Another wicked pissah WordPress blog
And I sang for the closing number. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house… (see other posting)
To copy the many to-do lists floating around planetapache and the like, I’ll post my to-do list now (after the event).
This is mostly for myself for followups:
- Policy on talk content; provide links to past shows (cf. email to planners)
- Contract (whatever)
- Azul release
- Will Glass’ scholarships
- Work with Susie
- Work with Sally (ironic ordering, eh?)
- Chris’s CSS and DrBack-haus’ blog tool
- foaf-a-matic setup
- Organize feedback / do statistics
- Marketing planning
- Susie’s logo policy review
Woke up exactly in enough time to get a cuppa before chairing a most excellent session on SpamAssassin. Too bad not enough people appreciate just how much time it saves them in reading their email every day!
More conference organizing, getting session chairs.
Chaired Rich’s mod_rewrite session (where I learned stuff – imagine!)
Lunch
After party
etc. (TBD)
My previous post was eaten by misconfigured WordPress settings. Oh well. It was good, but perhaps a little underedited due to the amount of champagne I had had.
Stay tuned for updates, it was the best day ever at ApacheCon!
A note about the numbering: ApacheCon is a conference that serves many purposes. We have Tutorials at the start of the week – detailed classes with the experts in ASF technology. Alongside those, we have the Hackathon, a place for committers already working on ASF stuff to get together informally before the conference. Then we typically have 3 days of full sessions, with keynotes and all the stuff you normally associate with technology conferences.
The conference opening was great. Sander gave the state of the feather and went on and on about how much stuff the ASF really does – I suppose even I was surprised to realize how fat the incubator is: 38 podlings in incubation as of the last board meeting. Phew.
Our opening keynote speaker, Cliff Stoll, was the star though. He’s the classic distracted, wavy long gray hair, glasses-wearing physics teacher. But he also has a significant intellectual manic streak, and can weave a story out for hours. His talk really was about measuring the speed of light (even though it wasn’t technically about that), but it was really about being eccentrically entertaining and enlightening.
Possibly the best thing was that Cliff hung out with us for the afternoon, and had a crowd of acolytes throughout the day. Oh: even better: he makes kleinbottle.com – pretty cool. And the largest glass klein bottle he’s ever commissoned was requested by the father of one of my high school friends (the Abeles). Now that was a pretty darn random 6 degrees moment.
Sessions – good, not that I really saw them. Spent a lot of the day getting session chairs, which was eaiser than expected, especially once I got a few folks to proxy to get their communities to sign up too.
Reception was fine. PGP Key signing was fine, although next year I have to volunteer to help Sander out (No, I’m not going to lead it, but I’ll help).
Then I just aggregated with successive crowds until I accepted the inevitable to go to the Sun after-party with open bar at a local hangout. Free beer, and I got the last of the non-fried appetizers that they had ordered, which was good. I suppose the highlight was watching Geir, Simon, Leo, and ???? sitting on the low stage, using a karaoke machine, and arguing about licensing beliefs between Sun and the ASF. One of those scenes that’s really fun for a bit (I mean, we have a couple hundred people really just drinking free beer and laughing at them – although they were paying attention). But to keep the momentum going they really needed to start sending them blinky shots every 15 min and make them keep talking.
Greg and company had of course found a local to get them into the next exotic place, but one or two bars is enough for me so I actually went to read in bed and get enough sleep for tomorrow.
Whoo-hoo, this is getting fun. Once again lunch snuck up on me unawares; in fact I was so surprised, I’ve already forgotten where we ate. That happens sometimes.
The hackathon was fairly productive for me, although I didn’t really hack much code, just conference stuff and people stuff. I really wish I could regularly make our Europe conference, since I hate to have to wait a year to reconnect with all these wonderful people. 
I did sneak in a swim between bouncing from here to there, which was nice. Then came the member’s reception which was great, both for the beer and finally getting to talk about my upcoming paper with a few folks and getting a couple of great new perspectives. Plus geeking wil a fellow gamer who’s playing a barbarian these days: it was nice finally finding one of us who also does the RPG world as well – I almost expected that to be more people.
