There is less than month to go before the biggest OpenNMS user event of the year. The OpenNMS user conference will be held 8-11 April at the University of Southampton in the UK.

I just got back from a week in the area and I’d thought I’d share some of my favorite things about it. First of all, I got to see two UK OGP members, Craig Gallen and Jonathan Sartin, who will both be at the conference.

Craig got his doctorate at the University, and he has arranged for us to have access to some pretty nice facilities. I wanted to take pictures but class was in session at the time, but basically we have access to one large, auditorium style classroom and several smaller classrooms, all connected by a common area that we can use for chatting, coffee, etc. We have access to accommodation in a nearby dormitory as well, which should make getting around pretty easy. There is a cafeteria/restaurant next to the building with the classrooms where we’ll have meals.

While some people criticize English cuisine, I do have my favorites and I look forward to having them again this trip. This last trip I stayed with some friends in nearby Lyndhurst, and on Sunday they rolled out the “full english“:

Okay, so it’s missing the black pudding, but I tend not to eat that anyway. I also have a fondness for “bangers and mash“:

But of course this conference isn’t all about food. Many of the developers will be there as well as numerous customers who will tell how they get the most out of OpenNMS. Jeff and I will be teaching a “boot camp” training course on OpenNMS for the first two days, but the main event will happen the last two days when the presentations start. David will be giving a keynote on the “new shiny” coming in 1.14 as well as an update on 2.0. Our newest hire, Ken, will be discussing what he learned running a huge instance of OpenNMS for the government of the state of Oregon. Eric, Mr. NoSQL, will present his work on the Cassandra backend to replace RRDtool for highly scalable performance data storage. Antonio will talk about the new features in Linkd.

But the sessions I will be attending are those by OpenNMS users that are part presentation/part case study. Markus will discuss a configuration done for a large company in Sweden that enabled category-base thresholds. Mike and Ron are going to talk about how they use OpenNMS to import odd but useful data into the system. Ian is going to discuss BGP monitoring.

And, while I can’t imagine that isn’t enough to get you interested, remember that other half of English cuisine, the beer:

I’m sure there will be lots of that. (grin)

Southampton itself is an interesting town. A major sea port, this is the port from which the Titanic set sail (slogan: when she left here she was whole). Craig took me to a museum dedicated to the port in the general and specifically the Titanic. It was pretty nice, except that someone needs to pay attention to their Adobe Air version:

If you want to spend the weekend after exploring the area, you can’t walk ten feet without tripping over something of historical significance. I got to visit Minstead, which is the final resting place for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

I also got to see “Satan’s Roundabout” up in Hemel Hempstead. This is a traffic circle with several little traffic circles hung off of it (in all fairness the locals call it the “Magic Roundabout“). It was weird to be driving the “right” way around it, which is actually wrong, and it made it even harder than usual for me to keep from getting run over by looking in the wrong direction for oncoming traffic.

And of course, if you get homesick for a taste of home, there is always Papa Johns:

So if you’ve been on the fence about coming to the conference, I hope I’ve convinced you that it will be both valuable and fun. I can guarantee you’ll learn how to get more value out of your OpenNMS instance than it costs to attend. Registration is still open and I hope to see you there.

It’s been a busy week for me as I had meetings in Sunnyvale followed by a trip to Austin to participate in a Rackspace Customer Advisory Council (CAC) event.

I’m not sure why I was chosen to be on the CAC. While I have been involved with Rackspace since April of 2002 (nearly 12 years – sheesh) we only have one server there. We are looking to deploy a number of new products and we’ve chosen OpenStack as our technology and Rackspace as our provider, but we are in the development stage and haven’t deployed any of it, yet. But it is always fun to come to Austin so I was happy to be able to visit.

I arrived on Wednesday just in time for a networking event. We had a choice of a visit to the hotel spa for a massage, or beer.

Guess which option I chose?

About ten of us got into a van and were driven to the Austin Beerworks. This was my kind of beer tour: it started with us sitting at the bar and then it pretty much stopped. I started off with a red amber called “Battle Axe” and then moved on to “Black Thunder”. I was sold on its description as a “German-style Schwarz” beer, and it was pretty tasty (I really liked the Battle Axe as well). Unfortunately, some good conversation got in the way and I talked too much (imagine), so time ran out before I could try the Sputnik. It was worth it, since a lot of that conversation was with Carl and Nick from Simply Measured, and it was cool to learn about how they were using Rackspace to implement their solution.

