OSCON Scheduling

This was supposed to be an entry pointing to my personal conference schedule over on the RedMonk my wiki, which I spent a half hour laboriously cut and pasting in from the conference schedule and my calendar (seriously, could collaboration be any more difficult these days?), but I’m really smart and decided to close Firefox without saving the schedule – thus losing my 30 minutes of work permanently. As a result, I’m going to postpone posting that till Monday.

Which brings me to the next bit of genius on my part. In the hectic rundown pre-vaca I didn’t bother to check the OSCON schedule, and instead merely booked my standard 3 days at the show, arranging hotel and plane in Sunday evening and out Wednesday afternoon. In reviewing some of the messages I accumulated over vacation, I noticed an odd thing: most of the folks I would be meeting with wouldn’t be arriving until Wednesday, or Tuesday at the earliest. This perplexed me until Miguel informed me yesterday when I met with him and Erik (the time was very much appreciated, gentlemen) that Monday and Tuesday at OSCON were solely tutorials.

As much as I want to attend sessions such as Thomas’ “Introduction to Ruby,” I need to attend the keynotes and my three day self-imposed conference attendance plan would prevent that. So this morning I called up Frontier and the Red Lion and pushed everything back two days; instead of arriving on Sun and staying through Wed, I’m now arriving Tues night and leaving Fri afternoon.

Realizing that I have a ton of outstanding requests for my time floating around out there – even more than I had at JavaOne, curiously enough – I’m scrambling to try to fit everyone in. Clients get priority, but I have a number of other committments such as meeting up with Stephe Walli from Optaros and Matt Raible and the SourceBeat / Virtuas folks on Thurs night. Dinners will be tough, and I’ve got a Wednesday lunch booked with Sun’s Claire Giordano (who’ll be part of a session along with some other folks on Friday), but the schedule is otherwise just filling up.

Should you wish to meet while I’m there, by all means drop me a note and we’ll see if we can’t get something worked out now that I’ve shifted my schedule to later in the week. Once the calendar starts taking shape, I will post it to the wiki so that a.) it’s public, and b.) people can tentatively reserve time (though they’ll have to set up a logon on the wiki). I hope to see as many of you face to face next week as possible, and am really fired up about some of the sessions.