Robert went home to Kansas, but the rest of us didn't quit. We flew out to Santa Clara for the third (and last) offering of Boston University's traveling road show on C++. Chris Skelly has organized a very effective conference for BU — I can only hope he and BU get together again soon.

I stayed on for the annual Embedded System Conference, just down the block. Since I last attended two years ago, it has easily doubled in size. And the exhibit space rivaled the SD show last winter. Looks like embedded programming and design is finally coming into its own. In fact, the first ESC on the East Coast is coming to Atlanta next April. (My talks on C++ for embedded programming drew hefty crowds of C programmers ready to kick tires.)

Then it was back to Boston for CASE World the week following. Yet another constituency with quite a different set of requirements. It's funny how the same topic can have so many different slants. And yet everyone shares the same concern — how to use C and C++ to develop software that is reliable and on time.

I'm pretty talked out for a while. My next few trips are for standards meetings (and a family vacation in Disney World). Otherwise, I'm content to stay home, write, and edit the occasional magazine.

I tell you all this to give you a flavor of the activity that's going on in the seminar business. There's lots of it and it keeps growing. If your enterprise is the kind that pays for such excursions, now is a good time to put in for a trip or two. I know I've learned a lot at each of these meetings. I suspect you can too.

We try to keep you abreast of the latest happenings here in the pages of CUJ. I think we do a good job. Still, there's nothing quite like rubbing elbows with a few hundred (or a few thousand) of your fellow programmers and hearing a few new war stories. And there's always the chance you might hear Robert Ward tell a joke.

P.J. Plauger
pjp@plauger.com