This year, one of the trade shows that I regularly go to — the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) — happened to take place the same week that Melinda was scheduled to be at Band Camp practicing her flag-waving routines and that Christopher was planning to stay with his grandparents for a week (and our two recent houseguests, Katharina and Renu, had both already gone home to Germany and India respectively).

So Colleen and I decided to take advantage of this serendipitous sequence of opportunities and make use of some accumulated frequent-flyer miles so that she could come along with me to Portland — the first time since our honeymoon trip to New Orleans almost 19 years ago that we’ve travelled together on the same plane!

We had a blast. During the day, while I took care of business at the conference (manning our exhibit booth, schmoozing with authors, learning about new products and technologies, etc.), Colleen visited an old teacher friend who lived in the area and generally acquainted herself with Portland’s many charms and peculiarities.

We also had several evenings to ourselves to ride the streetcars, eat dinner in some interesting Portland restaurants, and explore the wonders of the famous Powell’s Bookstore — which is kind of what you’d get if you combined into one huge store (to put it into terms that an Ann Arborite would understand) the original Borders, a university bookstore like Ulrich’s or Follett’s, and a used bookstore like David’s.

The full photo album, complete with many pix from the booth and the convention exhibit floor, is at:
http://www.colleen-n-mark.com/photos/album/200508osconportland/

Tags: OSCON, Portland, Colleen, Mark, second honeymoon, travel

BrainShare — Novell’s big annual user conference in Salt Lake City every March — was all open source, all Linux, all the time this year. It was fun to see big splashes of SUSE green thrown into the mix amongst all the usual red.

Here’s a slideshow of some of my pix, set to the neo-newwave sounds of the Killers:

Tags: Novell, BrainShare, Salt Palace, SUSE

A couple colleagues and I made a trip out to Provo, Utah in early November to visit with people at Novell, get an update on their software product plans for next year, and figure out what books we need to publish in Novell Press.

It was my third trip to Utah this year, but the first time when there was snow on the mountains — all three of us poor, terrain-starved Hoosiers couldn’t help but overtly ogle the stunning views through the windows of the conference room where we had our meetings.

Tags: Novell, Novell Press, Provo, mountains

I’ve posted a photo album and a slide show movie (in QuickTime format for a DSL or cable connection) from Pearson’s presence at this year’s MySQL User Conference in Orlando.

We were able to show off our very first book from MySQL Press — a new imprint we set up at the beginning of the year to publish the official books on the very popular MySQL open-source database system, as well as on other products and technologies from Swedish software company MySQL AB.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty slideshow that I put together with iPhoto, showing some photos I took at Novell’s BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City:

Medium Size and Medium Quality (QuickTime Format for a DSL or Cable Connection)

Tiny Size and Crummy Quality (QuickTime Format for a Modem Connection)