I've been in San José for XML Query working group meetings. I'm actually pretty pleased about the way XML Query is heading; late would be an understatement, but it will need to become a Recommendation (assuming it makes it that far) around the same time as XSLT 2, I think. Given that, and given the strong demand I hear at conferences and from both vendors and customers for they stronger type checking, I think it might end up pretty popular. I also think people will be generating XSLT transformations with XML Query, which is slightly mind-boggling but may help work around the limitations of higher-order functions.

On Wednesday had a good dinner with Raph, Jaye, Tony, Andy, David, Joyce, James, Aaron, and others, somewhere north of Palo Alto. It was well worth the cab fare. (Raph has a better list of who was there, including the "Open Source Air Force" people (OSAF).

The Holiday Inn Silicon Valley has an outdoor heated swimming pool and hot tub open 24 hours, so I've enjoyed swimming in the warm rain.

Last week at XML 2002 I had an exhibition of some of my calligraphy, which was fun. One booth boy came up to me while I was setting it up and asked, What are you selling? When I said, nothing, he asked, Which company are you with? and I realised that the concept of art for art's sake, not selling anything, was beyond him. I think he came from the Microsoft booth, but he could have been from a Bay area startup for all I know, except perhaps for his dark socks.</a>

The IBM Almaden research centre is pretty spectacular. The stone floors can be a little uneven, so if like me you go barefoot at every opportunity, you need to watch out. I wish I'd gone for barefoot hikes in the hills, though.

Some replies...

TheCorruptor, a good way to explore Mandrake Linux is to play with the Mandrake Control Center. Also investigate the Penguin Liberation Foundation for some useful packages that aren't in themain distribution, and for sample addmedia scripts. The rpmdrake user interface in the Control Center is a front end to urpmi, a command-line program similar in many ways to apt-get. I find myself using the What to do menu a lot (in Gnome at least).

For the sake of productivity, avoid frozen-bubble :-)

thomasvs, life is better when your feet are bare, put the new shoes aside :-)