Re: [CORE] Re: tomorrow

> Other then that we won *woo hoo!!* ...
> what ever did happen? *raised eyebrow*

OK, I was sort of waiting for an update to be posted on the LinuxWorld
site, but I still don't see anything, so you'll have to take my word
for it ;)

Here's the full story:

I hadn't heard *anything* from the expo organizers prior to departing
for San Jose on Wednesday morning, so was a bit leary of my reception
upon showing up cold. After an hour to get my rental car (seems some
convention had taken up most of the available ones...), and another 20
minutes to drive to the San Jose convention center, it took a couple
of minutes of talking, armed with a printout of our invitation, to get
onto the exhibit floor without paying money (needless to say, I hate
parting with a dollar, and hey, we *were* invited ;)

Anyway, I got there after 11am, and the awards ceremony was taking
place at noon according to our invitation. But since it was a
LinuxWorld magazine event, and taking place on the show floor, it
wasn't actually listed in the LinuxWorld Expo program and my strategy
of random questioning wasn't getting me closer. Thankfully they
started announcing it over the PA by around 11:30, so I found the
location pretty easily after that.

It would have been easier to find, but there were quite a few
exhibits, including a large one from Oracle (oh oh, no way we're going
to win this one, eh?...). It was great seeing a lot of the companies
in the Linux/OpenSource market actually acting like real companies
with booths, "demo girls", the whole schmear. FreeBSD had a large
booth full of t-shirts, coffee mugs, and CDs; apparently they have a
strong Bay area contingent.

When I got the the awards area, they were quite nice, and apologized
for not responding. Apparently their e-mail wasn't actually working
during the week before the show. Funny, I forgot to ask what system
they actually were running, but assume that it was some M$ corporate
garbage. They were using PowerPoint btw for projecting during the
awards. Should have given them a hard time about it...

The awards ceremony was pretty low key. The magazine editor (sorry, I
don't remember names) presented the awards for "Show Favorites" first.
These were ones voted on by people actually at the show. Debian
cleaned up a bunch of awards, btw. Then they got to the "Editor's
Choice" awards. The Database category was pretty far down the list,
but it was only 10-15 minutes before they got to us. They'd been
presenting the "Finalist" trophy first, and the "Winner" trophy after
that, and I was pretty amazed that they called Oracle before
PostgreSQL! Just walked up to the front, got my picture taken with the
presenter and the trophy, and that was it! But later, while I was
getting a box for the trophy, I talked with the editor a bit and he
volunteered that his DB editor was a Postgres fan, and that he was
starting to use it too. Did I mention that the guidelines for the
awards judging included criteria on how much the candidate had
contributed to the OpenSource movement? So maybe our win over Oracle
shouldn't suprise us too much, but it still felt great. Not every day
that you get to kick Oracle's butt up and down the street ;)

So, we've got a nice trophy, consisting of a curved piece of glass
with our project name (and Marc F's name; note to us: we should
probably ask them to put "Postgres Development Group" on it next time)
etched in. Looks nice. Supposedly they were going to post pictures on
their web site, but I haven't found them yet.

What should I do with the trophy? Send it straight to Marc, or should
it travel a more indirect route, perhaps passing through Pennsylvania
and other places first? The box seems fairly sturdy, and if I put it
into a bigger box then it should travel OK.

So, that's the story, and I'm sticking to it. I stayed up in the area
another couple of days working, so didn't get home until late Friday
night.
                         - Thomas

-- 
Thomas Lockhart                lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu
South Pasadena, California