I just got back from the SANE 2004. There were some great speakers and unfortunately some very, very bad ones. The most interesting one was by an eBay fellow by the name of Paul Kilmartin who is the director of availability and performance engineering. It was fascinating to see how eBay uses technology on such a huge scale to deal with the incredible number of transactions they have every day. The amount of transactions are at a rate of $1050 per second, so you can imagine that high availability is pretty high on the list of priorities.
The other really good invited talk was by a guy called John Nelson who was the visual effects supervisor of the I, Robot movie. I was very impressed with the technology they used to create the movie. So much of it was CG; it was quite stunning to see how he illustrated how they generated the scenery, the robots and everything else in that movie. It may not have had anything to do with system administration or networking, but it had a very high geek factor and was a real crowd pleaser.
In the evening there was a social event which was on a boat this time. I think in all there were about 250 people or so. They had a brass band, called the Bucket Big Band or something like that. In all there were about 13 members of the band including a conductor who jumped around like crazy. I found them to be a little too loud for such a confined space, everyone had to resort to shouting in order to communicate. The food was a really good Indonesian buffet. The bus ride to the actual boat was quite a ride. The bus driver got lost and we ended up having to walk quite a distance to get there. It must've been quite a sight for all the people in the village we were in to see approximately 250 people marching through their streets. Some people came out of their houses and stood in their doorways asking us who we were and where we were going. When the evening was over and we came ashore again the buses were not nearly as far a walk to get to. I stayed with my colleague Reinout in The Hague that night since I had already missed my last connection to Rotterdam Lombardijen.
I didn't stay the whole day today, I was just too bloody tired since I only managed to get about 4 hours of sleep on a couch. I am actually quite exhausted right now, so I'll probably end up in bed nice and early.