Wednesday

I woke up a bit late and missed the van this morning. I wasn’t that late, maybe 10 minutes or so. And for me to be ready at 7:25 is still an amazing feat. The conference was ok today. I will say that I honestly didn’t pay that much attention. Today was the first day that I brought my laptop with me and I spent time going over my mail and attempting to blog a bit. I didn’t get a chance to read anything, so I’ll have a lot of people’s blogs to catch up on when I get back. One presentation was a bit interesting. It was by the guy from the competing company. He and I met the first day and he seemed very nice. Did I mention that his company is one of the sponsors and that we make the same products? Well, he didn’t really go over anything much that you can’t find out on their web site. He just went over their product line and what they did. The interesting part was that I didn’t realize, he’s not just an employee of the company. He founded the company along with his brother and is now the acting CTO. Hmmm… I think I need to get him drunk later and steal all of his trade secrets!

After the conference was over, I decided that I need to do a bit of networking. Well, I really haven’t done any yet. So I went to the evening event. It was awfully convenient since it was a BBQ on the beach just outside of my room. So, after checking in with my boss on the phone, I headed to the bar for a pre-bbq drink. Now, there are really 3 stages to hanging out with computer nerds. First, they are all polite and talk about business. They get tipsy and start to tell really bad jokes that involve their grad student or something another professor did. And finally, they are drunk and dancing wildly, somehow believing they have some kind of rhythm. Trust me, THEY DON’T! Now, I had to have a couple of Rum Punches just to stand phase 2. Everyone was nice, but not really my cup of tea. I was good, though. I made some contacts and got some business cards. There ended up being 4 of us hanging out. A woman from California who is currently working on a project in Fort Lauderdale, a Canadian man who’s currently in Connecticut, and a German man who, I believe is staying in the Netherlands or something. We left the beach and headed back to the bar. There was a huge party going on up there for some of the Boston people I met the first night. One of the women was turning 50 so they brought Italian food down from NY with them and they had cases of wine. The manager was there as well. We all had a good time drinking and hanging out. The manager was trying to convince me to stay the weekend. The woman from California told me I should. She was like “if it’s not your wedding, you don’t need to be there!” Well, after hanging out there, everyone went down to Bankie Banks’ place. There was live music, and this is where the drunken dancing comes in. Not me mind you, them. And at one point, some woman watching what looked like an epileptic seizure asked, “is that the guy that’s a genus?” Very funny night.