I read on Larry Augustin’s blog that this weekend is the annual Open Source Think Tank event in Napa. I have never been invited to one these things, but I believe that I would get an invitation if I asked him.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time right now, which is a shame since I bet with enough notice I could get a reservation at the French Laundry, which is on my list.

I’m not sure how well someone like me would go over at an event like this, since my views are a little different than most of the commercial open source community, but I’ve never really been afraid to speak my mind so at least I would have some fun.

But in keeping with our mission statement of “Help Customers, Have Fun, Make Money” I’m on the road part of each of the next five weeks.

At the end of this week I’m heading up toward DC to help out one of our clients with a performance issue on Windows. The Windows software and the Linux software are exactly the same (OpenNMS is Java after all) so we can’t understand why they are experiencing performance issues on this huge machine they are using. I also lack the knowledge and the tools for diagnosing performance issues on Windows, so the plan is to install Red Hat Linux and see what happens.

Next week I’m spending a couple of days in Chicago doing a “Pimp My OpenNMS” project. We have a surprisingly large number of clients in Chicago so I like going up there, but my only wish is that we could do some of these engagements when it is not so darn cold.

The two weeks after that find me in Frankfurt for the first ever OpenNMS Users Conference, with a short side trip to visit a friend in Dresden after that. This conference definitely falls into the “fun” category and promises to be a great day. If you haven’t registered already, please do so soon since we are limited to the number of people we can fit into the rooms we have acquired and I’d hate to turn anyone away. We had hoped to repeat this in the US sometime this year, but due to the current economic climate that probably won’t happen, as our potential sponsor is having to cut back on the number of conferences they can host due to overall belt tightening.

Finally, I’m off to Portland, Oregon, for a couple of days the last week of the month to work with one of our larger clients on a migration to the latest code. If I didn’t live in God’s Own Earth I’d probably be living in the Pacific Northwest, so I always look forward to these trips. Plus the client is pretty cool.

In these uncertain times it is nice to be busy, especially doing something you enjoy.