Regular readers know that when I am at a conference, I usually blog one day behind -- On a particular day, I blog about the events of the previous day. As time has passed I'm spending more and more of my conference attendance time meeting with people as opposed to attending the sessions. So if you are reading for complete coverage of OSCON, I can tell you right now that you will be disappointed.

I'm also blogging less because I'm photographing more. I've been toting the Canon with me everywhere and photos are starting to go up on Flickr. I just hope that all the 8MP photos don't overflow my hard disk before I get home. (And no, I'm not shooting RAW, although I wish I could be. I'll save the rant on iPhoto + Digital Rebel XT RAW for another time).

There is a new keynote format at OSCON this year. Instead of big long keynotes, there are 15 minute keynotes. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be working well. Many of the keynotes were too product focused for my taste. In the past, OSCON has had some great long keynotes. I ended up in and out of most of the keynotes. The only one that I saw in its entirety was Jonathan Schwartz. His language around open source remains focused on cost, but was glad to see him emphasizing the competition is good for innovation, which I agree with. The other positive statement was that he thinks that most software patents are inapplicable.

I want the to the WebWork vs Spring MVC Smackdown because Kathy Sierra mentioned it the day before. The back and forth format and the boxing ring bell enhanced the content. There were lots of comparisons of details between the two frameworks. I'm not working in the space at the moment, but seeing the presentation makes me wonder if there isn't a simpler way.

O'Reilly graciously allowed r0ml to finish his presentation from last year. It appeared to me that the r0ml fan club is quite large, and includes many high profile individuals. I'm not even going to attempt to summarize here. Doug Kaye from IT Conversations was there, so folks will just have to wait for the audio to appear. (I hope that my iPod hasn't exploded from the backlog by then).

After that the OSAF festivities began, starting with my session on Chandler parcels. The session was lightly attended, which was disappointing, but the folks who did attend clearly understood what I was saying. There were a number of good questions about the content. I could hide behind "Quality, not quantity", but I'd rather have both.

The CalDAV panel followed my session, and I think that went pretty well except for a glitch on Dan Mosedale's demo. The conference wireless has been pretty unreliable, and Dan wasn't able to get a connection for the coup de grace. Sheila Mooney from OSAF demonstrated sharing (and updating) a calendar between two instances of Chandler. That was enough to make a fellow next to me go "Wow". I wonder what he would have said if he had seen the same thing happening between Chandler and Thunderbird.

The CalDAV panel ran over right into the CalDAF BOF (as planned). Unfortunately, the Chandler BOF wasn't so lucky. I'm not sure what happened, but I know that the BOF board entry for the Chandler BOF was confusing about the time of the BOF, and that we were up against the reception/party in the exhibit hall. Being far from downtown Portland increases the value of free food immensely. We had 2 or 3 people that ended up in Chandler conversations, but it wasn't really comparable to BOF's in previous years.

The folks from Portland are really going all out. A bunch of us from OSAF were standing around after the dust had settled, trying to figure out where to go for dinner (a neat trick when you don't know your way around the city). Kevin Altis had just finished giving us recommendations/directions when two guys came out of the exhibit hall. They were part of some kind of Portland evangelism group. The saw the map in my hand and proceeded to give an additional set of recommendations and directions. Ultimately, we were glad that they did. We went to andina in the Pearl district and had a fabulous meal. The last time I was in a restaurant like this was when Marc Canter to Julie, the girls, and I to Guu during Northern Voice. I've never been to a conference where people were evangelizing the hosting city the way that Portland folks are doing.

Being at the convention center is helping me to discover more about Portland. The free ride zone for the Max train is a thing of beauty. I had thought Seattle's bus free ride zone was good, but the Max train beats that all to pieces. Combine that with Portland's short city blocks, and wonderful downtown, and it's all very appealing. I've had lots of conversations (usually on the way to meals) about how nice Portland is.