Thursday

Forced Unification of the Armored Car Companies

As the misty San Diego dawn hovered over the bay, at 09-hundred an eager room of about 150 hosts, developers and Starbase21 groupies were poised for greatness. Winded from having to climb a twin flight of stairs because the up escalator had been disabled by a covert Cold Fusion attack squad, the room wheezed and panted in anticipation of Das Fuehrer hisself -- the venerable Joe Austin, Reining PooBah of the assembled army. Nervous headquarters staff (aka Miva employees) scurried about in bleached white polo shirts preparing the crowd for the first coming. So charged was the atmosphere, so intense the anticipation, the cadre of Miva devotees scarcely noticed (at first) the blazing search lights majestically projecting names of The Honor Roll on the walls of the room. Until they tried to gain passage through the crowed aisle ways to locate a free seat; at which time most received a 400-watt theatrical spotlight straight between the eyes, burning into their retina the indelible logotype of one of The Fallen. ¹

Well, maybe that's a small extension of what actually happened. Except for the CF attack squad thing. You'll have to be tolerant of the inaccurate name references and sequence errors; the nifty conference folder with all my notes was grafted from my body at the end of the day. I admit it. I left the fucking thing in the conference room, ok? Shoot me. I was never good with documentation.

Actually, it was a pretty cool day. It started with Joe Austin giving a somewhat awkward introductory speech. Bill Gates he ain't, but he offered a level of sincerity and presence that seemed very genuine. And to top it off, he turned out to be a really nice guy. All the Miva employees there were much less rigid that their public footprint might indicate, and only a couple of them appeared unapproachable. But I didn't get a chance to stomp on their feet to gauge the reaction.

Yes, I took pictures. And they suck.  Big time. Digital cameras take more getting used too than I expected. Shoot me again. But in keeping with the venue of this site, if you want to see them you can see 20 pictures here. I'll try to make up for it tomorrow. 

The rest of the morning was spent on presentations about web hosting business models, statistical growth patterns for ecom, the state of VC cash, unrealistic hardware vendor claims, and a quasi-roundtable discussion about payment gateways. The VC cash presentation won for content, the payment gateway chatter was entertaining 'cause you get to see five business enemies forced to cohabitate for a few minutes. Always conscious of maintaining my health, I spent the catered lunch period out on the terrace smoking cigarettes.

After lunch the crowd gained a few members and the appointed cheerleader/host of the day, Anthony, viciously hurled Miva t-shirts at the gullible throng (the guy is great at spirit building, but a little too gruff with the guest speakers. Poking Alan with a cattle prod to urge him from the podium was a little harsh).

The Compiler Cometh

Without a doubt Jon's presentation was one of the highlights of my day. It was damn near worth the trip to hear 1st-hand about the cool goodies coming. These Miva folks are really sharp people. It will be a real pleasure to see the results of these talented people in the coming months.  Beta grovel... beta grovel...

But JB's responses to audience questions were a little too measured & intentional at times. No discernable statement of intention to improve tech support, and a legitimate "WHAT ABOUT THE DOCS?!" question was deftly sidestepped with a referral to the Miva web site. Didn't leave this audience with much confidence that the most frequent complaints echoed on the user mailing lists will be directly addressed in the upcoming development turmoil. And recommending that people send feature requests to the wishlist echoed rather hollow for experienced Mivites. 

One unexpected twist was in response to one eternal Merchant question: "Will the UI be upgradeable?" My fuzzy take on the public response was "How about something kind of like that, plus a selection of other, new UI modules?" (maybe just skin-like?  its almost 4am. that's a lame paraphrase of what was said.) Privately, the intentions I heard expressed by some of the headquarters staff were a hell of a lot more exciting. If you are a Merchant user/developer, you might cream your jeans at what might be coming in the UI arena, especially when combined with the intended feature sets.  It might not help you completely stave off the 3rd party modules, but it will offer Merchant users a level of increased functionality easily worth the bucks to remain current on their licenses. Once the Miva Script compiler matures, odds would be that Merchant would be distributed in compiled form. It would be a sincerely most excellent move, IMHO.

After the adrenalin settled from Jon's predictions, Jeff Huber offered a kinda stiff overview of what Miva Script is, and what it is used for. Sounded a little like an orientation speech for all those new Miva employees (i.e. massive recent staff growth ain't easy). Given the widely expressed opinion of the current status of Miva Tech Support, I was somewhat shocked to not hear any of his vision for improving that state of affairs. A man of that talent surely has a plan for the future of his department; but didn't say anything about it. Yet. 

Userlist People

On the social side I got to meet some really fantastic people who had only been courier type on a Miva mailing list until then. List favorites Luray (he pronounces it 'lur-RAY'), Darren, Jeff Collins and Pamela are actually real live people. And all of them are nice as hell. Luray and Darren were (of course) nothing like you imagine them, and are the nicest folks you could hope to meet. All the mailing list members (and Miva employees) I've met here are the kind of people you feel like hanging around with in the hope that some of their mojo might rub off on you. Or maybe if you followed them around enough, little code snippets might fall from their purses & pockets (California law lets you brag about code you find on the floor). The Starbase21 crew just drips potential and commitment to the language (shameless plug for good people).

Got ditched by Darren, Luray & Pamela, stopped off and munched some highly-stylized orange California fish, and ended the evening wandering a beautiful bay front evening with Ivo (true gentleman and coder extraordinaire), after demonstrating multiple samples of my u-turn prowess in a crowded American city. Thinking about making him drive tomorrow whilst feeding him consecutive Tequila shots. I'm curious how many it might take before he forgets what country he's in & starts driving on the wrong side. He speaks more languages than I have inches of penis, so he could babble Russian or Slovak out the window to clear traffic. Might be rather entertaining.