Edward Burns's Weblog

Sunday June 26, 2005

Ed Burns JavaOne 2005 Day Zero Personal

My first day at JavaOne 2005 started obscenely early, at 0420 EDT. Caught the plane at 0600, flew thru Denver to SJC. Took the Caltrain up to SFO. It was great to once again be in the midst of the cultural diversity of the San Francisco Bay Area. While there is a fair amount of diversity in Central Florida, you don't get the same sense of it as you do when riding public transportation in the Bay Area. The train was positively boisterous with many different languages being spoken, loudly. In fact, it was so loud that I had a lot of trouble trying to hear the disturbingly low audio on the Ruby on Rails Movie I had downloaded just to watch on the long ride from San Jose to San Francisco. Anyhow, I stuck my earbuds way into my ear canal and persevered until the battery ran out.

After arriving at the 4th and Townsend station, I was delighted to find a ritzy new Safeway right across the street. Now I'm not normally a fan of Safeway, what with their anti-labor policies and monopolistic intent and all, but DAMN that's a nice store (especially coming from Central FL). I was impressed that I could get a hot meal of rosemary chicken breast with fresh steamed veggies and mac-n-cheese in three minutes. I then proceeded down 4th to get conference registration out of the way.

I had a little trepidation at what I might find at the conference, this being the first JavaOne after Sun ended its longtime relation with Key3Media to run the conference. This year, Sun took on more of the burden itself, so I hear. Well, I had no need of fear because the usual level of panache was displayed throughout Moscone. I didn't see any classic video game machines yet, but perhaps they'll show up tomorrow. The speakers gift this year is a nice hefty laser pointer. Very practical.

After conference registration, I headed over to the San Francisco Marriott for Java Licensee Day. The professional aspects of this event are covered in my java.net blog. Personally, it was great to see all the old pals I hadn't seen or spoken to in a long time at the licensee reception; Roger Calnan, Ray Ortigas, John Pampuch, Justyna Horwat, Thorsten Laux, Amy Roh, just to name a few. I also had some words with Stephen Keating and Jeet Kaul about the next big thing for Java EE. After a few wines and very tasty sushi I headed to my hotel to check-in.

Again, more trepidation, this time at the address of the Hotel on the borders of the TL. Again, I need not have worried because it turned out to be a nice place and quite a bargain. It's a clean place, reasonably priced. They made all the right choices for economy. Instead of real bedroom furniture, they have file cabinets. There's a Murphy Bed, and the lighting fixtures are "designy".