This blog post is just to list links and tips on getting home to Finland.

First leg: getting to anywhere in Europe

Being stuck in San Fransisco, my first problem has been to get just anywhere closer to home. Taking a boat from America to Europe takes from 6-15 days and is not significantly cheaper than flying. So the best bet is just to fly to Europe.

A friend just emailed some suggestions what to do while stuck in SF:

20+ campfires on Ocean Beach
-------------------------------------------------
A fun thing to do any Friday or Saturday night after about 8pm until
after midnight is go to Ocean Beach where hundreds of people make 20+
campfires (folks are friendly -- just walk up and introduce yourself
and join some group's campfire or walk between many -- bring some beer
or snacks to share if you want to).  This beach is at the intersection
of Great Highway and Fulton street, San Francisco

If you are a MySQL conference attendee who cannot get back home to Europe, you can find other fellow MySQLrs at this page on MySQL forge. Please use it as a central hub to organize gettogethers like dinners. Or why not take the opportunity for a hackathon?

As for myself, my BA flight is canceled and there is no way to even rebook (160 minute waiting line to call BA). I will have my travel agent rebook the flight on Monday European business hours. Until then, I'm stuck indefinitely in California.

I've been to (only?) 2 previous MySQL conferences. I never spoken before, I actually tried to avoid it plus I didn't feel I had any hardcore topics worthy of presenting. Last year all MySQL Sales Engineers were told to submit a talk, so I submitted one that I knew would not be accepted ("no vaporware rule"), and it wasn't. Hey, I obeyed our boss more than my collagues who didn't submit anything! I did feel that for me it was a more useful way to spend time with my customers who were at the conference, and just network.

Google Summer of Code is now open for student applications and people (like Ronald Bradford) are noticing that MySQL is not participating this year. (Drizzle otoh is a mentoring organization.)

Last year Morgan Tocker published a graph of all MySQL forks when preparing course material on the topic. I've been preparing some material for Monty's keynote at the O'Reilly MySQL conference, and briefly touch the same topic so I have pictures too:

Between following (from a distance) the talks at Fosdem and anticipating the ones at MySQL User Conference in April, I was reminded of 2 interesting MySQL talks that have had a deeper meaning to me than their original speakers probably intended. I thought today could be a good time to share these 2 stories that for me personally are filed in the "things I learned from MySQL AB and Sun" folder...

"If you can't solve the problem, try solving some other problem"

A week after the first announcement, MySQL user conference seems like it's coming together and will be as good as ever.

In particular, Sun makes a come back with a tailor-made "Founding sponsor" status. Great! That means everyone will be there, just like we are used to.

Call for Papers is opened, but hurry, you only have a month to submit your papers. Baron Schwartz has updated his"How to write a good MySQL conference proposal.

The European Commission has now got a lot of emails! It seems they even have to block some (at least GMail) just to keep their mail server alive. Thank you, all, for helping out, it is working.

As you can see, the emails already have had a small effect that Oracle had to backtrack and make some promises.

In this blog I will explain why these promises are not very helpful, even if they show that even Oracle is a little bit concerned now.

The first thing is of course that