I first came into contact with Alex in 2003 when he started buying things off of our Wishlist (which is looking a little bare at the moment). It was nice to know that someone appreciated our work enough to actually spend money, and Alex was one of the first people to regularly appear on our IRC channel (#opennms on irc.freenode.net).

Alex travels a lot, and when I started doing a large amount of international travel he would often promise to meet me. After a number of “missed connections” we started to think that he was simply an IRC robot. However, at one of the LinuxWorld UK shows in London he did manage to show up, but that didn’t prevent us from naming the robot in our channel “_sndbot” after Alex’s “_snd” nick.

He lives in Norway, and he was kind enough to host me at his house last year. It was a fun, if hurried, trip, and I hope to return sometime soon.

Alex has posted a nice testimonial for the Order of the Blue Polo. We target OpenNMS for people just like Alex who make their living as open source experts, and I for one am happy that he is able to make his clients happy with our project. He is also the first and only person to have a running installation of OpenNMS in Africa (at least that I know about).

Please check out his note to see how well OpenNMS fits as a tool for solutions providers such as Alex. He also lists a number of his clients (with their permission, of course) who are able to benefit from the combination of our software and Alex’s talent.

Finally, I got the last shipment of Blue Polos out today. Those of you in the US should see yours by the end of the week. For those of you overseas, please give it a week or two to get there by mail. Let me know if you don’t get your shirt after that time.

If you haven’t already posted on the OBP, it is still open. We’d love to hear from you.