free food from the devil

That is what the email said, it was an invite to a MS event in Irvine today, I signed up way back, but thought I was carpooling with Charles, who was nowhere to be called this morning so that didn't happen. So carpool to work with JJ and on the road at 9AM, 80 miles until Irvine, 10-20, grrr... what can you do, traffic is what it is. Registered at TechNetEvents and it was a pretty good event, although like most things from a company it was basically a way for them to promote Server 2008, active directory, Office Communications Server 2007, live.com and other talks I didn't attend as they had 3 tracks. It was at an Edwards 21 theater, instead of movies they projected PowerPoint from a projector down in the bottom. Interesting idea, theaters probably don't do much business during the day. Made some good contacts, gave out some cards and URLs, good networking event. However I am a big open source user right now, this is on Ubuntu as I type it. Ubuntu is getting to the sweet point for me, it works as easy as Windows and runs all I need. I have my laptop in it and my desktop is dual boot, but spending more and more time in Ubuntu. Like Leopard, it comes with more usable stuff out of the box.

I am not against using the best tool for the job though. I will run XP when I need to.

I went to LAJUG today topic JavaFX. Spoke with Matt outside about the stock, a 4:1 reverse split wasn't how I wanted to get value for my investment, SUNW or now JAVAD has been a trainwreck for me. I was too busy working in 2000 to sell it and since I moved and didn't have the net back then, or the sense to sell all, not paying attention cost me lots of money back then, not really Sun's fault, but ouch... Meanwhile most browsers support both Java and Flash so this could be a real compeditor to Flash, which is top dog now. FlashFX came out in May, seems interesting.

Today I deleted my 559 spam messages, about half through decided no need to keep going, Google did a good job filtering no false positives, only when I was in China did it baffle me why I couldn't get email from the person sitting in front of me, and some occasional dubious email that can't make it, but on the whole gMail is awesome as long as you don't need privacy or your mail to be deleted.

Just found out that there is another bar camp on the 14th, great, bring it on. At least this one is in Culver City not London.