Colorado Software Summit 2004

Here are some pictures from my recent trip to Colorado, where I attended the Colorado Software Summit. None of these pictures are too great ... I didn't take my digital camera with me, so these were taken with a disposable film camera. I took some shots of some of the scenery near the condo I stayed in as well as the conference center. I also took a few snaps inside the condo so I could show Donna what it looked like but those images turned out pretty crappy, as you can see.

As for the conference itself ... it was good but I was somewhat disappointed. I think I may have had impossibly high expectations, though. It has been a few years since my employer has had a training budget, and I've been wanting to go to this conference for a long time. Most other folks who have gone to this conference remind me a little bit of cult members. :) They rave about how wonderful it is and how they go every single year. Some of the presentations were pretty good, particularly the ones I attended by Mark Reinhold, the Chief Engineer for the JDK. I even got to meet him, which is a funny story in itself. I went to the welcoming reception with a co-worker, but we couldn't find two seats together. So I invited myself to the table where this guy happened to be seated. Trying to break the ice, I asked if this was his first time at the conference. He told me that he had been there several times and given talks each time. At that point, I realized he must be "somebody", but since he was being a non-conformist and not wearing a name tag, I had no idea who. It became increasingly clear that he was a big shot as person after person stopped by the table and said hello to him. It wasn't until after the reception when I had a chance to review the speaker's list that I figured out who he was. Really friendly down-to-earth guy though.

One thing that bugged me was the injection of politics. There was a Yahoo groups mailing list for the conference that I joined a month or two before the conference. Unfortunately, it contained very little information related to the conference. Mostly, it consisted of the left-wing paranoid rantings of a bunch of Bush-haters. The level of venom and conspiracy-theory paranoia amongst some of them was truly amazing. They put a little different spin on the typical "If-Bush-wins-I'm-moving-to-another-country" routine. It became "If Bush wins we should have the conference in Canada next year". But hey, it's a free country, they are entitled to their opinions (and entitled to move to Canada, I might add). So I just kept quiet and monitored the list for any actual useful info.

So now I'm headed to this conference feeling a bit like an outsider already, thinking that I better make sure I keep my political persuasions to myself. Then at the conference itself, the organizer (who is probably a really nice guy ... I never met him but most of the attendees seem to love him) introduced the keynote speaker by introducing him as being from Texas, the state where a "former one term president and a soon to be one term president" were also from. This got a resounding round of applause. Again, the guy is certainly entitled to his opinion, but as a paying customer, I am not interested in being subjected to it. Kinda felt like I was trapped behind enemy lines.

Oh well, at least Bush won. Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah!