Gawd, is that my alarm? I get up. There I did it. Headed down for some breakfast. Scrambled egg tacos. Yummy. The OJ was super tasty too. I don’t know why but it really was.

I must once again comment on how cool RW attendees are. They’re such a diverse crowd from all different professional backgrounds and experiences. Yes, there’s a huge Mac crowd but I think the Linux experimenters are increasing in number from last year. I love meeting new friends and hearing their stories. Often times, the best things about conferences are the discussions between and after the sessions.

The first session of the day was Christian Schmitz on “The Monkeybread Software Plugin”. It was a bit of a sales pitch, but there’s no doubting the power of the entirety of this work. Christian’s passion and commitment to RB and his product is readily evident. He announced a new graphing toolset now available. It must have had hundreds of graph types ready to go.

Next up was Jordan Morris with “Developing and Implementing an Input Validation Firewall for Applications”. Jordan did a great job of getting past the slides and getting to a real world (sorry for the pun!) demonstration of code. I love real world examples. He talked about different approaches to input validations, from nothing (been there, done that; I’m sorry to say!) to black lists, to white listing inputs (Doing this, I’m proud to say!). This reminds me of one of my favorite comics of all time: Little Bobby Tables. Great job Jordan.

I received a call from one of my clients.  Their server is blue screening.  I called him back on Skype and the call quality sucked.  What sounded like an emergency, evidently, could wait for a week from tomorrow when he’s back in town.  I can’t ever figure out my clients.  It sounds like an emergency so I treat it like an emergency, and then it becomes a non-emergency.  I don’t know why.  Humans!  Gah!

Third for the day was Guyren Howe with “Write Better Programs Using Object Oriented Programming”. It was a pretty theoretical presentation, I’m afraid. Not a lot of code. Good content, but I would have preferred example approaches of good OOP and bad OOP. Hard to do in 50 minutes.

Lunch! Chicken, roast beast, other goodies … peach cobbler! Again, a great discussion at the table; RB, PostgreSQL, Linux, politics, and the beauty written into the Bill of Rights. Gotta love that.

First after lunch was Aaron Ballman with “Accessibility”. I didn’t get to see Aaron speak last year and I wanted to make sure that I caught at least one of his presentations this year. It was really cool to see a guy who is deep in the guts of RB day in and day out, talking about how to write better programs to be better accessible for people who have visual, tactile, and hearing disabilities. Two thumbs up. Not bad for a guy who is half focused on getting hitched in a couple of days. Run Aaron!!! (j/k!!!)

I then was off to Marco Bambini’s presenation on “What’s New in the Upcoming REAL SQL Server 2008r2″. What’s cool about this is that it was a lot of what I missed when I missed Geoff’s keynote presentation. Very impressive stuff is on the way. I think it’s really cool that REAL Software is a two product company. I can see RS making a boat load of money off licensing for REAL SQL Server, as they should! They’re doing tons of work in this area and you can tell they’ve got more plans up their sleeve for the future.

Next up was Jonathan Monroe talking about “Advanced Database Programming with ODBC”.  Jonathan works for Actual Technologies that develops and maintains ODBC drivers for various databases.  I almost called out ot see if Jonathan could help me get RB to talk to VFP tables on Linux using ODBC because I’m totally flummoxed.  Perhaps later if I can corner him.

I skipped the next session because I was able to trick Paul Lefebvre of LogicalVue into spending some time answering my asinine questions.  He was very patient with me and very helpful but every so often a “why would you do that?!?” or a “you wouldn’t ever do that with RB!” would slip out.  It helped me a lot though to prepare my brain for the transition over to RB.  Thanks Paul!

I made a quick call on Skype to my wife before dinner.  The call quality was pretty good this call.  She had to run to take the kids to Archery Club practice.

I hooked up with Paul and Christian Miller and a table full other great guys in the conference ballroom for the RW banquet.  Great food, great company.  I actually won a RB shirt in the trivia contest.  My question was “What 50’s rock icon did the rock band Weezer honor in their 19somethingorother song?”  (Answer at the bottom!)  Andrew Bredow helped me out with the answer.  I should have known it, but I drew a blank.  Thanks Andrew.

Christian Miller won a 50% off certificate for answering “What stuff is mixed with matter to make warp travel possible in Star Trek?”  Easy!!!  I told Christian that I would write something mean about him to make sure that he’s reading my blog entry so, here goes: Christian thought the answer to “Who is Harald Bluetooth that the Bluetooth technology is named after?” was “He was a pirate!”  Silly Christian!!!  Everyone knows (except for me) that he was named after the King of Denmark.

Anyway, the questions were really hard but everyone seemed to have a great time.  Thanks to everyone from RS for a great evening.

Time for some sleep.  I won’t be getting much tomorrow.  I’ve got to check out, go to RW for the last day of sessions, then immediately leave for the airport at 4pm.  I think I’ll get to my house at 1am on Saturday morning, and then dream of REAL basic all night.

Later!

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