Our intrepid CEO, Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, has a speaking engagement every week this month. I already mentioned how we enjoyed hosting a group from Japan for the first week: top figures from our customers, distributors, academia and related tool vendors. That was the easy one, since it was mostly on home turf -- just a little domestic flight or two. Next up was DevWeek in the UK, where his session was so full it was "standing room only" -- or actually since DevWeek is mostly developers, the latecomers simply sat on the floor.

The start of this week was one I'm particularly pleased about: SPA 2008. We'd tried a couple of times before to speak there, but weren't accepted. In 2002 the answer was "DSM is old stuff, we've heard it all before". In 2007 the answer was "never heard of these guys". I guess it's partly just the luck of the draw -- which program committee members review your proposal -- and partly who you know. The UK seems to have a relatively, err, tight-knit community in that respect :-). Fortunately, the other English stereotypes of friendliness and modesty also hold true, when you get to know them (or rather "us" - I hope!).

Next week there's a couple of days at a MoSiS workshop, and then he's off to give a keynote at GT-VMT 2008 in Hungary -- a more academic workshop on graphical modeling for generation, simulation and analysis. I'd feel more guilty about not sharing the travelling load this month if it wasn't for that keynote :-). They're always an honour, and of course a nice little ego boost -- hopefully with no long term damage if taken only once a year!