On Monday, I had dinner with Alexandra Specht and Ed Burns (who is JSF spec lead at Oracle). It was a great evening with two great persons.

I am not a big JSF fan (and probably will never be one), but it is a good web technology and you can do great projects with it. They also have some very interesting projects going on. But that’s not what I wanted to write about today.

The best thing about the evening was meeting Ed again. He is a great person and it is fun and interesting to talk to him. You can also learn a lot of things from him - and I am not only talking about technical stuff here: It always impresses me how he seems to remember every name of everybody he ever met. I mean, he remembers my name ;) And he also asked about people we both know, so he remembered them AND the fact that I know them.

I guess this really is something I should try to learn from him: I sometimes even forget the names of people I meet while I am talking to them. When this happens it annoys me and I am ashamed and I hope that they don’t sense it.