As I was doing this with one person, he mentioned the O'Reilly Safari Network Bookshelf. For a fixed monthly fee, you get access to a fixed number of book slots, which you can fill from a list of books in the network bookshelf. Books have to stay in the slot for 30 days, and after that, you can swap them for other books. Pretty cool idea.

By Day 3, I am totally wiped out. I was up til 4 AM last night talking with various ASF'ers about various issues, and then I woke up at 9:30AM instead of 10 as planned. This did give me plenty of time to packup and checkout, but I think the sleep would have been better. I dislike travelling like this. You eat at weird times, you sleep at weird times, I don't drink enough water, and after 5 days of it, you've just had enough. So I'm looking forward to getting home.

The first event of the day was Doc Searl's excellent keynote address. At the beginning of the talk, Doc said that he had spent the last 3 days talking to people and trying to understand what he was seeing and experiencing. He gave me a lot to think about in terms of story construction (which I'm probably not applying in this post), and had some notable quotes such as, "information does not want to be free, information wants to be $6.95". After seeing his axes of open vs closed and proprietary vs public domain, somehow it dawned on me that what I really value about open source is the (underexploited) potential for innovation.

Afterwards I went up to the podium to tell Doc how much I appreciated the fact that he took the time to learn about us, and by crafting a talk that show that he had become one of us.

While I was standing around at the podium, I met Jennifer Machovec, from IBM, whose name I recognized from the new license@ mailing list, which is where we are discussing the Apache 2.0 license. Jennifer has been pretty active in helping with the new license. What was amazing to me was that she's been at the Con for three days, because she wanted to meet and become involved with the community. This is the kind of person (and attorney) that is perfect for communities. She instinctively knew that she needed to connect with the community in order to work with it. Hat's off to her insight, and willingness to act on it.

Ken Coar and I had lunch and talked about a project that we have brewing -- you'll just have to be in suspense for now. After that I went to the mod_pubsub talk. I've been getting more adept at IRC, so I remembered to login to the chat room when I got to the talk. When I did, I discovered that Jennifer Machovec was in the IRC -- turns out she figured out how to get in. JBMachovec++.

I've been hearing about mod_pubsub and wanted to learn more about it, especially since its the brain child of Rohit Khare, a friend of my friend Ernie Prabhakar. Rohit was there and remembered me but we didn't get to talk because I had to leave the talk early. Maybe there'll be another time.

The closing plenary was really a raffle session and the consensus in IRC was that the raffle needs to go. I finally got to met gnat, Nathan Torkington, in person, after a number of IRC exchanges during the course of the conference.

After a quick round of goodbyes, David Bau (one of the XMLBeans committers) and I caught a cab to the airport and had dinner while waiting for our flights. The conversation was so engaging that I lost track of time and dashed off to make the flight. It turns out that the flight was so empty that there was plenty of time. After being up till 4am, the only think I was capable of was sleep, although I did wake up and ask for some blankets because I was so cold. My flight arrived early, but not early enough to catch the 10:55pm ferry. Unfortunately, I got my hopes up by reading the Saturday/Sunday schedule instead of the weekday schedule, and thought that there was an 11:15pm boat when there was none. You'd think after a few times I'd stop making that mistake. Travel travails aside, I'm glad to finally be at home.