Sorry I didn't mention it here, but I was at COMDEX in Las Vegas this week, showing off Plone.

Plone came in 1st place in a O'Reilly vote for open-source projects. The top six projects got pedestals at the show: Plone, KDE, OpenOffice, Zope, GIMP and GNOME. GNOME didn't accept the invite so Eclipse, the 7th place project, went in their place. I was shocked that Eclipse came in 7th instead of... well, 1st, but apparently they didn't know about the vote so they didn't make their community aware of it.

The Plone booth was staffed by Alan Runyan and Alexander Limi (Plone co-founders), Scott Paley of Abstract Edge, and myself. A good time was had by all! Standing for 4 days was tiring, but it worth it.

Las Vegas is a great place to visit. Lots of fun things to do, and lots of good food to eat. :-) On Tuesday evening, Alan, Alex and I had dinner with half a dozen attendees of ApacheCon, including Sam Ruby, Mark Pilgrim, Joe Gregorio and Michael Bernstein. Mark included a picture of Alan, Alex and I in his ApacheCon photo album.

On Wednesday night representatives from the six projects enjoyed a fine dinner with four representatives from O'Reilly, including Mark Stone, Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly himself! (Sorry, I don't remember who the other person was, I don't think he introduced himself to me)

I also had the honour of demoing Plone 2 to Tim O'Reilly at our booth while everyone else was out having lunch. :-)

Another thing I'll never forget was the guy who lost about $100K in 10 minutes playing Blackjack ($1000 minimum bet table) at the Bellagio. There was a big crowd around the table he and his sexy companion were sitting at. He had a big bag of money sitting on the chair text to him... I lost count of the number of bundles of $100 bills he pulled out of it.

Oh, and then there was the guy who turned $50 into $5000 in around the same amount of time playing craps. :-)