I have had the privilege to go to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 4 of the past 5 years.  During that time, it has been held in beautiful Portland, Oregon.  Well, the OSCON 2009 web site is up and they are moving it to San Jose, CA.  I have never been to the San Jose Convention Center.  The pictures look nice.  I have only been to San Jose at all to get off a plane and go to the Santa Clara Convention Center.  I hope San Jose has more to offer than Santa Clara.  The Santa Clara Convention Center is nice.  And the hotel it is attached to is also quite nice.  I have attended an Apachecon in 2001 and two MySQL Conferences (2007 and 2008) there.  But, outside of the convention center, there is not a lot of fun stuff to do.  You have to travel a good distance to find good medium to high end restaurants.  It is in the middle of a lot of large office buildings with names like Yahoo!, Intel, AMD, nVidia, etc. on them.  The other space is taken up by apartments.  But, I did not start this post to dig on Santa Clara.

I will miss Portland.  It is a neat town.  Lots of good food.  Lots of good beer.  Easy to navigate once you get used to the bridges.  If you like public transport it is quite accesible.  There is good disc golf in the area too.  That was always a plus.

But, here is to new beginnings in San Jose.  May it be as fun and educational as Portland has been these past few years.