This time of the year is holiday season around where I live and it can get pretty quiet during the day, as people dream of days off rapidly approaching and answer IMs from boomerangs of the diaspora, back for a couple of weeks. It makes me wish I had followed through on my idea to make a machine that goes ping whenever an EclipseCon submission came through, because the constant ringing would be like totally festive. Jingles bells and all.
Sadly, though, the jingling will be coming to a halt TODAY. It is bah humbug time as the Program Committee close the sack and wander off to their various lairs to peruse its contents. So, if you have a submission that you were thinking about, and you’ve been putting it on the long finger, now is the time to get that finger out and submit your abstract.
Enough of the reminders. This year we picked up Donald Smith by his ankles and shook him and enough money fell out to fund a Program Committee Top Five Early Bird Pick competition, wherein awesome Eclipse schwag would be deployed to a lucky few. The talks were selected to be great representatives of the different topics, styles and directions that the PC is looking for this year.
The ever-on-the-button Don has already blogged about the winners. No doubt he was a little miffed when we couldn’t settle on just five talks and had to shake him again to get enough funding for a sixth!