“it could be bunnies”

So last weekend I came back from a two week trip to the US. I attended the Adobe Community Summit in San Jose and the Webmaniacs conference in Washington DC. As the name suggests the Community Summit is organized by Adobe for the Community. Usergroup Managers and Community Experts are invited to have a look at some cool demo’s and talk to people from different product teams. Obviously I can’t get too deep into what was discussed at that part of the Summit. After that is was 2 days of training, either CS3 or AIR. I went for the AIR training which was delivered by Leo Schuman. I had met Leo before last Februari when we were working on the materials for the TechU training program but I had never had pleasure of a two day class with him. The training itself had good materials, but was a little too much a beginners training for me since I had already worked with quite a few of the topics presented. The delivery though was excellent and made it a very enjoyable experience.

Then from San Jose it was on to Webmaniacs in Washington. I presented two sessions there for CFmaniacs. The first session was on Monday morning on J2EE clustering (slides) and it didn’t go as planned. After writing in the session abstract that clustering was easy I got challenged to demonstrate that so I set out to run a live demo in between my slides. The demo went off track when creating the cluster. That is not really unexpected, that part of setting up the cluster is temperamental, but you just delete the cluster, restart your instances and it will usually work. Then it went completely wrong when tying the cluster to IIS. As far as I have been able to reconstruct after the session there were still some leftovers from the trial run the previous night and some .dll’s were locked by IIS or something. Anyhow, after a restart of my laptop it went off without a hitch.
Then on Thuesday I had a session on N-tier ColdFusion (slides). That went much better, probably because I didn’t do any live demo. After that I was free to enjoy the rest of the conference. I didn’t follow too many sessions though because it was my first time in Washington and I took some time off to go sightseeing.

All in all it was a nice trip. The only weird thing is that I keep running into fellow Europeans in the US that I never meet in Europe.