It's exactly a year ago that I got to visit Monterery California to report on the 4th O'Reilly Open Source software convention (Apache Week issue #208) When I managed to get invited back to San Diego for this week I thought I'd been given the ideal assignment; getting to fly to California in July, avoiding the British rain, and spending a week right on the West Coast with nearly 2000 other open source advocates. So with only one direct flight a day from England I was unsuprised to find a large number of delegates on the plane; wearing Penguin badges and snapping pictures of the clear views over Greenland with a variety of digital cameras.

San Diego has great weather, and it's easy to forget that coming from England, so I managed to get sunburnt. If you're at the conference this week look out for the pasty english guys with sunburn. Wireless lans are great; I'm currently typing this listening to Brian Behlendorf talking about Apache to a group of people including Larry Wall, sitting just in front of me.