At the evening event at Perry’s Steakhouse I was happy to see that John Engates had made it up from San Antonio. I last saw John on CBS News when he was talking about issues with the healthcare.gov website. As a thought leader on hosting he was called to DC to provide input on fixing that site’s performance woes.

As we were catching up, a very energetic man came up and joined our conversation. He turned out to be Robert Scoble. Of course I’ve heard about him for years, and it was a pleasure to finally meet him in person, and yes, he is as crazy animated as his reputation suggests. When it came time for dinner I ended up seated between the two of them, and I likened it to being the creamy filling in a geek Oreo.

John had just taken delivery on a new, bright red Tesla Model S, so I begged a ride back to the hotel. While I think electric hybrids like the Prius are cool from a technology standpoint, the Tesla is cool from a car standpoint first and technology second. The controls and instruments are accessed almost completely through a touchscreen, and you can control everything from what music you want to listen to through ride height using it (only the buttons for the hazard lights and the glove box are analog). Plus the thing is insanely fast with zero lag – press the pedal and it snaps your head back. With a measured zero to sixty mph time of 4.2 seconds, it is slightly faster than David’s stock Mustang GT.

Want.

On Thursday we got to work with a series of presenters who discussed existing and upcoming Rackspace products. I’m not allowed to talk about them due to NDA, but I’m very interested in Rackspace’s hybrid cloud model using OpenStack. I like the control and security of a private cloud but I look to the public cloud to handle peak traffic. While getting the two to work was a little kludgy six months ago, they have done a lot of work to streamline the process.

Scoble did a talk during lunch about his new book the Age of Context. It seems worth checking out, although I think I’ll pass on getting the $3650 Meta Pro goggles in lieu of Glass.

I also got reminded that I really need to check out the Chef project. Both Rackspace and most of the attendees are heavy Chef users, and it seems to be edging out Puppet in the enterprises I’ve come across.

Thursday night saw sleet, freezing rain and some snow descend on Texas, so the Friday session was a little lighter on Rackers than was planned (since many of them were going to drive up from San Antonio that morning). It was cool to see that Nathan Anderson , who was a programmer at Rackspace when I started with them in 2002, is now is a position of responsibility, even if that responsibility involves the billing interface. (grin)

It was a fun time, and it made me excited about the possibilities available using the Rackspace platform. Hats off to Sandra, Aisha, Cara and the whole Customer Experience team for a nice conference.

Last week was the inaugural All Things Open Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina (USA).

My involvement with this show was somewhat accidental. We were talking with Tom Rabon a few months back about how the Research Triangle Area (which includes Raleigh as well as Chapel Hill and Durham) is something of a hotbed for true open source companies, headed by Red Hat (‘natch). He was thinking we could emphasize this by hosting an open source focused conference in the area, and work toward building some sort of open source “center of excellence” for the region.

Now unfortunately the current North Carolina state government seems hell bent on making the State unattractive for technology businesses as a whole, but there are pockets where the open source culture thrives and the Triangle is one of them. This was noticed by a group out of South Carolina called It-ology whose mission is to promote Information Technology from primary education up through adult professionals, and they see open source as the wave of the future. They decided to hold a conference in the area to see if there was any interest, and when I found out that someone was already working on it I decided to get involved.

The expected attendance was 400 people. Over 800 showed up.

Now note that this was not a free conference, like the wonderful, grassroots LUG-driven events I try to attend. While definitely not as expensive as, say, a Gartner or IDG conference, the fact that so many people were willing to pony up the shekels to come speaks well toward both the conference line up and the organization, headed by Todd Lewis.

I arrived just before 9am and found a huge line of people waiting to register. I chalk that both up to first time conference issues as well as to the unexpected turnout, and for one of the few times in my life I used my clout as a sponsor to get my badge early (grin).

Along the way I ran into Mike Else, the evening’s entertainment, as he performs as Professor Kliq and OpenNMS had paid to sponsor his trip to the show. We entered the crowded, standing room only keynote room and found some places in the back to sit (yes, the “standing room only” part happened after we sat down).

