Well, yesterday wasn’t a very fun day. I prefer to focus on the positive and even though it is required of me to deal with the negative I don’t enjoy it. If it was just me I might have been tempted to chuck this whole thing and get a real job (grin).

Luckily, it hasn’t been just me for several years now. Without working up a sappy “wind beneath my wings” vibe here, the community around OpenNMS makes days like yesterday worth it.

By the community I don’t just mean the OGP (although they are a significant part of it), I mean anyone who runs OpenNMS and finds it useful.

At the end of the day I received two little presents that made my mood a bit lighter.

The first was on our IRC channel (#opennms on freenode.net). Ethan (foo’ on the channel) from Checkfree popped in to ask a question. I thought it was cool, since I used Checkfree back around 1992-1993 well before you could do it through your bank directly (and even now they form the basis for a lot of those systems). He wrote:

“I’ve put OpenNMS in place to monitor all of CheckFree’s IP based Telecom systems. It monitors systems all over the world, and does a very good job at it :)”

That was pretty cool to hear. Often we don’t get feedback on who is using OpenNMS and whether or not they like it (trust me, when you deal with bugzilla and support issues all day you can sometimes get a little down on the product).

The second thing I received was (finally) a picture of Salvatore.

Salvatore Russo was born at three minutes to midnight on 11 February 2008. He is the son of Antonio and Roberta Russo. Both baby and mother are home and are fine. He joins his sister Valeria (OpenRusso 2.0) and brother Gabrielle (OpenRusso 2.1) at their home in Naples, Italy.

Antonio is the project ambassador in Italy. He maintains the OpenNMS wiki in Italian, as well as moderating the opennms-italia mailing list. He is also a good friend and a great cook, who I never would have met if not for OpenNMS.

So last night I closed the laptop, poured a couple of fingers of some Bushmills that Craig Gallen gave me awhile back, and drank the first toast to Salvatore. The second was to OpenNMS. Here’s looking at you.