I got up to chair Santiago's 8:30AM session (the things you do for friendship) after being up till 3. As we were doing the post session form collecting, etc, Ted Husted came up to me and asked me to sign a copy of my book. This is the first time this has ever happened to me, and I was so stunned that Ted had to tell me what to write. In case you didn't know, Ted is the author of Struts in Action.

Doc Searls was up for today's keynote. Last year was the first time that I heard Doc speak (also at ApacheCon), and I really like the way that he tailors his talks by examining the situation that he finds at the conference. In keeping with his musings on DIY IT, Doc talked about the construction industry and the way that modular/standardized materials facilitate a DIY environment. I've neglected to mention that the conference hotel is under serious construction (the pool is empty, there's rebar in a bunch of places, scaffolding and plenty of red/yellow plastic tape. In fact, I had to duck under some plastic tape in order to even be able to get to the room for Santiago's session. Doc used the state of the hotel as example of some of the principles that he was discussion. He showed photo after photo of the state of the hotel, and in many cases, he contrasted photos from the hotel's website with his own photos of the same areas. It was incredibly funny, and a demonstration of Docs' artfulness as a storyteller and speaker. I have some more ponderings that I'll save for another post.

The other session that I went to was the Lightning Talks. This was patterned after the Python Lightning Talks at OSCON. Stefano and Fitz ran this - Stefano found a court jester's hat, and Fitz had a toy that played recordings of Mr. T. The atmosphere was light, and circus like, and for a little while I feared that this was going to be a disastrous session. Fortunately, the community rallied and we had some pretty good 5 minute presentations. I don't remember all of them, but here are the ones that I had notes for. Stefano showed off Agora, William Glass discussed his geek support group's blog, Jeffrey Barnett showed unalog, and Fitz described how he places his entire home directory under svn. While Fitz was talking it occurred to me that it might be interesting to have a session called "Lifehacks of the Apache Community". Maybe next year. All in all, I think that this session went well for it's first year. I hope that word will get around (and perhaps some advance warning/PR), and that this will be a place for the long tail to make itself heard.

After the session I was sitting in the exhibit area and Jeffrey Barnett stopped by to talk more about unalog. We talked about how it was and wasn't like del.icio.us (someone asked this during the talk), the context that unalog is being used in (universities) and the importance of the social rather than technological factors of these sorts of sites. Jeffrey also pointed me to a few interesting projects, which I'll record here: Openurl and Sakai.

I always end up having to leave in the middle of the closing plenary in order to catch my flight -- weeknight flights to Seattle are pretty scarce. Fortunately, the closing plenary is dominated by a raffle, which just doesn't float my boat, I would have liked to hear the feedback on the conference, though. From where I sat it was a fun and productive conference, but I have a totally different set of metrics than the regular attendees.