During the opening remarks we were told that IT-ology is looking for a director of operations for the Triangle area, so if you are in to that sort of thing, give them a call. That sounds like something I would love to do, but alas I have bright and golden handcuffs to my current job.

This was followed by some good keynote speeches. One was given by William Hurley, more commonly referred to as simply “whurley“. I first met him back in 2006, but hadn’t seen him in awhile since he created his company Chaotic Moon (and he started rockin’ the C. Everett Koop beard).

He’s his own cult of personality and no one can deny he is a dynamic speaker, but I do want to criticize his use of “F-bombs“. Now don’t get me wrong, I love that word and it is very useful in certain contexts, but this wasn’t one of them. One might have been okay, but this was something of a family oriented show and it detracted from the message (by making some people uncomfortable) versus helping it.

I also took issue with his claim that open source hadn’t changed in the three years he’s been at Chaotic Moon (that company is definitely not open source, having gained fame through the development of iOS apps). He brought up some examples, such as RMS, Mark Shuttleworth and Matt Asay (that last one struck me as odd since he ceased to be relevant a long time ago, if he ever was) and to me we have so moved beyond them, this conference being one example.

The little video he showed of the mind controlled skateboard was cool, though.

I talked with him about the keynote afterward and the fact of the matter is that he is who he is and F-bombs are just part of that. Still, he does get the conversation started and it was great hearing stories about working with Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs in the same room.

But it wasn’t the whurley show (sorry to drone on about it but that is just what happens when he is around). I got to see Andrew Oliver and Phillip Rhodes, two local open source entrepreneurs who I’ve kept in touch with over the years. I also went to a talk by Jason Hibbets, the main project lead for opensource.com as well as the author of The Foundation for an Open Source City and another reason why the conference was held in Raleigh.

Most of Wednesday’s talks were business and introductory, whereas Thursday’s talks were more technical. I did one on my experiences running an open source business, which was held over lunch.

That night there were a number of social events. There was a Github drinkup, followed by a speakers dinner, followed by a party sponsored by OpenNMS. Kliq did an amazing set, but there seemed to be a large drop in attendance from the initial Github party and ours. I think that was mainly due to people being local and heading home (I made it back to my, slightly spinning, hotel room around 2am) but part of it may have been the delay in the middle. Next year we should probably not split the events like that, so there is more continuity (versus come to Spy, leave to get dinner, and come back to Spy).

Still, since I was buying the drinks, it worked out (grin).

Overall I had a great time, and the feedback has been uniformly positive. Next year may see a curtailing in the number of conferences I can attend, but All Things Open will be one of them.

I’ve spent this week in Silicon Valley meeting with a number of interesting people, and while I love the density of tech savvy people here, there are some issues. Traffic, for one, and housing prices for another. As we were driving down University Avenue I witnessed the definition of Valley poverty: having a three million dollar house but still having to park your Ferrari outside under a car cover due to not having a big enough garage.

Where I live, near Raleigh, North Carolina, we have our own traffic issues but housing is affordable, and, most importantly, the tech savvy people there really “get” open source software.

Perhaps it is due to the presence of Red Hat, arguably the most successful open source company in existence, but it has been my experience that those people interested in building businesses around a truly open model seem to congregate in the area.

So it seems logical that we should hold a conference of some sort to celebrate both open source software and the open source way. We at OpenNMS were thinking about organizing one when I stumbled across All Things Open. It seems that folks like Jeremy Davis and Todd Lewis had the same idea and, better yet, took action to make it a reality.

Now, I like conferences. In fact I’ve saved every badge and lanyard I’ve received over the last ten years or so, and I’ve always favored grassroots efforts over corporate ones.

All Things Open has the makings of a great conference. The speaker line-up is impressive. I haven’t seen whurley in years (he stopped responding to my e-mails a long time ago but I am hoping it is more that, like Wesley Crusher, he has moved on to become a being of pure Twitter versus the fact that I bother him) and I never pass up the chance to see Chris Dibona, the open source projects manager at Google who has always gone out of his way to help us out at OpenNMS. The rest of the list reads like a “Who’s Who” of open source software, and I think the biggest issue for attendees will be choosing between competing presentations. Our local talent is also highly represented, with my friend Andrew Oliver speaking as well as opensource.com’s Jason Hibbets, author of “The Foundation for an Open Source City” which uses Raleigh as a model.

