One of our local newspapers did an article on blogging that featured Julie's blog. Be sure to check out her comments on the whole experience.

[Yesterday was day 1, but as with all my conference reports, they are delayed by one day.]

I didn't get a lot of sleep the night before flying out, so I took a bit of dramamine (highly unusual) in anticipation of the boat/limo/flight. This turned out to be a smart move, because there was quite a bit of turbulence on the flight, which which totally did not affect me. Due to ferry scheduling, I arrived quite early (in my mind) for the flight. Apparently, this wasn't early enough, because I ended up in the C group of my Southwest flight. I have a love hate relationship with Southwest -- I don't like playing the seating group game (and for this reason I try to fly Southwest when flying with the family, when having a child boosts us to the front of the line). On the other hand, the "food"/snack, and seats are better than lots of other airlines, and the flight attendants generally are pleasant and entertaining. As usual, I got to the Alexis Park too early in the cleaning cycle, so I had to wait to get a room. I headed straight over to the hackathon room, plopped down at a table with Ben and Santiago, and started to make merry.

Not long after that, I went to lunch with Santiago, Ben, the anthropology team from Syracuse (studying FOSS communities, their second year) Sanjiva, and Brian McCallister. One interesting thing from the lunch: Kevin Crowston from Syracuse was surprised to learn that we (the ASF) use CVS to coordinate social activities, etc.

One of the things that the ASF is going to do in the near future is rely much more on PGP signatures and certificates. I spent some time talking with folks from infrastructure about how that's going to happen. Based on that conversation, I'm going to take some time to wander around and get ASF people to get keys and get them signed. We are having a keysigning, but participation isn't as broad as it should be. During the course of these conversations, I got to meet Noel Bergman, who I've wanted to meet in person for a while. Thom and I also spent some time discussing improvements for Planet Apache. I think I was also successful at persuading Ben that we should use krell to generate the config file for PlanetApache. Open source jujitsu at work.

For dinner I went to Gordon Biersch with Stefano, Lars, Dirk, Gregor, Gianugo and a few others. I was the only American at the table. One of the great things about open source is that anybody can play. The geographic distribution of the dinner party was demonstration of that. I did my hardest laughing all day as Stefano (the Italian) was ragging on Dirk (the Dutchman).