bkdelong

Well, here I am in (mostly) sunny San Diego at the Sheraton San Diego Harbor Island with a gorgeous view of the...harbor. Of course, I currently have my shades closed because it's 3:25pm and all I can see is blinding sunlight. I suspect it will get better at dusk.

I am here on behalf of HALO Worldwide who is managing media activities for ApacheCon US 2005 though this is a bit of a reunion for me. The show producer, Full Circle Productions, is run by Charel Morris - a dear friend, (who I have been horribly neglegent at staying in touch with), with whom I worked with at a previous ApacheCon, (2002 I believe?), and spent several years commiserating with while wrangling press at the BlackHat and DEF CON computer security conferences. My first working DEFCON was 1999, BlackHat 2000 and I stopped working with both shows after the 2002 season when I started working at MIT. I actually started working with ApacheCon at the first conference in Florida, 2000 when Sally Khudairi and I were representing the Apache Software Foundation via ZOT Group after having helped launch them the previous year.

So....here I am again. Looking forward to reconnecting with quite a few folks not the least of which include Charel, some fellow DEFCON "goons", and a plethora of open source pundits & ASF members/committers/contributors alike.

The flight was disturbingly good - Dallas is a gorgeous airport compared to my experiences with O'Hare and Detroit. I will never fly through them again if I can help it. I had a 3-seat row to myself from BOS to DFW and from DFW to SAN, I was sharing the row with 3 normal sized people. The key to not dying of sinus dryness as I had in the past? (Aside from water, that is.) Lip balm and something called Nose Better. A godsend.

I have a Members Reception to go to tonight and then the first ever F2F HALO meeting with the West Coast team since we started in September. I'm really looking forward to hearing Cory Doctorow speak as well as my former fellow Web Standards Project Steering Committee member Tim Bray. Jaron Lanier sounds....intriguing - he plans on speaking about whatever the attendees want based on the model of ApacheCon Lightning Talks.

Anyone else here...?