Day 1 – Tuesday, May 10th. Started not as expected – tripped getting out of the shower, dodged the toilet, but jammed my toe during the tortured dance that was required to regain my balance. Fortunately I did manage to avoid tripping over my towel and falling flat on the tile floor. Book tours are supposed to end on naked the floor- not start that way.

The non-bathroom/naked part of the day started with a trip to Sun Microsystems – The Newark campus is up north and across the bay, but staying in Sunnyvale it only took 20 minutes to get there. I arrived early and Met Aimee – the host of the series i was speaking at. She was great (though initially, and understandably, tired from lugging the 50lb box of books O’reilly had sent from her car). While waiting for Aimee at the front desk in building 16, the woman at the desk confirmed that i was, in fact, in the quietest lobby she’d ever been in. It was almost relaxing being there (minus the latent fears i had as a former Microsoft employee entering Sun Microsystem turf). I signed the usual visitor/NDA forms, got a badge, and followed Aimee inside.

At the talk we had about 40 people show up, plus another 15 or more on conference call.

Pros: Good, smart crowd. Good questions, and no one fell asleep or threw anything (two hallmarks of decent presentations). They laughed at some of my jokes. Cons: 25 minute struggle with a projector, which included an inquisition about my laptop, ane it’s inability to produce proper video – but I was vindicated, as a replacement projector worked fine. Gave away half the box of books, saving the rest for lecture #2, the biggest (or so I thought) of the tour – baychi, later in the day. One of the good questions I got included a good pointer for a book I should check out about a biography of Cray (the supercomputer dude) and the way he organized teams.