I am humbled to be a part of it (while not yet on the schedule I’ve been told I’ll be speaking during lunch on my experiences running an open source business) and The OpenNMS Group will be doing their part as sponsors of the Wednesday night party. The details are still being ironed out, but the musical guest is confirmed to be Professor Kliq, an electronic musician who publishes his work under a Creative Commons license. Jeremy introduced me to him and I’m eager to watch him perform live, and he is also a speaker.

Registration is now open, currently with “Early Bird” pricing, so get your tickets today and reserve 23-24 October for what promises to be a great conference.

I just found out that the OpenNMS Foundation has decided that the annual users conference will take place from 8-11 April 2014 at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

Southampton (slogan: “when the Titanic left here, she was whole”) should offer more temperate weather than last year’s snow, and by holding the conference on campus we’ll have access to great bandwidth, decent accommodation and high end classroom facilities.

So mark your calendars now for what is sure to be the OpenNMS event of 2014, and I hope to see you there.

I’m calling this post “Day 3” of but that is a bit of a misnomer. While there were some OSCON events on Friday, the Expo closed Thursday night and as the holder of an Expo-only pass …

Instead I decided to grab a Zipcar and hop over the border to Vancouver. I am an unabashed fan of Zipcar, and I look forward to the opportunity to use them whenever possible. Portland is one of their major cities, and I had a choice of two cars that were parked directly in front of my hotel in the City Center.

I chose the red A3, and I rented it for a couple of hours so I could scoot across the border to visit one of our largest and oldest clients, New Edge Networks.

Well, technically they are Earthlink Business Systems, and while I think Earthlink is a good brand I still think of them as New Edge.

The car was fun, if a little dirty. It looks like someone who had it before me got into some mud. The thing I like about Zipcar is the community – not only are we customers but they have built a culture where you feel more like you are borrowing a friend’s car than renting one – so the interior was very clean as that just happens to be the way we Zipcar users roll.

Another courtesy is that you should leave at least a quarter of a tank of gas in the vehicle, and the person before me followed that to the letter (grin). I thought it would be good to fill it up on the way back, so I got to experience getting gasoline in Oregon. Oregon, along with New Jersey, requires an attendant to fill your tank, and it took a second for me to understand why the guy at the gas station was being so attentive. He was familiar with Zipcar, and that part of the process went smoothly, as fuel is included in the rental fee.

I had a little time on my hands before dinner, so I decided to visit Powell’s. Of course, I felt the need to leave my mark, if just for a little while before the smurfs took it back.

A small group of us met at Vault Martini for happy hour. Tina and Jason showed up from Earthlink, and much to my surprise Jason Aras (OGP) also showed up. I was thinking that he was mad at me since I was having trouble getting in touch with him via e-mail, but he assured me that it was due to him being crazy/busy at StackMob. The fifth person in our little group was Ken Eshelby. Ken works for the State of Oregon where he has done some amazing customization work on their instance of OpenNMS, but we have not been able to get permission to do a detailed case study (yet).

We talked tech and politics (these are a few of my favorite things) and then grabbed dinner. My only requirement is that dessert was going to be Voodoo Doughnut.

As usually there was a line, so I used it as an opportunity to get rid of a large number (sigh) of L4 XMP Bursters.

As for my dessert choice, I am nothing if not a fan of the classics.

It was a great trip with great people and great weather. I look forward to the opportunity to do it again.

My Thursday morning started off with a visit with Matt and Moira at the City of Portland. One of the reasons I like this city is that they are also cool enough to use OpenNMS, and I had a nice lunch discussing tech and politics during another amazing Portland summer day.

Afterward I did have one little errand to run, just on principal.

When I made it to the convention center, there was one stop I wanted to make before the show ended and that was the New Relic booth.

Although they have been around since 2008, I had never heard of New Relic until just recently when they hired MC Frontalot to make a video. They have raised over US$115MM for their hosted application monitoring platform, which is amazing until you find out that their Chairman is Peter Fenton. You have probably not heard his name unless you follow Silcon Valley venture capital, but Peter has been involved in every big deal in the open source space, so he has this reputation of having the Midas touch.

