No Business Naming Things

Highlights of day three:

• Talks by co-workers Douglas Pollock and Susan Franklin explaining commands and undo/redo (respectively). It was good to hear these talks because despite my proximity to them and their work the direction of these components was somewhat of a mystery to me. I find it interesting how difficult it is to keep up with all of the work in the Eclipse space now - there is SO much going on you really need to pick and choose what it is to follow.
• Vegetarian lunch!
• Hanging out at the Drag and Drop poster session. A lot of good questions came in regarding our new work along with a heaping supply of praise. Some people in particular were quite impressed with the quality of our posters and the credit for that goes out to our design team. They make everything look so darn pretty!
• Falling asleep in bed wearing 16 hole Doc Martens. No wait, that sucked.

ps: I miss the Netbeans girls.

Woe are my feet.

It was another fine yet extremely busy day at the con. Some highlights for me include:

• Joel Spolsky - a very funny man who managed to convey some interesting points between jokes about Keanu Reeves and Brad Pitt (they’re so dreamy)
• The scriptability panel. Scriptability has been near and dear to me since I first attempted to get AppleScript hooks into Eclipse. I feel I’ve learned enough that another attempt at this after 3.2 ships might result in something positive.
• The Halo challenge. I’ll be gentle guys… good effort.
• John Wiegand and Erich Gamma teasing the Jazz project. I am VERY excited about where this is going and I can’t wait to get my hands on it and play.
• Swag in the exhibiter hall. I’ve entered contests for everything under the sun including a very nice iMac. Oh, it will be mine.
• Socializing! This is one of my favorite aspects of the conference. The talks are nice and all but for me it’s the one time of the year that I get to meet up with other members of the community and committers external to the Ottawa lab. It’s nice.

I arrived in Santa Clara Sunday night with tunnel vision - my plan to sleep on the flight from Chicago was hampered by a large group of hyperactive tweens returning from a class trip. No attempts were made to check out the lounge for any errant bloggers that might have still been around. In fact, I barely bothered to get into my PJs before heading to sleep.

The two tutorials I gave on Monday with Doug (thanks SO MUCH for helping me out with that BTW) went reasonably well. This was the second time I was involved with giving these tutorials at EclipseCon and the original problem persisted. Getting people set up with a JDK, Eclipse, and the tutorial projects took forever in both tutorials and ate roughly 1/4 of our time. There has to be a better way to do this in future sessions. Having a few EclipseCon USB sticks, irregular internet access, and some CDs that only a few users could read (thanks Apple!) just wasn’t cutting it.

There were some festivities last night but I largely went on autopilot through them - I was asleep by 9:30. Hopefully I wont be a fuddie-duddie again today.

I’ll be heading off to the airport shortly to begin my long trek to Santa Clara for EclipseCon. Provided everything goes as planned (HA!) I should land tonight at 10:40. When I get to the hotel I’ll try and pop in and say hi to any drunkards that remain at the blog gathering but I suspect I’ll be three shades of green away from being a proper Romero-style zombie by that point.

Braaaainz…

Hey, there should be plenty of brains at EclipseCon…