Vakkotaur

What made it long was the travel. It's about an 8 hour drive from Fairmont to Chicago. jmaynard and I made that drive Friday. And then the reverse on Sunday. Friday evening to Sunday morning was spent in the outer reaches of Chicago: Schaumburg and Arlington Heights.

The event was a computing conference, mainly dealing with mainframe stuff so I was a bit out of my element at times. I did get to see Jay give a Hercules presentation so I now know how those go. I saw Sam Knutson, a friend of Jay's, give another presentation which went quite fast and still nearly ran over time. Even if I didn't pick up on everything mentioned there was enough there to be of interest and hopefully of some use to me.

At various times during our stay (which includes before and after the official conference) it was interesting to hear of the organizational issues. Any such gathering has roughly the same issues, but it was still amusing to contrast a mainframe conference with a furry-con. They're quite different, on the surface, but have the same problems to solve underneath. To my amusement, registration happened on "Furry Standard Time" which is to say it started later than planned.

After the conference, Jay, Sam, and I went out for supper. It was interesting to hear Sam have the problems with the future envisioned by one speaker. The idea was then everything will be a subscription service and there'll be little ownership. What was overlooked was that people like ownership and see subscription services as a problem. What if that particular service provider goes under, then what? You can't activate this or that, which you spent a considerable sum on. That sort of thing.

But the highlight of the weekend was not really the conference at all. It was having lunch with Cindy Morgan on Sunday. She's just... generally excited about, well life, the universe, and everything, really. The topics of conversation included the Treo cellphone (She and Jay each have one, and can justify it), her newly acquired GPS (it's rather impressive) and her recent travel from Florida to Chicago. But that was not the extent of it, by any means.