Austin, and the Ghost of Bosses Past
I’ve just wrapped up a trip to Austin, Texas. This was my first visit to Austin despite my parents having lived there for over a year, so Mandy and I went out on Friday afternoon and spent the weekend at their place. We had no idea how beautiful Austin is — the hill country is breathtaking in much the same way that Dallas and Houston (both fine cities!) are not.
There’s also very good eating. From Bergstrom we went to the Eastside Café for a tasty and healthy dinner. Saturday brunch at Chez Zee left us literally lying around the living room (the crème brulée French toast is delicious and formidable) for a few hours before heading to The Oasis for drinks and an unfortunately hazy view of Lake Travis. Duly libated, we proceeded to Siena for an excellent Tuscan dinner. Sunday included a new Egoscue menu work-up with my dad and lunch at the Kerbey Lane Café, which besides good food has perhaps the coolest 1960s-retro sink counter ever in its men’s bathroom.
I spent Monday and Tuesday with one of our customers, a video game development house that’s integrating OpenNMS into the system that will monitor and manage the health of the many servers that will power a new MMO game. These guys are using our software in a way that’s not quite like anything I’ve heard of before, and it’s going to be really cool. As a testament to the flexibility of OpenNMS we were able, in just two days, to come to a good understanding of what they want to accomplish and how to approach the project.
Back to food for a moment 
We broke for an authentically Austinite Tex-Mex lunch at Chuy’s (whose salsa rivals the hole-in-the-wall Mexiclone place near our house) and had dinner at Rudy’s for my first-ever helping of Texas brisket barbecue. On Tuesday one of the guys took me for a quick lunch at Conans, which besides excellent pepperoni and veggie supreme pizza also boasts a really unique atmosphere that I’m told is very Austin.
When I got back from lunch on Tuesday, there was a voicemail waiting in our sales mailbox from Kathleen, the former boss who unwittingly launched my career in the network management field. She wanted to talk with somebody about using OpenNMS to replace an installation of HP OpenView Network Node Manager (HPOV NNM).
Now there’s a bit of history here — when I turned in my notice eight years ago to Kathleen, it was to go to work for a vendor whose software she had paid to train me on. She wasn’t terribly happy about that situation, but I heard that the vendor gave her a couple of free training seats as penance.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll realize that this voicemail arrived on 01 April. I was well primed for pranks already, having been pwned hard-core by YouTube’s masterful RickRoll and having made the OpenNMS “Enterprise Edition” price calculator for one of Tarus‘ series of blog posts. I immediately IMed Johnny to see if he had put her up to calling, but he had had nothing to do with it.
If you’re reading this, Kathleen, thanks for considering OpenNMS and I hope to see you soon in one of our training classes or as the guy doing your GreenLight!
Tuesday night I met up at Koreana with some folks from one of our other Austin customers, also a video game house, who also want to use OpenNMS in their MMO game server monitoring system! If OpenNMS keeps spreading through the video game industry at this rate, the old stand-by of blaming slow game servers for a failed raid will soon be history 
The bluefin sashimi was great, by the way.