The product is pretty neat. It’s agent driven and cloud hosted, so there is little set up once the agent is installed. It monitors your web-based applications to locate bottlenecks, and has a really nifty drill down feature to show you exactly where the performance issues lie. The have introduced a mobile version as well that you can instrument into your mobile applications.

It is not open source, so there exists an opportunity to disrupt their business model, and they focus on applications, so there is, say, no way to tell which part of the network is causing the delay if a network delay is detected (maybe a good integration with OpenNMS would help that), but they obviously have something people want since they have tens of thousands of customers willing to pay for it. Plus the folks in the booth were just so nice. Gautam (above) was kind enough to tolerate my large number of questions and Saheer told me about the business side of the company, especially how much she enjoyed working there, so it is a company to watch.

My work day over (grin) I wandered around to see if there were any cool people to visit, and I found them.

My first stop was the Fedora booth where I saw Tom “Spot” Calloway. He is thinking about moving back to the Raleigh area, which would be cool, and we’ll see him again a the FLOCK conference in a few weeks (OpenNMS is a sponsor). FLOCK is the annual Fedora conference that used to be called FUDCon, and I like the new name a lot better (Spot does as well since he came up with it). If you are in the Charleston, SC area the weekend of 9 August, check it out.

Over at the Citrix booth I found Mark Hinkle (sorry about the crappy picture). Mark is the open source guy there and I can remember when he used to come by the OpenNMS Group office (when the three founders shared what is now just my office) and we’d talk at length about open source. He told me he uses a lot of what he learned there in explaining the open source philosophy in a company known for commercial software. When he was at Zenoss things were a little tense between us but when he left to pursue life in the cloud that tension went away and I genuinely look forward to talking with him these days.

On my way out I ran into another great guy, Joe Brockmeier. Joe has been involved in open source longer than I have, and he currently is part of the Cloudstack project.

I saw a number of other people as well. It was great to chat with Karen Sandler, GNOME Goddess and one time OpenNMS attorney, and I hate that I just got about 30 seconds with Ilan Rabinovitch in passing. Stephan Walli was supposedly around, but he must get invited to better parties than I do, since I missed him entirely.

Well, that’s not true. For some reason I did get invited to a party hosted by the Google Open Source Programs Office run by Chris Dibona. The party was on the deck of the Departure Restaurant at the Nines Hotel, and it might have been Mount Olympus as far as I was concerned since it was full of open source gods and goddesses.

For once I feel the need for restraint and discretion, and I am not going to drop the names of all the people I met there. Trust me, if you are involved in free software at all you’d know this guest list, which considering how little OpenNMS is known outside of our community I am still baffled as to why I was there.

I will publicly thank Chris, Carol, Cat, Stephanie and the rest of the OSPO for putting it together. It made me want to go out and do great things.

On my second day in Portland, I spent the morning working and then made my way on the MAX to my final hotel downtown.

The weather is so nice here that I decided I would walk to the Convention Center over the Steel Bridge. Actually, I wanted to get in some Ingress time and I figured the best way to do that would be on foot. Unfortunately, while there are lots and lots of portals downtown, the buildings make getting a decent GPS fix difficult, and so it was a little less fun than it could have been.

Anyway, I made it to the conference without incident, and had to laugh when I was greeted with this:

Close up:

Now, public displays disabled due to Windows error messages are so common as to border on cliché, but it seems a little ironic to see one at an open source conference.

I got my “Expo Hall” badge and made my way onto the show floor.

It’s pretty crowded this year, and I would venture a guess that this is an indication that the economy, at least in the tech sector, is turning around. They did have some nice touches, like a set of systems set up to run Starcraft and the perennial big chess set.

The first booth I visited was the one for Microsoft. Speaking of clichés, I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who said “Hey, where’s my free Surface RT?”. I went there specifically to talk with my friend Gian. Microsoft has actually been very helpful to the OpenNMS Project by providing us with an MSDN account so that we can test our application against various versions of Windows, and Gian has been my main contact with respect to that.

They also had a pretty cool idea for their booth. They hired photographer Julian Cash to take pictures of the attendees. In the booth is a large white backdrop, a bunch of geeky/techie props, and a lot of lenses for his Nikon. He spent about 15 minutes with me, and I’m eager to see how the pictures turned out. I watched him work with a number of people throughout the day and it was a lot of fun.

