Apachecon Day 3

Here's the opening session here at Apachecon. Remember that Monacle Guy from yesterday? Turns out he's Ken Coar, director and vice president of the Apache Software Foundation, and a Senior Software Engineer with IBM. So he opened things up. You can kinda see him sitting at the front podium there.

There's a closer, though blurrier, shot of Ken.

Here's Ken with Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly and Associates. Tim gave a talk on "Watching the Alpha Geeks".

only he couldn't get his Mac to work with the projector.

They were recording all the sessions,and you could by a tape of all of them for $999.00.

Here's the first real session I went to: Managing Content with Apache Cacoon. It was pretty good.. Turns out you can do just about anything with cacoon and XML... so long as you exist in a universe that exists outside of time.

The Cacoon guy was from Switzerland, and spoke German a few times during the session... or maybe he was explaining how Cacoon worked.. I dunno.. Either way I just smiled and nodded a lot.

And this is the Cacoon guy close up. He was good, & managed to make a technical talk entertaining. I said so on his evaluation. This would not be a trend.

The session was over, and it was time for lunch, which Apachecon did NOT provide. Odd how you can get water for free during the session, but during lunch it was $2.00. I got a grape juice instead. And two very greasy pieces of pizza. It's in the low 70's here, so we ate outside.

Here BDF is talking to Brian at work, Fixing something or other. Without us, they're completely lost, it would seem.

Then Sherrill joined us for lunch.

The next session I went to was on XML and internationalization. This talk sucked. I think it lasted about 30 minutes, and the most I learned was that I can set the char set in the heading. I already knew that. So this one was a waste.

I took this picture to prove that there were a few girls at this thing. In the center in the tan coat is a rather attractive Asian girl. This too would not be a trend.

The next session was in the same room. It was about some guy who wants to replace the http syntax with his own "waka" syntax, and all that would be involved in that, and why his is better, or wil be when he actually finishes it. It was interesting, though not all that helpful. A lot of the people from the earlier session stayed for this one, but I managed to snag a power outlet anyway. But i did fail to find any coffee anywhere.

This session was on Scalable Internet Architectures. There were seriously NO sessions that even remotely interested me, or came close to anything I would deal with anytime soon in my job, so I went to this one cause BDF and Sherrill were both there. I scored some free cans of pop, which was huge, and then I spent the whole time finishing my script to add pics to this site (which I'm using now) and then adding all the pictures from The Strip on Monday night.

This session lasted about 2 hours....

After that session was the opening dinner, which Apachecon (thanks to SUN) DID provide. Not only food, but free beer! You were given two tickets, each one good for a free beverage. BDF gave one of his to Sherrill when her water came, but I sucked down two beers before I managed to lose my tickets. Afterwards I wandered around a little bit, as they had some booths set up. I grabbed a free java decoder ring from Sun, and then chatted with a AMD guy for a while about AMD vs Intel for a while, cause I saw they had free knives. There were about 10 when I started talking to him, and we were slowly walking towards them (very slowly), and more and more were getting taken by passers-by. Finally there was one left, and soe kid reached for it, so I snapped my arm around and grabbed it before he could get it. Oh yeah, this is after slamming two beers quite fast, and I was kinda dazed. The AMD guy probably thought I was retarded, but I got a free knife, so I couldn't care less.

BDF and I decided to try our luck that evening, so we got ready to jet after dinner.

BDF made sure he was set...

I knew I was set...

Some things just aren't right.. and a lot of them seem to end up in Las Vegas. So what exactly IS an _almost_ X-rated hypnotist? There are some things people are better off not knowing, I guess.

We had wanted to see the fountains at the Bellagio on Monday, but just missed them (we saw them in the distance). So BDF and I took a cab straight there. We saw the tail end of one fountain show, and then headed in to gamble. Shortly thereafter we exited, slightly lighter (one more than the other.. hehe..), and waited for the next show, which was in a few minutes. Here's a video of it.. and you have to imagine this whole thing to the tune of "My Heart Will Go On" (yes, we managed to show up for the girliest one. Way to go us!)

The fountains continue. More video.

here's the finalie of the fountain thingy. More video.

Here's another picture snuck from inside a casino: This time it's Caesar's Palace. I was really dissapointed. I expected people dressed in Togas and Roman Soldier outfits. There was none of that. Inside almost all the Casinos we went in, it looked the EXACT same. The Bellagio was a bit nicer than the others, and we did score free drinks there, so that was something, but man, I was kinda bummed with the lack of effort these people seem to put on the inside of their establishments.

More sneaky pictures. The picture quality totally sucks, but do you see that woman right in the middle, looking back at me. She was certain I was up to something horribly evil, and kept her eye on me for quite some time. either that, or it was love at first site, and I totally blew my one shot at happiness. Nuts.

The one spot we didn't hit on Monday that I wanted to see was the Luxor, which had the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid. So we walked there next. By now, it was a lot more difficult to impress me.

You can see this light shining out of the Pyrimid EVERYWHERE. If you're in Vegas, and it's dark out, look up, and you'll know where the Luxor is.