Early in the morning I flew to San Francisco where I met Paul Watson, Mark Little, and Dan Kuo. We drove down to the Asilomar Conference Centre for the HPTS. It was a great drive. We took route 1 by the Pacific coast and we stopped at places on the way. This was the same route I took back in 2001 when I did an 1-week long road trip on my own in California. It was great fun then and it was great today as well.

We arrived at the Asilomar retreat. This pace is fantastic. This is how conferences should be. A small number of attendees (by invitation only), ready to have fun discussing technology and ideas. We’ve already had dinner and drinks (no TV or bars around to distract us) and we are now ready to start with the agenda tomorrow.

Just have a look at the list of great people here (and there are some more who are not listed). I am so honored to be amongst these great names and to present some of my ideas about distributed, service-oriented, large-scale computing to them. This is definitely a highlight!