Sunday, August 08, 2010

#Techwave 2010 - Day 0

Today was just travel to the event and the welcome reception. The only problem with getting to the airport is that apparently the highway department thought that crack of dawn Sunday morning was a good time to shut the 105 down to one lane. Ended up taking surface streets the last few miles.



My office is a couple of miles from lax, so normally I just part in the covered parking there when flying out of lax. I usually get somebody to drop me off and catch a taxi back when I return. Given the time and day I'm flying out now, I went with some offsite covered parking that runs a shuttle. Only about the second time I've done that, but the last place was closer to the airport and mores expensive. Trying a place a bit farther out.

One point of confusion upon landing at Dulles. The Techwave site says "Washington Hilton". Newsflash: there are several Hilton hotels in Washington. Fortunately, one of the other TeamSybase members ran into the same problem and posted the actual address in the newsgroups so I could tell the shared van folks.

Hotels rooms are rather narrow, and I have water stands in the ceiling of my bathroom. This is a Hilton?

Now that I have a 3G iPad, it's really hard to justify paying for an Internet connection in the hotel room. About the only thing I can't do is upload my photos in real time. It looks like the hotel's "free" wireless in the lobby is only available for 1 hour after you first connect (not one hour of use). It's rather pathetic. May end up getting the Internet access just to upload the photos.

Tried to get ahead of the game and do some souvenir shopping before the event rather than scrambling on the last day on the way to the airport. I got a bit turned around walking around on the streets (despite google maps on the iPad). Guess it's been 12 years since I worked here and I don't know remember my way around as much as I thought I would.

Reception started at 7:00. I spent the majority of time mingling with other PowerBuilder folks, and left about 10:30. A bit different this year in that the reception occurred before registration opened. So people didn't have badges, they just checked your name against the list of registered attendees at the door.

Note to self: pack some Starbucks via next time, better than the stuff they provide in the room.

1 comment:

Allen said...

I'm not able to attend but I'm looking forward to any updates on pocketbuilder and it's creative uses.