I returned from this year's JavaOne conference intact. You wouldn't think returning from a programming conference intact is a huge deal, but to me, it is. I now run a 50% rate of breaking bones and missing 2 months of work for J1 conference attendance. Hopefully we'll get that down to 33% next year.

They really do overwhelm you with sessions out there. There were 2 days at least where I was going from 8am to well past 10pm. It is really quite good tho, I now have 8 different ideas on how to do the next few tasks on my plate at work. And unfortunately, I really want to try 8 different implementations to see how they all work out. Conference overload I suppose.

Some of the interesting things I saw was the new line of Siemens phones at their booth. And the new Siemens I-Drive system in the newer BMWs. New phones: Cool. IDrive 2: Sucks. Here's a free clue for siemens... entering names and addresses by moving a joystick around was annoying back in 1985 when you had to enter 3 letters with a joystick to submit your name to the high score on Space Invaders. My Prius has a onscreen keyboard on it's nav system. I have no idea why a BMW wouldn't.

I also came away really impressed with the scalability of java in general. It's common knowledge by now that if you play games on your cell phone, you're playing java games. It's not so common knowledge that java is also used in large industrial applications. Java's scalability is nothing short of astounding these days. And just wait until Chrome hits the market.... yeah, it's written in Java too.