Dinner was passably good but completely hilarious with Rich, David, Chris, and (Rich’s friend who’s name I’ve forgotten). Dinner was mexican with a completely spaced out waiter (I wonder if that’s a theme for the week), but it was outside on the deck above the fray and so comfortable. Then we argued about where to continue drinking – of course. The first bar wasn’t acceptable, so I helped convince people to walk to the Martini Bar, which I was looking forward to. Oh well.
Call me a traditionalist, but only having three gins in stock (Tanq, Bombay, and Sapphire), plus no limes, really means you don’t deserve the name of Martini Bar. At least the bartender was really nice about it, and everyone else was happy with a beer for the time being as we told stories and got sucked into the TV behind the bar. I’m so glad we don’t have cable at home; it’s really worth watching unless you have a crowd that’s drinking. Praised be the MST3K ideal.
I ended up waking up (no alarm, still must finish getting rid of this cold) just in time to coincidentally get to the floor as tutorials were starting. I felt all virtuous for being there on time even though it didn’t matter for me.
Had breakfast with the President, which I figured would fulfill my prestige quota for the day*. Had a great discussion about a number of stuff going on behind the scenes, some of which (I hope) will get itself resolved this week. And oddly enough had the same waiter that my party had the previous night – he was only slightly better in the morning. French toast wasn’t bad, although I obviously can’t give many points for the maple syrup this far from home.
I then got into early conference mode, which for me means wandering around vaguely networking, and thinking of all the things I should be doing / could do. Must write one of those todo lists that are cropping up nowadays. Maybe I’ll wait until the end of the conference, so I can predict what percentage I’ll actually get done (cheater!).
Actually it was fairly productive, catching up with producer folks and getting introduced to whurley, a very personable guy with a tuft of hair who’s working on another open source community. Oddly enough, about 15 minutes later his name was suggested as a good fallback for a talk that had just fallen through (unfortunately). At least we didn’t have to track him down to see if he’d have content ready.
Suddenly, it was lunchtime. Still not sure where the morning went, but met a “Mrs. PHP” L.T. and a couple of other tutorial attendees and Lars. We hashed a bit of con biz after the cake, then went to setup a time for a con meeting.
Afternoon was in the hackathon, where I finally remembered where I knew the name Chariot Solutions from. The t-shirts – “put the free beer in open source” – are a brilliant turn of phrase, even if they are a boring blue. We hope they come back next year, we can always use the free beer.
After a serious but successful con meeting, we headed out to lunch with Cliff, Lars, and the trio from Utah. 6th ave in Austin is wild: there are more bars & nightclubs per square foot than just about anyplace I’ve ever seen – and *nothing* else for about 4 blocks. (tip: stay on 6th, over on 7th is the Bail Bonds storefront). Dinner was in an irish pub – one built in Ireland and painstakingly disassembled, shipped, and installed in the middle of Texas. We couldn’t figure out if there was some poor town in Ireland missing it’s pub, or if they had a great little furniture business where they built barstools there, and then sold them here at a premium.
Oh, yes, C.S. says “I won’t eat the pickle”, so don’t forget that.
That crowd wasn’t done with their beer yet, so I wandered the long way back to the hotel as they hit the next bar. There is some appeal to beautiful, warm, dry weather all day and all night long. Not enough to move, but it was still a nice walk.
* Some of you may know him as Sander, and it’s really not that much prestige. Although it was admittedly very funny to watch one of the hotel event managers – upon being introduced to the President of the organization holding a conference here – be sure to schmooze him and pass him a business card. (P.S. Striker, not Temme of course)
Travel day. Flights are fine. Heck, I even got to sit next to a very nice Ft. Worth couple who love vacationing in Boston – as long as it’s not winter. They even offered to mail my postcard for me since I had a very short time to get to my next flight (which worked out just fine anyways).
Arrived and hung out with David of Feathercast.org fame who I still haven’t actually done an interview for yet (sorry), plus Chris and had a passable dinner in the simpler of the hotel restaurants. The waiter was quite the trip though. (Funny: had the same waiter for breakfast the next day – and while the almost-Anthony Hopkins from Psycho look was still there, he was much better in the morning).
Then I sat with the planners group while they had a very late dinner (kept the kitchen open) and discussed the world of the conference. So far Lars wins the ‘longest weekend immediately leading up to this beer’ story.
Crept off to bed not having had any beer at all, since I still haven’t shaken off our family’s first daycare cold of the fall yet.
