It’s been a busy yet fun week in OpenNMS-land. We got 1.5.91 out the door, one of our old clients is doing really well with their on-line business, and we signed up a record number of new ones.

So now David and I are off to Europe for two weeks. Ah, the jet-setting life of an open source maintainer: first class all the way.

Not. (grin)

There are two ways to increase the money you make in a business: sell more or spend less. We’ve always taken the “spend less” bit to heart, so when we decided to attend the TM Forum’s conference in Nice, France, we decided to maximize the value of the plane ticket to Europe by adding on a week of seminars. Travel within Europe is pretty inexpensive, even in US dollars, so it was just an incremental cost to do this.

It will be a lot of coach-class air travel and sharing hotel rooms (apparently in Europe if two men share a hotel room it means they are gay – we’re not gay [not that there’s anything wrong with that], just cheap).

The “first class” part will be seeing many old friends and making new ones. It was only through the OpenNMS community that we were able to get this thing together in first place, and it is due to their kind nature that we’ll be able to have a really fun trip.

The first stop will be Lyndhurst, Hampshire, England. My friend Martin is picking us up at Heathrow and driving us down (train service from LHR sucks – I wish American still flew into Gatwick). The weather looks grand, and we’re getting a bunch of people together at my favorite pub in the whole country.

My plan is to keep the blog updated as much as possible, but time and Internet availability may limit that to some degree. If you’re coming to one of our seminars, hope to see you then.