I've been at ApacheCon since Friday night, and it's been even more non-stop than usual. The ASF hackathon ran the same two days as the conference tutorials. I've been catching up with a bunch of old friends, as well as meeting some people for the very first time. One of the people that I've been happiest to meet is Susan Wu, the ASF's Chief Media Officer, and one of the founders of the feather, a group blog devoted to more business/marketing issues around Apache, and Open Source software in general.

Other people that I've talked to in person for the first time include Leo Simons, Upayavira, and Scott Sanders. Scott is working on a web based RSS aggregator called FeedLounge. FeedLounge has some nice AJAX touches and is written in Python. For reasons that I can't talk about yet, I'm going to be paying attention to what's happening with FeedLounge.

One interesting phenomenon is that I've spent a lot of time talking to people about photography stuff. Maybe I missed it in previous years because I wasn't interested, but there are a lot of photography geeks in the ASF. I've had people offer to let me try lenses and flashes and all sorts of things. We've been swapping tips like mad. There's even been talk of a digital camera BOF one of these evenings. This year, we have an official photographer, Julian Cash, who's been wandering all over taking photos and talking about his Human Creativity project. It's been interesting to watch him at work, to see how he poses people, how he lights them, and so forth. I even got to sub my camera for his. We were going to take a group photo of all the hackathon participants (we are pretty bad about group pictures) when his Nikon locked up. I had grabbed my camera on the way out to the picture, just in case I'd have a chance to shoot while Julian was setting up. He ended up using my camera to do the shoot. That was kind of cool, and watching Julian and Cliff work the photos over in Aperture was pretty cool as well. There are several people here using Aperture, and most of them seem pretty satisfied with it. I've taken some photos which will go up on Flickr as I have time to put them up.