Still Here (3 comments)
I'm still in Atlanta. Today, I went to a presentation on livejournal's painful growth given by its founder and lead programmer, Brad. He was assisted by Lisa, the livejournal sysadmin (yes, singular)... cute *and* capable! It was an enlightening presentation (slides here), especially given that I once thought about using cloudedthought.com to run a pay-for-blog service. I eventually decided not to do that because I figured it was too much work for my schedule. It turns out that I had no idea how much work goes into a big service. I have a lot more respect for livejournal now that I've seen what went into it, and I had a chance to tell Brad that at a vendor party tonight.
I also met the sysadmin of a Canadian ISP tonight. If I were to move to Canada, I'd want to live in his coverage area. The technical aspects we discussed would even be enough for me to forgive his employer's web design, although I did have to admonish him on his uncanadian pronounciation of "about."
On the tech side, I saw really neat demos of Sun's self-healing systems with the new init setup and the power of DTrace. Combined with ZFS and zones, those features make Solaris 10 the first Solaris I'm considering using on my personal systems.
All the fun aside, I'm looking forward to going home and seeing Mel again.