Charlottesville

Charlottesville is a cute little down, with an extensive red brick pedestrian arcade. It actually has a European feel to it. I was expecting a fork in the road with two sticks stuck in the ground and the conference would take place around there.

I was expecting to see drunken rednecks, and while I have seen a few of those, there are a lot of hippies selling whatever on the street and hipsters as well. There seems to be hipsters everywhere you go, whether it be New York, Virginia, Thailand, Japan, all with their black-rimmed glasses and v-neck sweaters listening to Nirvana. There must be some pan-hipster consciousness, weaving all of the threads of humanity together.

Everyone is extremely friendly, people smile at you, wave at you when you walk by. The waitress at breakfast called me "sweetie".

Thanks to our MySQL contact, last night I had dinner with some MySQL top guns at a "Himalayan" restaurant -- I sat next to Monty, and Aker was a few seats away.

Aker's just finished his keynote, and a Postgres guy is giving a talk on concurrency.