Allow me to provide some relaxed photographic observations from this morning’s MySQL UC keynotes.

Warning 1: My view is distorted, by my favourite lens, Sigma 8mm.

Warning 2: I took the pics with a shaky hand in low light, so they’re not sharp ones, of the James Duncan Davidson type (the guy who takes all the great pics for O’Reilly).

On Johnny Good’s command, doors open, and the audience starts pouring in.

Zack Urlocker has challenged me in the James Callis Lookalike Contest (of Battlestar Galactica fame), but is himself clearly in the lead.

Journalist James Niccolai of IDG, taking a picture of Rich Green and Mårten Mickos (Note: I am a fan of recursion; it would have been even better if Zack had taken a picture of me taking a picture of James, Rich and Mårten).

Mårten Mickos talking to Sheeri Kritzer Cabral.

Jay Pipes’s head is moving so fast talking to Gina Blaber of O’Reilly, that it gets blurred.

James Duncan Davidson, one of my two favourite contemporary American photographers. The other one is Julian Cash, whose fault it is that I now have a Sigma 8mm lens. He takes weird pictures with his fisheye lens (way weirder — and, above all, better — than mine), and now he has turned his interest into something he calls light painting. Speaking of Julian: He is here. Do come to the Bayshore Room (on the Mezzanine level of the hotel) tomorrow between 10am and 2pm, and have your weird picture taken!

Me showing my favourite gadget (remember? the 8mm fisheye lens) to Jonathan Schwartz; Rich Green and Mike Zinner look suspicious.

Everyone has found their way in and we’re ready to go!

Mårten complains he got only 35 minutes, of which Jay had already burned 5 when Mårten got on stage.

Sheeri Kritzer Cabral’s video camera recording Mårten.

Mårten asked everyone in the audience who had reported bugs to stand up.

Mike Zinner wearing a MySQL Workbench t-shirt doing his great demoes, with an amount of superlatives that is more American than Austrian (prompting Mårten to mention that Mike could have an alternate career in Hollywood; perhaps, later, Mike could run for governor somewhere).

Ah, did you note that MySQL Workbench went GA and is ready for download today? At least Mike Hillyer did. And of course Patrik Backman did, but it would be strange if he didn’t, as he is Mike Zinner’s boss.

Mårten Mickos and his SunVisor Rich Green (Note 1: Rich Green doesn’t want Mårten to call him “boss”. Note 2: A “SunVisor” is a helpful person working for Sun Microsystems that adopts an employee of an acquired company to guide him through the first rough times with a new employer).

James Duncan Davidson taking pictures of award winners.

The Community Award Winners between Rich Green and Mårten Mickos: Diego Medina, Baron Schwartz, Sheeri Kritzer Cabral.

How bright (not)! I didn’t take any well-lit pictures of Jonathan. Perhaps because his captivating presentation kept me focusing on the content? But I did take this picture of the stage when Jonathan explained the world map in blue and green dots. The light blue dots depicted places downloading MySQL. And if you look really carefully in the top-left corner of this picture, you’ll see green dots. That’s the US East Coast, and Europe, which are eager at downloading the GlassFish application server for Java EE.

Today’s keynotes were concluded by Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, on “The Power of Infrastructure as a Service”.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 0:50 and is filed under Events, MySQL, MySQL Users Conferences, MySQL Workbench, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.