Tryphoon’s Lair

 

It’s been almost 2 months since we’ve made it to sunny California and it is time for me to get back on the road for various conferences. Mobile TV conference last week in Texas and ETech in San Diego is on this week’s menu! 

I must admit one thing though: I have been secretly dreaming of attending this event since Mike mentioned it to me several months ago. One of the reasons for this is that the name of Tim O’Reilly is deeply attached to my past online developer’s life and brings back many good memories.

Back in the days (I think 1996) while living in Paris, in one of my errands, I discovered a new collection of programming manualsthat for once where well written and all seemed to make sense to me and were not overpriced. I straight bought one, the first edition of “Webmaster in a Nutshell” and spent many many long nights trying to decipher it, from broken English into French and then trying to make sense of it in a Web browser! I then embarked in a new crusade which was to try to acquire every “XXXX in a Nutshell” book relevant to my activities, I could find (Unix, Linux, Perl, Java, etc). And to this day, these books are still standing on my shelves, in my Disney office.

And here I was this morning, sitting in front of Tim O’Reilly himself, about to be executively briefed, listening to some Peter Gabriel music in the background, songs I was playing in loop during these long coding nights.

Happy as can be!

After a terrible dinner (Yoshi, remind me to NEVER go back to this fake Sushi/Seafood place), I even managed to get myself on the center stage as one of 4 assistants to Arthur Benjamin aka the Mathemagician, one of the world’s fastest human calculators and mix square root with squared numbers. Don’t ask, but this was pretty a pretty embarrassing moment…

 All Pictures: (C) Laughinsquid