Usually I don’t do basic, “dear diary” / “kitty blog” stuff – but I am so happy that my hotel in Barcelona has free wireless that I figured that I would use the free bandwidth to kitty blog.

My phone does not send pix form Barcelona so they are queueing up to be send when I re-arrive in the US on Saturday.

Barcelona is a nice city – I am not sure I saw any Spanich people here – so many tourists – it looks like Disneyland :). The cathedrals and squares and the Gaudi house all were pretty cool. Couple of hours walking, and a subway ride back, and in one evening I got the outline and a few blog photos to prove I was there. The subway was quite clean and easy to figure out – unlike Paris there is a single price (1.20 Euro) so you don’t have to have a Phd in Metroology to buy a legit fare.

Things in Sakai are going great. There is a lot to do – I stay nervous about the 2.2 release. Lately, we have gotten used to “not slipping” 2.0 and 2.1 were right on schedule. Later, we can wonder why we slipped – to me it really comes down to several “include or not to include” decisions we made back in May. We thought a couple more things “would not hurt” and low and behold a 5 week slip – wearing out the QA team and getting us dangerously close to Fall for folks who want the release for a few months before going live.

But the release is looking good and those fetures will hold us in good stead for the next year – probably worth it in the final analysis.

Coming off a lot of travel since the Vancouver meeting. UK is busy this time of year. The sequence was Vancouver(Sakai + JASig), Indianapolis (TeraGrid), Indianapolis (Alt-I-Lab), London UK (holiday), Manchester UK (gave talk), Cambridge UK (gave talk), Lancaster UK (played cricket, worked, gave talk), York, UK (went to meeting), Toronto CA, (meeting), Edinburgh, UK (gave talk), and now Barcelona (meetings).

Wow – Not home for more than 48 hours since June 1. But a LOT of cool stuff got done. The Edinburgh meeting was invaluable – it was basically folks mucking around int he portal world sharing their deepest secrets and stories. The data we got from each other would have taken a very long for each of us to figure out independently. Nicely Sun and IM were there too which caused some cool discussions.

I got inspired by both Jason Novotny and Marcus Christie’s talks where they postulates that in the future we will want portlets in “web sites” rather than making all of our web sites these “portals”.

This got me all charged up to dig up an idea that I had for a while – taking some Ian Boston Sakai 1.5 code and see if I could create the “smallest possible portal” that was not the null portal (i.e. the 0.00001 portal)..

I am almost done.

TTFN dear diary.