Fine. Today's the day. My first talk in the US. Good signs for all superstitious people: bright, sunny - alas chilly - day again.

Slept until about eight, been in bed until nine, did some final touch-ups of my slides and demos until eleven. Went to the conference.

Heck, I haven't been on the stage for about two months and could hardly remember how great it is. I can only speak for myself, but I get lots of energy from public talks. This was one of the better (maybe the best) audience I ever had. The small size of the conference really allowed for lots of questions. discussions and ad-hoc changes in the samples and topics. Absolutely rocked! Thanks to anyone who's been there.

In my second talk, Mike, Keith, John and I switched the topics rapidly between Remoting Internals (the talks topic) and the pitfalls of threading, late thread detachment and non-existent timeouts. Short story: don't use TcpChannel if you depend on your application working with delegates' .BeginInvoke() calls. Reason: The thread is only detached after the message has been sent to the server and there's no possibility to set a timeout on the TcpChannel. Combine these two and a malicious server which just accepts a socket connection but doesn't read any data from the socket and you end up with applications which won't perform as you'd expect them to do.

After the talk, John and I planned to have a look at his Common Language Aspect Weaver (CLAW). Right when leaving the conference facility, we bumped into Sam Gentile and took him with us.

Lucky us: Sam's a local so he could lead us to some great food before John got the chance to install CLAW on his laptop. He originally planned to install it on mine, but unfortunately it occurred a sudden loss of battery, going from 4 hours of battery power to zero minutes in about 5 seconds after John told me that "I just need to run NGEN /prof System.Windows.Forms.DLL and don't really know what it does ...". Sam's been more brave than me:

I had to leave the party at about 1:00 am, pack my luggage (ok, I admit - Katja packed as I dropped into my bed nearly instantly) and prepare for a short two hours of sleep. Argh ... do you know this feeling of having to set your alarm clock to 4:00 am?