Thursday May 08, 2008

Yesterday was totally packed. Absolutely no rest for the wicked :-) Lots of great interactions with all sorts of folks, some in organized meetings, but most just random chats in the hallways. I love the energy that is everywhere.

I helped take a group of University and High School students on a tour through the pavilion. For all the appeal of "virtual reality", it was the "real reality" stuff that grabbed them most: the realtime control demo, Tommy, and the blu-ray/streaming media got lots of questions.

I spent an hour with the Dutch JUG. It was great during the opening on Tuesday morning when John Gage made a comment about the Brazilians being uninhibited extroverts, and how the rest of the audience should be honorary Brazilians... About 80 members of the Dutch jug lept up with a huge banner and let out a roar that put the Brazilians to shame. There's definitely some national competition brewing here.

I ended the formal part of my day with a short walk-on during the AMD keynote. I got to spend some time talking about how amazing the HotSpot optimizer has become and what a good job it does of exploiting the special features of CPUs. I ended my bit with a tongue-in-cheek one-liner that was roughly "now we're going after Fortran". When I got off the stage, Denis Caromel from INRIA came up to me and said "you're already done": he had just finished some extensive benchmarking of Java for HPC and his results were impressive. Thanks!

This was followed by an extensive pub-crawl :-( Now I'm off to rehearsals for my keynote tomorrow. The Toy Show is going to be very cool.

Lame joke: when you're standing outside a theatre as a showing of Iron Man is letting out, how do you tell who the real geeks are? They're the ones lusting after Tony Stark's workshop. Permalink Comments [4]