Near the Microsoft booth was Canonical. In case you have been under a rock this week, Canonical announced a rather ambitious plan to raise US$32MM to produce the Ubuntu Edge. It’s a smartphone but with a different agenda than most. The idea is to create an integrated environment so that your PC/Laptop is actually the phone itself. At your desk you would just have a keyboard and monitor, and your desktop software would run directly off the phone – no need to sync, etc. What really intrigues me about this idea is that they are trying to raise the funds directly from the consumer through Indiegogo. There are two basic perks. One is you can contribute a small amount to show support. The other gets you a phone when it comes out. The prices are tiered, so the first perk had the phone at US$675. All 1250 of those are sold out, so the next cheapest option is US$50 more. Once those 1250 are sold, it goes up another $50, etc., to the maximum of US$830.

I got to see Alan Pope again, which was nice, and he demonstrated the basics of the device (it current does make calls and send texts, although MMS is a couple of weeks away yet). They have ports for various other smartphones (well, Android-based phone, of course). Currently it boots into Android and then runs the Ubuntu kernel, but I was told that starting next week that process will be reversed, with Ubuntu booting first.

If you are interested in these sorts of things, I would suggest getting your order in early to save a few shekels. If the goal isn’t met, you get your money back. And of course, I had to use OpenNMS to track the status of the project. As I write this they are just shy of US$6MM.

While hanging out near the booth I did run into Jono Bacon. As one of the official mouthpieces for Canonical, you can imagine how busy his schedule is with this announcement, so I was grateful for what little time I got with him. Actually, I was just using him to find out if Erica Brescia (his much better half) was around, and I found her at the Bitnami booth (they met at a LUGRadio Live event back in 2008 and I happened to take one of the first pictures of the two of them together. Man I’ve been doing this blog thing too long). It was really nice to chat with her, as she always has some great insights and advice about the business aspects of open source software.

I made my way around to the back of the show floor (I always refer to those little out of the way booths as the “geek ghetto”) where I was happy to get a few minutes with Simon Phipps. His out fighting the good fight with the Open Source Initiative, the group that gave us the open source definition among other things. They are making a number of very positive changes, including moving from an appointed to an elected Board of Directors, and if you appreciate open source software I strongly recommend you become a member. Plus, I might one day make a run for the Board myself, and I’ll need all three of my reader’s votes.

The rest of the afternoon was spent socializing. I got to see my friend Greg (he used to work for ADP Dealer Services, one of our clients, before he moved over to a non-profit) and we decided to get dinner together. I recommended this place called Clyde Common that was excellent. You sit “German Style” with tables for eight, and it was coincidental that the four people who sat down next to us were from O’Reilly in Boston.

Toward the end of the meal, Greg’s friend Garrett, who still works at ADP, arrived with his new bride Megan. Megan is a flight attendant, so I got to get my airtravel geek on. While one of my favorite places to drink in town is Vault Martini (we will be there on Friday, starting around 6pm, if you want to join us for drinks and OpenNMS) we were directed to place called Teardrop. As someone who is into artisanal cocktails I found the place to be top notch, but I think I like the atmosphere at the Vault a little better.

So Day 1 was a lot of fun – looking forward to Day 2.

So, what do you do when you find yourself in Portland, Oregon, a day earlier than you expected? Why you spend a couple of hours jamming to a twelve piece Romani brass band, ‘natch.

But maybe I need to back up a bit.

I travel a lot, and for the most part I really enjoy it, especially when I get to visit other countries.

It was in Portland several years ago that I realized that the United States is so large that it is actually possible to get that “foreign country feeling” without leaving. I was with a friend having drinks in this outdoor café, enjoying one of those rare beautiful Portland summer evenings and watching the people, when it dawned on me that the people in Portland are very much different than the people in, say, San Antonio, Texas; New York City; Chicago or Pittsboro, North Carolina. Even though we share the same language and currency, the differences are strong enough to qualify, culturally, as much as traveling to another nation.

Thus I always look forward to a trip to Portlandia.

