now. With age and marriage come changing priorities. Also, with the new job comes an intense desire to not spend one more moment on the computer when I get home. I tend, also, to have a lot of extra projects going all the time, and for the last several months, they’ve all had to do with Apache, but none of them were involvement with the actual Apache community, which is a little sad. They were, for the most part, writing Apache training materials, which I enjoy, and I think I’m good at, but it’s a little isolating from the great people that comprise Apache itself.
Another thing that I have done with Apache over the last two years, and have largely abandoned since early this summer, is FeatherCast. I hope to pick that up again this week Perhaps as early as this morning. I really enjoy talking with folks from all over the technical world, and Apache particularly, and then sharing those conversations with you. There are so many people, so much smarter than I, working on fascinating projects, and it’s exciting both to talk with them, but also to give them the opportunity to tell the whole world about what they’re doing.
So, these weeks immersed in my third life are always rejuvenating, exciting … and generally expensive. But, I hear that my training class sold really well, so perhaps we’ll at least break even for the week.
Registration is open for ApacheCon in New Orleans. I’ll be giving a two-day training class on the Apache Web Server along with Jim Jagielski. Should be a lot of fun. You should come.
On Thursday night (yes, I’m still catching up from Thursday night) we had the traditional ApacheCon boat ride. You know, if an event that’s only happened once before can be considered a tradition.
