It's day two of the Sun TechDays in Mexico City and I've finally managed to find time to blog (I should actually be helping to run a hands on lab for J2SE 5, but I snuck out).

This has been a great event so far, we've had about 1400 attendees and the feel has really been that of one the TechDays from several years back; there's an enormous amount of enthusiasm and excitement from the audience. James Gosling did the keynote yesterday and I presented on the new features in J2SE 5 and how to develop rich clients using Swing. The Java jacket giveaway this morning, which is decided through a talent contest, brought up the usual variety of strange 'talents' (this is definitely not something you'll see at most software conferences).

This morning I did a presentation for companies from the Mexican stock exchange, explaining why innovation at Sun in everything from Solaris to chip multi-threading really does matter. Another enjoyable event and some very focused questions. This afternoon we have an event for students with James Gosling and then I have two hours to talk about performance tuning for Java. A packed two days, but really great fun.

The food here is great; I've always been a fan of Mexican food but, being my first time in Mexico, this is the first time I've had "authentic" Mexican cuisine. We've been out for dinner three times and it's been Mexican every time. I'm here until Sunday so I should also get some time to do some site seeing.

One thing that was rather bizarre was the giveaways that we had for this event. In addition to the usual T-shirts we also have small foam Dukes that are suitably shaped to enable them to be thrown a long way into the audience. We'd shipped 650 to the venue and only 100 turned up. It seems that someone along the way took a shine to Duke and decided to liberate 550 of him. The other thing was that Duke needed a health certificate to get into the country. I kid you not. Apparently the customs people wanted a doctor's certificate saying that the foam Dukes, which are officially classified as stress-relievers, really would reduce stress. It is indeed a strange world in which we live.