I would like to personally and publicly give a standing ovation to everyone at Digital Creations for the magnificent job they did at LinuxExpo this past week. This includes all of the preparation that went on pre-show (for quite a long period), and not just those brave souls who talked their voices out, and demoed their hearts out. I had reasonably high expectations before the show, but they were greatly exceeded in every possible dimension. Every individual at DC had an exceptionally strong personal presence with individuals, corporate types, the media, etc. The energy was contagious. Not just for DC, but even a few of the surrounding booths seemed to feed off of the energy in the DC booth. Paul uses the word "gravity" to describe some of the general momentum at DC. The word is perfect to describe how a much higher percentage of folks were "drawn in" (gravity?) to the DC booth than to the average booth at LinuxExpo. The demos were (as you have heard before) fantastic. The amazing thing about the demos is that they conveyed very clearly, in roughly 10 minutes, some extremely powerful concepts. Most people got it (perhaps after asking a question or two :-). This is a really hard thing to do, and again, the DC crowd should be congratulated not only for building the software to allow these seminal ideas to be realized, but for distilling all of the amazing things they could have demonstrated down to a handful of cohesive and coherent relatively simple operations that encapsulated the essence of Zope, the Portal Toolkit, etc. Paul gave a speech on Open Source and Business on Saturday morning. It was attended by nearly 100 people. No one left early (I didn't attend any other talks, but I heard that it was quite common to have a number of early leavers). They gave him a very nice ovation at the end, and easily a third of the attendees hung around afterwards to exchange cards with Paul and me. P.S. And, in the spirit of the Python community, immediately after hitting deliver, I'm leaving for the seven hour drive home after an exhausting and exhilirating week :-)