I've been involved in a lot of conferences this year, with only three left to go.
- First, there's the Middleware conference, for which I'm the general chair, coming up in the week of October 18 in Toronto. For this one, I'm looking forward to, among other things, Werner's keynote and the workshop on reflective and adaptive middleware.
- The week after that is the Distributed Objects and Applications conference in Cyprus, for which I'm a co-chair. There are some good papers at this conference, and the fact that it's co-located with two other conferences means you can easily hear about developments in other areas too. Cyprus weather should be nice as well ;-).
- The third conference is the 2nd International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing in mid-November in New York, for which I'm industrial papers co-chair. This conference also has some good papers.
I hope to see you at at least one of these events.
In addition to technical content, conferences also have a social aspect. For me, this essentially means discussing interesting things over beer. I hope these three conferences don't fall short in that category, and of course I'll do my best to ensure that they don't. One reason JAOO rocks, for example, is that the social side of the conference is stellar. For example, at JAOO I ran into David Cummins and Tim Galligan, who were running the Addison-Wesley "Meet the Authors" event, where I was paired up with my book and could get to meet readers and other authors. I'm not the smallest guy going (ask Don Box about the time we arm wrestled, for example), and I never shy away from a beer, but Tim and David are both physically much larger than me, not to mention younger than me, and have no problems consuming their share of beer either. Or your share for that matter. For example, here's Tim's typical beer order, just for himself:
Yes, that's an actual JAOO photo of an actual Tim beer order. When I spent time last year with Werner at WWW2003 in Budapest, I was impressed with the way he could put away the suds, and Patrick Linskey, Beat Schwegler, and Dave Thomas were no slouches at JAOO either, but David and Tim were at the top of their game. I wonder what would happen if we could get Werner, Tim, David, Dave, Beat, and Patrick to all attend JAOO next year? Sign me up! Don, you should definitely come along this time too.