For many years I always got a paper accepted at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON). Last year, however, my topics were not accepted, so this year I cranked them up a notch. Still no love. I think I may have pissed someone off on the paper committee. I remember meeting this young woman at the Open Source Think Tank last year who helped decide on speakers and she was one of those “Go Big or Go Home” types. It is that attitude which is now so pervasive in Silicon Valley that has, to some degree, soured me on the whole area. The focus seems to be to make as much money as you can, which I think is an attitude doomed to fail.

Not that I’m against making a lot of money. I really would like to have a lot of money, but the way to do it is to focus on your customers. Make something they want, treat them well, have fun (extremely important) and the money will come. But if your only focus is money you’ll forget the customers (who are responsible for giving it to you in the first place) and the money will either never show up or it will go away.

I think I might have said something to that effect and thus got on the “no speaker” list. (sigh)

Anyway, I am digressing more than usual. It turns out this year’s conference coincided with another trip, so I got an “Expo” pass to OSCON and planned to come up for a day to hang out with some friends there as well as to visit some customers (the City of Portland is an OpenNMS client).

The other trip involved meetings in Silicon Valley, and I flew out on Monday expecting to spend Tuesday and Wednesday there and then up to Portland Wednesday night. Unfortunately, the business partner who was to join me came down with a nasty stomach issue, so the meetings got postponed. I called the airline and got my flight moved up a day, and I was excited to get an extra day at the conference.

While I was waiting at the San Jose airport, I caught up on some e-mail. One note was to some friends of mine who live in Eugene, Oregon. Every year they hold a big party on the Fourth of July and for the last two years we have made plans to attend but had to cancel. There was no way for me to visit them this trip but it made me at least want to say “hi”.

Soon after sending the e-mail, my phone rings. It turns out that they were on the way to Portland to see a band, and would I be interested in joining them?

If I could give any one piece of advice to people, it would be to take advantage of things like this. Even if you are dead tired – when you get an opportunity to experience something new, take it. I developed this philosophy back in 2003. I was in Japan for an OpenNMS training gig, and on my last day an ex-pat from the States calls me and invites me out. I was incredibly tired, but I figured what the heck, when would I be back in Tokyo again? Turns out I haven’t gone back yet and that night in Shibuya is still one of my fondest memories.

Anyway, back to Portlandia. I landed, ran through the airport to the hotel shuttle, had them call me a cab as we drove, checked in, dropped my bags and headed to the Alberta Rose Theatre.

The Alberta Rose is an old school movie theatre that opened in 1927. It closed in 1978 but now has been reopened as “Portland’s premier setting to experience acoustic music, art house films and live performances”. We met there about 7pm and hit the Thai place next door before the show started at 8pm.

The opening act was a band called Chervona, made up of mainly of ex-pat Russians. They consisted of seven pieces: drums, bass guitar, accordion, clarinet, two trombones and guitar. The lead singer/guitarist reminded me of a cross between Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick and the lead singer of Midnight Oil. One standout musician was the clarinet player – he was simply amazing, and on a couple of songs he played with the headlining band (that’s him on the far left of the next picture).

They played for about an hour, and after a short break the main attraction took the stage: Fanfare Ciocărlia. This is a raucous twelve-piece Romani brass band (Romani from the Roma people and not Romania) and they play music at a speed that makes “Flight of the Bumblebee” sound like a funeral dirge.

It was pretty amazing. I also liked the fact that there were several generations on stage. Most of the performers looked to be in their late 30s to early 40s, but a few looked younger and a few were older. It was non-stop energy, and the crowd seemed to love it. At one point there were more dancers on stage than band members, and considering how many band members there were, that was quite a feat.

It was also the third anniversary of the reopened Alberta Rose, so they were handing out chocolate birthday cake. It wouldn’t be Portlandia without microbrews, and the evening’s libation was a double red ale called “Believer” (I thought the lady tending bar said “Belieber” as in Justin, but was promptly corrected). While I tend to find Oregon beers slightly bitter for my taste, it was pretty darn good.

At the end of the show they did an encore (one song was their take on the James Bond theme) and then they just started playing in the aisles. I think the plan was to march around the theatre, but the crowd was so tight that they stopped after about 30 feet, played, and then slowly made their way back.

So even though I didn’t get to bed until well after midnight, it was so worth it, if just to see my friends. If you count experiences as wealth, my account balance is now much better off.