Sumitha came to my desk and asked me if were willing to go Kanpur for a presentation.
It was Sanjeev who was supposed to go, but he had an urgent issue to deal with.
But the problem, for me, is very short notice. I have to prepare slides within 3 days.
Even though 3 days was good enough, I had some work which needs immediate attention
and on top of it BOSUG meet is there, where I promised will present a video
of Solaris Express installation. I prepared it long back, but I didn't look back.
I finally thought I will do it. I felt I can stretch to some extent and do it.
I got some slides from Sanjeev which I didn't look seriously till 4th Feb.
I opened the slides on the Saturday morning, at home in my laptop,
 and realized I need to change lot of stuff to make it a opensolaris preso.
I came to office as I thought I might not work seriously at home.
Evening there was BOSUG meet, so didn't have time to look again till Sunday.
I finished it on Sunday itself and got ready for the flight on Monday evening.
Considering the Bangalore traffic, we started by 2:30PM for the Delhi flight.
After security checks we entered the Jet airways flight at around 4:00PM.
It took exactly 2 hours 20 mins for the flight. We landed in Delhi and went straight to
the old Delhi railway station where we had to catch a train for Kanpur.
We went to Kanpur by Kaifuyat Express. We reached by 5:30AM.
The Kanpur guest house was good, but had lot of mosquitoes.
We slept for a while and showed up for lunch. Meanwhile our Marketing person, who
was in contact with IIT Kanpur camein. We discussed about the program and later
we went to the cse lab. I saw few AMD Opteron boxes lying there. The coordinator
for this activity and a 3rd year student Piyush was all along with us.
He said those boxes were donated by SUN but all are running only Linux.
I was surprised as the marketing folks didn't even push them to use Solaris on that.
Our program started in the evening around 6:15PM.
They initially thought a room which can hold 250 people would be enough, but theres huge
response for this and they had to move to another room with 500 capacity, which was also full.
Kannan started with J2SE preso. We realized that not all people outthere are interested.
They started moving one-by-one and the audience were reduced to half of what we had at the start.
Then after Kannan I started my OpenSolaris presentation. I focused only on outlining
various technologies we have in Solaris and how they can benefit/participate from/in OpenSolaris.
Mine went well. Very few were serious questions. None were challenging to me.
They were given a DTrace problem to solve, for which I offered help after the presentation.
I told that I will be available for another 5 hours. Few of them came
immediately after Ashok's presentation and asked how to tackle the problem.
I didn't give them the solution but I gave them some pointers with which they can solve the problem.
I got to know there was huge response for the BeleniX liveCDs. Overall the trip was a success.
I hope more developers to join the band.