Live galootin' report from the hackers lounge at JavaOne.....

Well I ended up having Sunday in San Francisco free and since my manager bailed
out from the trip (no not from the plane ;^) ) at the last minute I only had
one other person to influence my wanderings. The whether in San Francisco was
less
than ideal, fog, cold just generally blah, so we decided to head on up to
Sonoma  and tour some wineries.

After a few rounds of sampling at 2 or 3 vineyards we went into Sonoma for
lunch. In Sonoma I found an historical site, I can't recall exactly what is was
called, it was some barracks of some historical significance. Anyhow We went in
and
they were having some kind of oldtime craft show. About a dozen vendors/display
of
things made the old fashioned way. I skipped over the knitting and corn husk
dolls and
headed over to some guy sitting at a table in front of an old fashion canvas
tent, complete with kerosene latern and a couple of buffalo hides for bedding.
He
claims he actually slept out there the previous night. In front of him were two
absolutely gorgeous muzzle loading double barrel shotguns circa 1830. The
barrels hand
forged  with an amazing damascus pattern on them just as you'd see on some
swords.
After talking to this guy for about 20 minutes he gave us a demo buy loading an
d
firing one of the guns. Once my ears stopped ringing we headed on over to see
on older
gentleman who was busy making a shallow dovetailed tray out of sugar pine
completely by hand. I just stood and listened to the other people ooh and aaah
at
the fact that he was not using any power tools, just a plow plane, chisel,
dovetail
saw etc. Once the gawkers had gone I talked to him for a while. He seemed quite
pleased
to run into someone who actually knew something about the old tools, I think we
must
have talked for at least 20 minutes, old tools, roy, oldtools, galoots,
oldtools, EAIA
etc etc. He gave an application form for EAIA and off we went to find a place
to have
lunch. Wandering around the town I spotted a shop window full of old tools so I
walked
over to see what was there. What was in the window wasn't anything
amazing, a stanley 71, 5, 80, braces, squares, wooden jack, dado, rabbet etc.
and none of it in good shape. I had origianlly though I had found an old tools
shop but
it just turned out to be a display in the window of an architects office. So no
tool
acquisitions but much more galootinous activities than I had expected

That's likely to be the only oldtools related stuff I'm going to see since
there seems to be JavaOne stuff going on from 6 am until 2 am.

See ya

Dan