The Hell of Attending Computing Conferences

Think about this. You are with a couple hundred of your computing peers. At a conference about a single product. In this instance, Adobe Acrobat. This is two full days of all about PDFs. There are many men in shorts and sandals. And t-shirts. There are presenters talking in depth about form fields. There are more computer nerds from schools and government agencies than any other conference I've ever been to. At the opening night mixer there was more beer drunk than wine. People hung out at the nosh bar and didn't mingle. Of course they didn't mingle. They are computer nerds.

And so am I. I must be, I'm here, aren't I? And scarily enough, learning things that will be useful at my job.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Fortunately we are at a Disney resort hotel and they have a wonderful theme bar. The resort is the "Coronado Springs" so the swimming pool has a forced perspective Mayan temple (with water slide). The theme is "Mexican Fiesta" so they have terrific frozen margaritas. And that's where this little conference attendee is headed right now. To the bar. Arriba! Vamanos!