Checked In, Registered, And Heading To The Annual Penumbra Dinner

My flight from Manchester was apparently the official flight of New Hampshire Lotus BPs. Tom Hoey of PistorStarand Jim Wilson and several others from of Brightline, were on board with me. Several IBM employees, including Doug Conmy from the engineering group in Westford, MA, were also on the flight. Doug and I have actually been on the same flight to Lotusphere several times over the past eleven years, quite coincidentally. We never plan it. We just end up on the same plane. A little strange this year, however, was the fact that I flew without my family or my buddy and partner in RHS, Moses Peabody. He's missing Lotusphere this year, for the first time ever. He's admiinistrator for IBM's Lotus Developer's Domain web site, and they can't do without him this year.

Down at baggage claim, it was really easy to spot Andrew Pollack, who was waiting for me so we could share a car with Bob Balaban. Andrew was wearing a bright yellow t-shirt, which is this years Certified Unofficial Lotusphere T-Shirt. It is an extraodinarily well-done shirt this year. It's definitely going to be the hit of the conference. Bob appeared about 30 seconds after I picked my suitcase up off the carousel. Perfect timing. We got the car, and drove to the hotel. I was checked in by 4 PM... a little later than I had hoped because my flight was about 15 minutes late.

I went to the speaker registration room shortly after arrival, running into my co-speaker Dieter Stalder and his wife Ursula along the way. Dan and Melissa of Domino Developer Network came around the corner while I was talking to Dieter, and Jamie Magee of Martin Scott bumped into me a minute later. Jamie and I found our way to the speaker registration room, where we picked up our badges and backpacks. The backpacks this year are really, really nice. Well-padded in all the right places, very roomy, lots of zippers, and black thank goodness... not that bright yellow they did once a few years ago. I wonder... does anyone still have that yellow backpack? Does anyone actually use it? ;-)

In ten minutes it will be time to head over to the annual Penumbra Group dinner at Fultons, which is right next to Pleasure Island. This will be the ninth annual dinner for this group. That's really hard to believe. Penumbra was formed in 1995, when a bunch of us small Lotus Business Partners realized that the landscape was changing dramatically. Notes was moving from the department to the enterprise, and the small consultancies that had helped nurture the Notes customer base in the early days were in danger of losing Lotus' attention as larger service providers moved in. If we're still having dinners after nine years, and getting a number of high-ranking IBM executives to attend every year, I guess we've managed to meet the objectives that we set for ourselves.