I caught up (physically) with Mark Potts (where's your blog gone?) for the first time in about three years last night. We had some fine Italian food down on Stanley Street and a few beers while talking about all things Web Services and (of course) systems management. Oddly, even though Mark works for a company that's firmly in the we-love-WSRF camp our positions on service-oriented systems aren't far apart especially around the notions of context and semantics.
We also raised a toast to all the fine, fun, friendly people (including Mark and Savas) who were involved in the OASIS BTP effort. Looking back there were people involved in that effort from whom I learned a great deal about distributed systems and who really planted the seeds for some of the MESTian thinking.