I leave this morning for Beijing -- this will be my first time there -- my first time to Taipei as well.  Only 3 more cities left on this year's Sun Tech Days tour.  I've managed to work every city this year, which is something I haven't done since our very first Sun Technology Day back in 1998.    Next travel season, which begins in the fall, I think I'll slow down a bit.  It's been an arduous year...

Last week was the Java Bus Tour -- we visited 5 universities in an many days:
 

• University of Santa Clara
• University of California, Berkeley
• Stanford University
• University of California, Santa Cruz
• California State University, Hayward

We rented a 34 foot Winnabego Journey from Family RV in San Jose, called it the Java Bus and evangelized students of all kinds over the course of the event -- I slept in the RV in the Sun Menlo Park campus parking lot -- it was a magical experience, to say the least.  Probably one of the coolest events I've been part of at Sun so far, we challenged each of the schools to sponsor a team to design, build and program a Lego Mindstorm Kit robot using a Java operating environment which was developed via open source.  So far 3 of the 5 schools have accepted the challenge; it appears as though 4 will accept in the end (they have another 24 hours to accept the challenge).

I'll be back for a few days in a few days, at which point I'll leave for the final Tech Days event in Tel Aviv...