Here are highlights of the first day of sessions.

Wil Wheaton gave the keynote. The most interesting thing was the real life blog stories including his own. He got great applause when he said that people could record, photograph, etc the performance, as long as it was released under a Creative Commons license.

I'm not attending as many talks this year, but I did go to Matt Raible's talk on Web Frameworks, and learned a bit about frameworks that I haven't had the time to look into, specifically WebWork and Tapestry. Matt's talk is a very working programmer's style talk -- he's giving people the stuff that people need to get work done. I also went to Howard Lewis Ship's HiveMind session. While I get the technical concepts behind IOC containers, I'm still a little mystified by the amount of excitement over these things. The final session that I attended was Torsten Curdt's session on continuations.

I had a number of good conversations over the course of the day, meeting new friends, and catching up with old friends.

The evening's events consisted of the "Star Trek" reception (again), the PGP keysigning party, a BOF on legal issues, and a trip to see the Incredibles.

The keysigning

At the PGP keysigning, Theo de Winter told me (and a bunch of other people) about CA-Bot, a script for batch signing keys. It also implements an e-mail verification mechanism. This sounded really cool. In fact, I got my messages from Theo this morning. The problem is that the GPG plugin for Mail.app couldn't decrypt the messages, which made things very annoying -- I had to respond to them all by hand. If anyone has a better script for handling this stuff let me know. Robyn convinced me that the use of ID for the keysigning doesn't really help security any, so I'm altering my signing policy appropriately.

The Incredibles is an amazing movie. It's clean, and there were lots of really hilarious moments. It turns out that one of the most hilarious moments occurred on our way to the theater. Roy Fielding got a new car that includes a cool navigation system (my first time riding in a car with such a system). So when Roy turned it on and quickly got directions to the theater (like, faster that I could have done it in MapQuest), and the synthesized voice started giving directions, I exclaimed "I'm gonna write this up". Roy then decided that he was going show off a little. "Show parking" he intoned. What ensued could only be described as a live version of the Doonesbury strips that lampooned the handwriting in the original Newton. Let's just say that the car was full of laughter. But I do have to admit that it was pretty cool.