Well, OSCON 2003 is over, and I guess all the attendees are more or less home by now. I got home on Monday night, after a detour to work in London. Tons of ideas and inspiration came forth during and between sessions this year, like the last two years I’ve attended. It’s a double-whammy — if you go to a session, you get a chunk of very interesting info about subject X. If you don’t go to a session, you get to exchange ideas with likeminded people; ideas that you’d be hard-pressed to find otherwise. Great stuff.

It was lovely to meet old friends and make new acquaintances. Amongst others, I met some of the Jabber guys (pic), plus Matthew, Steve, Gnat (and family), Paul (pic), Randy, Edd, Dave, Rael, Christian, Geoff, Tom, Joe, Leon, Ask, James, and plenty of other Perl and O’Reilly folk. I even managed to say a brief “hi” to Nat.

Even when we weren’t having fun, we were having fun. The author signing event was great; Piers and I were drinking beer to celebrate the end of our talk (which had just finished) when we were snapped.

Our talk had included live demos against an SAP R/3 system, which I was running on the diminutive Sony Vaio laptop (128Mb RAM, PII-233, 12Gb HDD) that you can see in the picture. While preparing the system the day before in the speaker room, the work processes decided for some reason to recompile all the ABAP components, which almost killed the laptop. The HDD went mad for minutes on end, and made funny noises, which Graham promptly likened to the sound of a deep fat fryer in action. I’m thinking of renaming the laptop to “chip-pan.local.net”.