ApacheCon: Day 3
Friday October 13, 2006 • Howard Tayler
It was a great day. I awoke to video-game remixes, courtesy of my iPod's alarm feature, and the nifty "MP3" setting on the hotel clock radio. I packed my stuff, checked out of the room, and headed downstairs. I sketched a bit, sold a couple of books, and got ready for my keynote address. These keynote things are different at ApacheCon. I'm accustomed to Keynote Speakers (capitalized) being corporate bigwigs who lay down the party line that will be adhered to by the rest of the sessions. Sometimes they have cool tech demos, but for the most part they're pretty dry. Then again, I'm probably not the best judge -- I skip keynote addresses at every opportunity. Well, at ApacheCon they pick keynote speakers who are at best tangentially related to the topics at hand. We're not supposed to be relevant. We're supposed to be interesting. So I did a presentation on how and why the web makes my line of work possible. It went really well. I fielded lots of questions, got a few laughs, and was inundated with heartfelt and enthusiastic thanks afterwards. A few people had very personal connections with my material -- apparently I'm not the only person to hold down a high-paying corporate job in the IT industry while harboring nigh-believable fantasies about living off of more creative work. After the speaking I made with some more sketching and a few book sales. And then it was off to the airport. The flight home was really nice. The whole way back I was thinking how I'm not scheduled to get on another aircraft until the end of March. That's five and a half months of no travel, and I'm looking forward to it (well... there's a family vacation scheduled for late December, but we're driving.) Signing off, I'd like to give a huge shout out to the Schlockers at the Apache Software Foundation who made this appearance possible, and to everybody else who made it so much fun. Thanks, everybody. We'll have to do this again sometime (I'll have to bring a bigger sign, so more people can get free sketches.)
