The Sun BabelFish Blog

The Dalai Lama, James Gosling & Simon Phipps

What do they all have in common? Well they all passed through Zürich during my stay here. As I arrived the Dalai Lama was appearing as part of a one week conference on Budhism. There were Tibetan monks on every street corner it seemed. Then last weekend James Gosling came through for a short trip, gave a talk at Saint Peter Street to a number of Swiss bankers and Zürich Java User's Group members. The talk consisted in just answering with care, detail, depth and a lot of humour every one of the simple sounding questions asked by members of the audience. I was able to meet James Gosling finally in person during his stay to discuss a couple of thoughts around BlogEd. Then, a day later, Simon Phipps came over and gave a couple of talks, one of which I attended. Simon is a very good and entertaining speaker too. After warming up his audience with a short video comedy he had made to illustrate the dramatic lifestyle changes the internet has brough about, he continued to detail the business, political and technical reasons for Sun's Open Source Strategy, and some of the steps taken to implement it. I returned with Simon to the Zürich airport where I had time to show him the slides I had prepared on an introduction to the Semantic Web to Hal Stern's group. His comments were very helpful and a few made their way into the presentation.

So of the three the only person I did not see was the Dalai Lama. And now I wish I had :-) Next time I hope.

Posted at 08:22PM Sep 09, 2005 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in General  |  Comments[0]