• We spent all day yesterday discussing four topics: SaaS, Tools for Scrum, Web 2.0 and Domain Specific Languages. Even though it was just a day, my brain is full. These were deep and challenging discussion. I need to let the discussions stew a bit before posting anything about them here. But I will.
• Next time we do one of these, I’m bringing a video camera. I took notes, but looking over them the next morning they seem woefully incomplete. OneNote’s integrated audio/video recording capabilities would nicely augment my notes.
• We ran this meeting using Open Space, and it worked very well. Of course, we only had 8 people, so we didn’t need a lot of process to self organize. However, it did whet my appetite for having a larger Open Space style un-conference for architects. Is that something other folks might be interested in?
• Major thanks to the folks at Clarity Consulting who graciously gave us space to meet and fed us yesterday. Their CTO Jon Rauschenberger sat in on most of our meeting, and drove our Web 2.0 discussion. I said I wanted to stew a bit on the discussions, but Jon’s slides are available on line if you’re interested.
• Scott Colestock showed me Diigo, a social annotation tool. Where del.icio.us lets you tag and annotate individual pages, Diigo lets you annotate and highlight specific parts of the page. They also have blogging tools, where these annotations and highlights become blog posts, but they don’t support dasBlog. However, since FeedBurner doesn’t support Diigo for link splicing, I’m afraid my use of it will be limited.
• Jim Wilt introduced me to Virtual PC’s command line. He recommends using “-pc <vpc name> -launch -singlepc” which launches a single virtual environment without the VPC console. I rarely run more than one VPC at a time and I hate stuff cluttering up my taskbar and notification area, so I like this a lot.
• Loren Goodman demonstrated the SharePoint Explorer Client. SharePoint & MOSS came up several times in all of our topics, so this is going to get a second look. I always thought it was strange that MSFT ships a smart client for editing WSS & MOSS, but not viewing it. SP Explorer looks like it fills that gap nicely.
• Shannon Braun sent us all a link to the 50/70 rule, which seems like a good rule of thumb. Of course, assuming that things won’t progress linearly is almost always a good rule of thumb. But the 50/70 rule has reasoning behind the assumption.
• Chicago is nice, but the weather has been a little freaky. It’s either been hot & humid, downporing thunderstorms or tornados. Keith Powell showed me FlightAware, which shows you flight departure and arrival history. My flight hasn’t left within an hour of scheduled departure in a week. I’m going to try and grab an earlier flight, but I have a feeling it’s going to be a long trip home.

I flew down to San Diego for the Emerging Technology Conference today. I’m here thru Thursday which is the longest I’ve been gone from home since TechEd last year. And I’m only home eight days before heading off to SPARK and MIX for an even longer trip. Well, the SPARK/MIX trip is just one day longer than ETech. But a day can seem like an eternity to my three year old son who was predicting “Daddy come home in one minute” as I was pulling out of the driveway.

I skipped the pre-confernece tutorials, though several looked interesting. I’m really looking forward to hearing Bruce Sterling speak tonight.

And for those keeping track of my travel shenanigans with Alaska Airlines, no problems with the flight today. Apparently they only screw up when I’m in a hurry. And even better news is that I’ve re-earned my MVP status. I used to fly with them all the time, but then with the new role and new baby I just didn’t fly much last year. But they had some “quick earning” program that let me re-earn my status. They even gave me MVP status for the flight today, so I got to sit in first class. Crowded flight too, so it was nice. Of course, in what has become true Alaska Air style, I had to wait on hold and deal with a subordanant flunky for twenty minutes before I could talk to a supervisor who could get me registered into the quick MVP program, but it turned out OK so I guess I shouldn’t complain.