Yet another OScon entry so I'll try to keep it short. I see that Matt has added his pictures online. If you weren't there this should give you a good feel of what the conference was like as there are many pictures involving drinks.
It was cool to have Robin around as it was pretty tight for him to come this year. It was also really cool to have expenses covered by the company so I would not have to cut corners like last year when I did not have a job. It was even cooler to have us being moved from the Best Western to the 10th floor of the Sheraton by the ever-so-helpful Nat. Now, that was really it. Robin & I managed to meet with Simon St. Laurent, our editor for the SVG book. Ronal Bourret was there too and was a good laugh. We hung out a lot with the usual gang: Matt and Heather, Kip, Eric, Geoff and the missus, Stas and Michel. I also got to meet people I did not know, DJ and the Jabber crew.
Talks went pretty well. The SVG Tutorial went very smoothly with reasonable attendance (about 35-40 people) and what seemed like great interest. The SVG Animation session was really cool too. It must have been the fourth time I was presenting it so it was bound to go down well. People seemed to really dig my little demos. The Batik talk went ok considering I did not know much about the internals of the project and have never worked with it much. Lightning Talks were really nice too, and with a funny moment during my "Flash Sux, SVG Rox" talk when I was (rightfully) bitching about Macromedia's attitude towards SVG and this Macromedia guy stood up and said who he was working for. I'm already thinking about what I should do for next year, hopefully one session in a different track than XML. I hope to do a tutorial on SVG components if SVG has been going well til then, and it should do.
How many people had new iBooks? I knew I was one of them, and I know a few people who got one either during the conference or right when they got back home. The iBooks look amazing and OS X rocks (even more with Jaguar just around the corner), so I kind of figured out why everybody was going for one. I got the OS X Missing Manual and Cocoa books from the O'Reilly bookstore. Hopefully next year you will see our book there too... and you'll get it, right?
See all of you there next year!
-- junior
