It was a good day
Thanks to the Dice Lounge at the W Hotel, I was able to avoid the box breakfast and lunches at the Moscone and actually get good food. I also maxed out on the Dice swag except a t-shirt (they ran out :-( ). In the morning they had laptop covers, coffee mugs, and very expensive heavyweight luggage tags that seem to be made from circuit boards. I tweeted @aalmiray and @shemnon that there was a breakfast buffet. @JavaOne2008 picked up my tweet and broadcast it to everyone on the #javaone hashtag. Lunch was a lot more crowded. It was a good thing while it lasted. It was dead again when the afternoon tapas came out so I was able to get seconds and thirds.
Swag crawl
After heading back to the Moscone, I hooked with @shemnon and we went on a Pavillion swag crawl. SpringSource ran out of t-shirts in regular people sizes. So we had to settle for IceFaces. Still cool but the SpringSource shirts were really designed well. There was surprisingly a line for t-shirts from JenniferSoft. They were white with hot pink on the back. I hope the guys in that line were getting them for their gfs. We meandered about a little more and got to the Google booth. There were three fourths of the JavaPosse present and I proclaimed, "Hey! It's most of the JavaPosse and the pseudo-Java Posse(referring to Romain Guy)." After getting over being starstruck for a bit, I spoke with Romain and @joeracer about his new company Navigenics and how they are taking steps to ensure patient information doesn't make it into the wrong hands. Very cool stuff. Oh and @crazybob was there too but I didn't talking to him. Then a little chitchat with Romain about Android and expressing mutual respect for each other's work. Joe mentioned that he should be interviewing people and got out the mike and recorded and quickly interviewed @crazybob then myself. If it doesn't hit the cutting room floor you'll hear me contest Ruby's upset win at the Script Bowl(whose name eluded me at that moment) and a quick mention of the new Groovy 1.6-beta-1 release, its speed increases, and my attempts and desires for Groovy to run on Android. In the heat of the moment, I forgot about @Bindable automagically wrapping PropertyChangeListeners around nodes. Oh well.
The BOF
I'd have to say it was a victim of bad timing. @shemnon's and my BOF on extending SwingBuilder was scheduled two days before the actual technical session on SwingBuilder. The technical session was a late addition. The other problem is that our BOF was in the 8:30P time slot so everyone who had commuted already heading home, and those that remained might have been at one of the three parties taking place that night or the free showing of Iron Man. But it's okay, one has to pay his dues before having major pull. If we're invited back next year, we might have better slots. So on to the BOF, after being miked up, the first thing I noticed was how insanely bright the lights were. I don't usually have a problem looking people in the eyes but the bright lights made it where if I did for more than 5 seconds(rh, my eyes would start to water blurring my vision. Other than that, the BOF went pretty well. I was silently chastised by @glaforge though. Because of the aforementioned lighting scheme, I guess I was looking down at the laptop during one section and I got this smirk and hand signal to look up by @glaforge and then a thumbs-up when I did. I had a sudden flashback to the high school play when you teacher and parent is sitting in the audience and you're scared to disappoint them.
Thus was my Wednesday at JavaOne.