ApacheCon

I'm glad to be near the end of what has been a fairly exhausting (but useful) week.  I spent most of it in Las Vegas at the ApacheCon conference (http://www.apachecon.com) where I spent 5 days hacking and playing with Apache.  The conference itself was ok -- although I was a little disapointed by the lack of depth in most of the talks, and the absence of slide handouts and/or up-to-date electronic versions of the decks.  The event was a good forcing function, though, for me to spend a lot of focused-time with an Apache installation and really immerse myself with it.

Miguel de Icaza gave a keynote on Mono on Tuesday which was pretty fun (he has a good speaking style that really works well for a technical crowd).  Much of it was a pitch on why the .NET Framework is cool -- which was fun to hear while sitting in the crowd at an open-source conference.  An interesting bit of trivia is that Nat Friedman (http://www.nat.org), who co-founded Ximian with Miguel, was a college intern on the IIS4 team way back in 1997 when I also worked on it. 

Dmitry (who is the ASP.NET dev manager) and I caught up with Miguel the day before his keynote and got someone to take a group picture of us:



Dmitry is one on the left with the ASP.NET hat.  I'm the one who is unfortunately squinting in the shot, and who looks like he is two feet taller than everyone else (note: I'm actually only 6'4).

The last time I was in Vegas before this month was in January 2002, when our .NET Framework 1.0 ship party was at the MGM Grand.  Ironically, I happened to be there twice in one week this month -- I was there the previous weekend doing the keynote at ASP.NET Connections.  I flew back to Redmond for 3 days last week to catch up on work before flying out very late Friday night to attend the conference Saturday morning.  I then got back around 3:00am Thursday and have been in back-to-back-to-back meetings since then (including a very early morning video conference call with my Senior VP who is currently in Paris -- fun).

Dmitry decided to drive to Vegas this time (and why not -- it is only a 2200 mile round-trip!?!).   I'm not sure where he is right now on the road back -- but he hopefully will show up early next week....

As for me, I'm headed to bed...

:-)

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