I'm in Tokyo this week for Tech Days. We've got a crew of folks doing detailed talks all over the Java and Solaris technology landscape. I'll be doing a keynote, the opening of NetBeans day on Tuesday, and a pile of customer visits. If you're in the neighborhood, please come.

The past couple of weeks have been pretty cool.

I was at OOPSLA in Montreal and participated in a panel session on Simula. I learned OO programming writing Simula programs, and even did some bug fixing in the CDC 6000/7000 Simula compiler - the first real compiler I ever saw the innards of. Ole Lehrmann Madsen from Aarhus University was there: he was one of the three originators of Simula. Unfortunately, the other two, Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, passed away recently. I also got to meet one of the members of the team that wrote the original CDC compiler - but with my leaky brain I forgot his name!

I also had the pleasure of getting an award from Concordia University, which was very nice. But the real thrill was meeting one of the folks that worked on the photometers on the ISIS-II satellite. My first software job was writing code to manipulate data from them.

I also got to swing through Ottawa for the Order of Canada ceremony. I was in a pretty intimidating list of folks. I even got a long talk with Connie Kaldor (and I scored an autograph!).