I’m not the only one blogging his conference activities. If you go over to the Tucows Blog, you’ll find not only my blog entries on the Ajax Experience, you’ll also find a boatload of entries written by our pal Tris Hussey, who’s at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle. Go check them out!
The gentleman pictured below is James Duncan Davidson. He’s often seen at conferences where the subject matter can be classified as “Web 2.0”, where’s he’s easy to find: just look for the friendly, smiling redheaded dude with the mega-phallic camera lens. Here he is taking pictures of a panel session at the Ajax Experience:
In addition to fast becoming the Annie Leibovitz of the Web 2.0 set, James is also a programmer of note. The trivia question that led to my winning the XBox was “The man with the camera in the front row is well-known in the Java community. In the Java world, what’s he known for?”
I raised my hand first, so I got picked. For a moment, I was tempted to say “He’s known in Java world for defecting to Ruby!“
Sensing that the answer, accurate as it was, would not be accepted, I gave them the answer “He’s known for making ‘Ant‘. The build tool.”
Ben Galbraith, one of the conference organizers and a judge at the trivia contest, looked a little uneasy. “I was thinking of something else, but I think that’s right…
“Oh yeah,” I said, thinking quickly, “…and Tomcat.” Although I’m not really a Java guy, I’ve used Ant many a time, but never Tomcat, so it’s a little off my radar.
Okay, then. You win the XBox 360!
So I tip my hat to Duncan, for playing a role in my shiny new XBox 360.
I also have to thank him for taking this lovely picture of me playing accordion at the Ajax Experience party on Tuesday night. I love this photo: it says “this guy enjoys life.” Mondo thanks, Duncan!
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
Okay, I’m kidding. Having just flown back from Boston, the city was on my mind when I stumbled across this photo this morning.
Many thanks to Miss Fipi Lele, who keeps sending me these lovely pictures.
As you may have read, I won an XBox 360 core system in a trivia game at the Ajax Experience yesterday (I knew that learning Java development trivia would come in handy someday!).
If you’ve got XBox 360 games that you love, recommend them to me in the comments! I prefer the shootin’, killin’ and adventurin’ games to the sports stuff, and I also like music-based games.
Perhaps I’ve become a bit too comfortable in Logan International Airport’s Terminal C.
Terminal C is the terminal I use most often, after the ones in Toronto. Of the airlines that have regular Toronto-Boston routes, Air Canada is probably the best option, both price- and comfort-wise. They tend to use larger and more comfortable jets than the next-best option, American Eagle, and they use Terminal C, which has better restaurants and stores and more available power outlets than Terminal B. It’s also where the Logan branch of Legal Sea Foods, home of some very good “chowdah”, is located.
Yesterday afternoon, I took Brent Ashley to Legal for some chowder and calamari, to thank him for giving me a free pass to the Ajax Experience conference. The “Thai Style” calamari is pretty nice, with its spicy pineapple-and-peanut sauce, but let’s face it: it’s seriously deep-fried and greasily travels through your system like Mario Andretti down a straightaway. Needless to say, I felt nature’s rather urgent call while waiting at the gate and asked Brent to keep an eye on my stuff while I beelined for the bathroom.
I’ve used the bathroom at Terminal C dozens of times, so I navigated my way there on auto-pilot. I saw a set of open stalls, picked one and went about my business.
As I was finishing up, I noticed that the voices of the guys in the room were a little…weird.
That’s when I realized that I’d just taken a crap in the women’s room.
A plane must’ve just landed, because the bathroom got very full. I decided that right then would be a very bad time to emerge from the stall; better by far to wait for a lull. The last thing I needed was a room full of women who might be under the mistaken impression that I was some kind of Japanese toilet pervert who got his jollies listening to women using the bathroom.
I even briefly considered tossing my black blazer over my head in the hopes that it would hide my bearded face and perhaps even fool casual onlookers into thinking I was wearing some kind of chador. Hey, I’ve had stupider ideas.
A few minutes later, I got the lull I was waiting for. I opened the stall door and set a quick but not overly hurried path for the door and crossed the hall into the men’s washroom, where I washed my hands.
Note to self: Look before you poop.
(By the bye, the women’s washroom at Logan is just as poorly-maintained as the men’s.)
Over at Global Nerdy, I’ve filed part two of my report on the dot-com-bubble-esque swag and prizes being given away by the vendors and organizers at the Ajax Experience conference. Check it out!
At the end of the Ajax Experience conference, they were giving away prizes to people or groups of people who could correctly answer trivia questions. These weren’t cheap prizes either — we’re talking iPod nanos, iPod videos, XBox 360s and Mac Minis.
For correctly identifying Rasmus Lerdorf as the creator of the PHP programming language, Brent Ashley won a Core Duo Mac mini:
For knowing that the “guy with the camera in the front row” was James Duncan Davidson and that he created the Ant build utility and Tomcat server, I won an XBox 360 core system:
