The Next Wave

Tuesday March 28, 2006

On the road down under

I'm on the road again, this time "down under" ... visiting Sydney, Melbourne Australia and currently in Wellington New Zealand. So far, it's been rather exciting as I've been meeting a number of developers who have certainly not been shy in coming to talk to me about technologies, Java and sometimes problems they are trying to solve (and wondering what Suns' position or plans are in areas which are causing them pain). This is great stuff ... one of the reasons I really love going on the road is that I learn more in a couple days on the road meeting real live customers than I do at home because these folks are solving real-world problems which I can then take back into Sun as feedback.

Getting here was a bit of a problem as (if you haven't heard about the weather) as there a number of cyclones in the area which are causing air traffic problems in areas such as north-east Australia and here in New Zealand ... I'll leave that story for another time.

After my keynote here in Sydney Brad Perriott, one of the local Sun folks, picked my up by car and took me to one of his favorite local breaks near the town of Mona Vale near Sydney.

When we arrive, the weather was warm, there was almost no one out in the water (which was around 22C) and the waves were around 2M and clean ... we surfed for what seemed like days and at the end of the day we couldn't raise our hands over our heads because our shoulders were on fire ... good thing beers don't have to get hoisted that high.

.....

OK ... not really ... (over a beer at the end of our surf session, I thought about exagerating the truth a bit, but after reflecting last night I figured that anyone who was a real surfer would have just checked one of the local surf sites and realized I was pulling their legs ... sorry Brad ... couldn't go through with the "fish story" :-) )

Everything was as above, but the waves were about 1M and mushy ... so much for the epic cyclone-driven waves but it was still a lot of fun ... I've surfed in various places in the U.S., Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Hawaii, Mexico, etc. ... never Australia (so this was a real kick). One thing to be said for the folks here in Australia is that there is a real sense of "stoke" related to surfing and pretty much everyone I've met is easy-going, nice and I didn't get any feeling of the kind of local-ism that you get at some other places like Hawaii and some breaks in California.

Here's some thanks to Brad and team for allowing me the opportunity to sample some great Australian waves and hospitality ... this weekend I'm off to go wake boarding on one of the local rivers here (and I'll let you know how that went) Posted by brewin Mar 28 2006, 11:39:18 PM PST Permalink