ApacheCon is over, for me at last. 'This morning' (wednesday), we flew out of Vegas, and after a change of planes in Chicago, we arrived 'this morning' (thursday) back in Belgium. Since wife and kids were off to work, school and daycare, and it had been more than one month that I saw Marc in real life, I headed to the office, to set up the new geek device which you can see in the non-feed rendition of my blog: a little office webcam.

I haven't slept for 24 hours (again), and I still have like 8 to go. That's at least one lesson I learnt during ApacheCon: I'm not immune to this jetlag thing. I will be crashing in the living room sofa tonight.

ApacheCon was a nice experience, meeting quite some new faces and also a lot of established friends. Yesterday afternoon, I attended the Cocoon and CMS BOF, which went pretty well - it's great to meet people who are investigating a lot of time in learning Cocoon, and come forward with interesting questions and concerns from their novel perspective. Ovidiu, Bruno and I went out for a stroll and a drink on the Strip in the evening, and got to admire the Bellagio fountains. I'll be posting pics later on.

I'm also mulling over some larger perspective thought on Cocoon and its community, but I'll keep that for when I'm awake and fully synced again. Thanks all for your comments and links, BTW. I'll try and post more often again.

I'm sitting in on Ovidiu's session on Cocoon control flow at ApacheCon, being a bit tired after a wonderful morning. My phone rang at 4AM in the morning, it was that same Ovidiu inviting me for a sunrise trip to Red Rock Canyon, a 20 miles drive outside Vegas. We left the hotel around 4:30, grabbing some coffee and snacks along our way. We arrived at the Valley a little bit early, the gates only opening at 6AM, so we went back to a lookout place to snap pictures of the rising sun illuminating the canyon mountains.

After that, we went driving onto the Scenic Drive, a 15 mile scenery-viewing tour along the mountains of which the canyon is composed of. Plenty of pictures, beautiful scenery, a great way to start the day. Then, we hiked to the Calico Tanks, a ridge with natural water tanks providing an extra-ordinary view on Vegas and its surroundings. We got there after about an hour, and enjoyed the view for quite some time, also to give Ovidiu plenty of time to goof around with all his photo gear. You name it, he's got it: lenses, adapters, a body (camera, that is) to die for... We took a lot of pictures, also talked about all sorts of things people talk about when getting back to basics, in a beautiful natural setting. Ovidiu and I have met each other now only two times, and we live many time zones apart, but still there's a sense of connectedness, feeling relaxed and sharing a common mindset. Great fun, leaving an afterglow in your mind.

After hiking back, we drove some more along the Scenic Drive, where I finally discovered some network coverage (no wonder I had some issues with that, being 'out there') and I had a heart-warming phone call with wife and kids - my baby-daughter actually saying 'daddy' on the phone for the first time (she says it all the time, against everybody, but never did so when I had her on the phone).

This was a truly wonderful morning, a great way to start the last day of my short stay in the US. Rough, unsorted pics can be found here. Thanks, Ovidiu.

Just got my ASF Member T-Shirt. Yay. :-)

Presentation is bound in an hour and a half.

I just briefly went into the main room to see Stefano starting off with a keynote on the way the ASF works, but am now retreated back into my hotel room to tinker with my presentation (and get showered - I was up this morning messing around with my computer and forgot to do that). My presentation is due in a couple of hours - tension is arising (english-spoken conference presentation still excite me somehow).

Yesterday, we had a huge brunch in the Ceasar's Palace and went and visited the Apple store afterwards: iPod, iSight and power plugs now belong to us. We went back to the conference center thereafter, with intentions to get some work done, but I ended up chatting with people in the Hackathon. After the Hackathon, we were allowed to sit in silently during the ASF member's meeting, which meant I was observer of myself being voted as an ASF member - yay! Thanks for that. I still have some paperwork to do, but it's great to see several years of ASF involvement culminate into this. I feel really proud.

After that, we headed back to the Strip, inside The Venetian, for a god-awful dinner in some Mexican restaurant. The food wasn't especially bad, but the setting of the Venetian Grand Canal made us all puke in utter unbelief that people would actually pay to visit this. Vegas really is the essence of AmeriKitch. Yikes. On a positive note, it was good seeing Ovidiu back - a man with wisdom and maturity and brains to go with that, and someone I hated seeing depart from the Cocoon community something like a year ago. We chatted about family, becoming of age, people, posturing and open source, and photography of course, and there's a slim chance we'll be going out for the Vegas neighborhood dessert landscape tomorrow morning (sunrise, that is, as in 4AM).

