Just had quesadillas for breakfast. Jolly good. If any of you out there have a Costco membership, and they carry the raw, ready-to-cook tortillas, buy them now! They are the next best thing to Mary Zubiate living next door and making them from scratch on a daily basis. Those were the best refried beans in the world… Good memories.

Popularity: 26%

Took the Apache flyers to JavaOne on Monday, and manned the booth. It was fun chatting with James Gosling, on his obligatory ‘meeth-the-booth-people’ dog and pony. I spent some quality time with Justin E. at the colo, while he did the heavy lifting upgrading minotaur, Apache’s main server.

It was amusing to be asked by a group of devs at JavaOne if we could plan this some other time, since they we meeting at JavaOne to furiously code away, and couldn’t live withtout Subversion access for any amount of time. First amusing point: that they don’t consider the infra team’s time as important as their own. Subversion ‘just works’ for them because of the effort of the infra team, and JavaOne was a perfect time to do the upgrade that had been on the list for 6+ months. Second amusing point: these devs couldn’t live without Subversion for a 1-3 hours. Subversion is a source code control system, not something critical like email. You can live without if for a few hours, trust me. The source code will be back. Sheesh!

After the colo, I came back and headed over to the Thirsty Bear to meet up with Stephen O’Grady from Redmonk. Alex had met with him the week before, and we knew we were both in town for JavaOne, so … Anyhoo, I had a great talk with Stephen, and even got to meet the ever insightful James Governor (where’s my tshirt ? ) Stephen, it was a pleasure meeting both of the RedMonkeys, and I look forward to chatting and drinking beer again. If only I could do that more in my job.

After, or rather during my meeting with Stephen, the Sun Bloggers get together started in the area of the bar where we were talking. Although it was supposed to be Sun bloggers only, I was fortunate enough to meet Simon Phipps, Tim Bray, and quite a few other names that you would recognize. Sun seems to be changing its tune wholesale, and it definetly looks like they may be able to turn around the death march to oblivion they started 5-6 years ago. I am quite impressed.

All in all, the trip was long, since I was only in town one day, but the Apache booth was fun to be around. It is actually amazing how many people either a) don’t know or understand open source at all (how much is Apache?) or b) don’t understand the tools they use every day come from Apache (Ant, Tomcat).

Popularity: 18%