We heard from author and lecturer Christopher Avery on the topic of "A Set of Methods and Skills or a Leadership Mindset and Culture." The seven levels of how one progresses through to take responsibility for any problem: lay blame (on something or someone else), justify (ourselves), shame (I should have known better), obligation (I have to), responsibility (it's my mess and here is how I am going to clean it up).

The presentation by Nick Geise dealed with how one goes about moving to Scrum. Then we heard from Mike Ratliff about FitNesse, which really helped Mary Kay as a couple of their folks gladly testified. The best presentation of the day was Introduction to Aspect Oriented Programming by Brett Schuchert and his demo of AspectJ in JVM 1.5. The presentation of JBoss ESB and SOA by Burr Sutter was packed with information. He drove home the point of interoperability and provided demo of interoperability between Sun Java web service and Microsoft Visual Basic. He quickly went over a lot of the JBoss technologies, from jBPM to WSBPEL.

Jonathan is out of town so I ran the Dallas County Young Republicans monthly meeting tonight before heading to the Heritage Alliance Foundation reception honoring the ten most conservative members of the Texas Legislature. All ten of the honorees were House members.