I woke up again at 5:30AM, which was early enough, but not that bad. After all, it's morning over here, and the day has just started, while my family is now in the midst of the evening rites. No pictures for now, maybe later during the day or night.

This morning, I went for a brisk walk to The Strip and back, buying myself and Bruno breakfast (donuts, that is). Vegas, and the US by derivation, is huge. 6-lane roads, and blocks of half a mile - much longer than I'm used do. Simply going back and forth to Las Vegas Boulevard is a one hour walk. I also met Carsten and his wife, they were planning to do the touristy thing as well.

After that, it was about 9AM, Bruno and I hit town, took a cab to the Fashion Show, a huge shopping mall along The Strip with an Apple store inside. Unfortunately, the shop only opened at 11, so we got out and walked down The Strip instead, to the Stratosphere. The Stratosphere is a hotel/casino/shopping mall combo (as most of these places are like), with a huge tower next to it where you can take an elevator for a nice view on the city. Took some pictures as well. I'm now sitting in the XSL-FO tutorial, which Gianugo is presenting as a fall-back since Doug couldn't make it. Poor guy got almost no sleep preparing himself for this emergency task. We'll be hitting town shortly, looking for lunch.

Ouch - 5AM and awake already - my biological clock isn't synced yet and thinks it's afternoon. It's raining in Vegas ATM, but I managed to snap some pictures yesterday night. Travel went nice and uneventful, even if a bit longwinded: leaving home at 7:30AM, and touching down in Vegas around 5PM local time, means you've been up until 2AM 'bio' time. Adding a quick burger dinner after that with Gianugo, which we met on the plane already, Santiago and Andy, meant I hit by bed only around 6AM bio time in the morning. This timezone thing is kinda fun. :-)

Other peeps I saw and talked or shaked hands with yesterday: Stefano, Pier, and Ted. Others I saw but didn't introduce myself to: Brian, Roy, Dirk-Willem and Ken. Welcome to the Apache Zoo. ;-)

Plans for today: working a bit on my presentation, visiting the local Apple store, have brunch at Ceasar's Palace, and wander around aimlessly.

My last mail and server check before driving to Brussels Airport and getting aboard an AA plane which will take us (Bruno and me) to Chicago, where we get a connecting flight to Las Vegas for ApacheCon. See you when we get there. ;-)

Since my not-so-new-anymore, but still very lovable old-style 15" TiBook arrived, I knew I had to replace my trusty old laptop bag (some Targus model, must be four years old by now, but still looks pretty nice, if only a bit too 'corporate'). The TiBook was a tight fit for my old laptop bag, and given my recurring back problems, I also got the advise that a backpack might be slightly better for my posture as well. After reading up on Tom Bihn's range of laptop bags, and as a birthday present for myself, I decided to order a Brain Bag and assorted stuff as a new home for my TiBook. I ordered it on the 24th of October, it arrived in Belgium through USPS Express Mail on the 3rd, and then it required until today (October 12th) for customs clearance, and having it delivered to me. USPS should really get his act together on this: packages are not delivered through Belgian Postal services, but by GLS - which are virtually unreachable by phone, and work themselves with subcontractors for the doorstep delivery.

Kudos to Ted for mentioning Tom Bihn somewhere (can't find a link anymore) - I followed his advise, and the bag seems indeed very nice.

I'm now off to Flanders Multimedia Valley to speak on Open Source and Business from a producer's perspective. Reiterating Outerthought's two years of existance. Should be fun.

My sabbatical week is still ongoing, with my beloved one and myself going for dinner tonight, celebrating 15 years of knowing each other's highs and lows, nine years of marriage, my birthday, and the fact that we have the cutest set of kids in the world. This noon, out-of-the-blue, we did some table grill cooking with the kids, which was a good moment to consider what life really is about.

This sabbatical thing has been lasting for a small week by now, and essentially boils down to me not doing anything during the evening which is work- or computer-related, and has been dropping me into some Homer-esque mode of watching television, eating chips and drinking wine, reading the latest Aspe novel (which is Flanders' most popular detective writer), and starting to browse Cryptonomicon (yep, I'm late). Nothing really exciting, but a big change from trying to 'do something' on my computer until well past 1 AM on almost every week and weekend night for the past few months (with no real tangible result however, as often is the case when one is basically ignoring his own sleep deprivation and the subsequent unproductivity).

The nice side-effect of this (non-)leave is my batteries feeling being recharged and new energy emerging. That was about time.