Viewing posts tagged conferences
So this was the last day of Brainshare. I watched the morning Keynote, which was quite a show. For drawing the winners of the ten custom-painted laptops they had the crew of the American Chopper show on stage, after showing a three-part spoof of the show during last week.
The last talk for this year, only seven people in the audience, but very interested ones. And that's much better than 70 bored listeners. The rest of the day, booth duty in the technology experts, and tonight: meet the experts. It was quite interesting to talk to various customers from all over the world. In the informal environment we got valuable feedback on our products we wouldn't get otherwise. And today they even had very good wine (additionally to the micro brew and that dreaded dishwater Americans call beer.)
I held two tutorials today: the second session of the basic Linux troubleshooting tutorial, which went much better than the first one. Despite the early time (8:30, welcome to the midnight lecture!) about 80 people actually showed up, very few walking out, and I've got at least some questions in between. One participant "complained" that I put into one hour what took him two years to find out...
The day itself wasn't very eventful, however tonight was party time at Delta Center, SLC's basketball stadium. It startet with plenty of food, some kind of soda-pop which served as a poor excuse of a beer (I think its called Budweiser here), a DDR station, an Elvis immitator which wasn't bad, some silly green-screen music video parodies and a break-dance crew. Next, a mediocre stand-up commedian. Okay, mediocre in my opionion. Maybe I just don't know enough about American family life to find his jokes funny...
The elevators in the conference center broke down yesterday.
So I'm sitting here in a hotel room in SLC, right across the street the Salt Lake Palace (the convention center) after having managed to sneak out of the Analyst's Night at Novell Brainshare... I spent the whole day having lab duty at a demo point already and was very grateful that two co-workers with more experience in talking to a non-technical audience took over for tonight.