Friday
6am – up to catch an 8:30 flight. My daughter Lisette is going with me on this trip.
9:30am local time, we arrive in CO. Grab a car and head north to Fort Collins for Beau Jo’s pizza, free loaner bikes from the Bicycle Library, and general sightseeing. BEAUTIFUL flower garden on the university campus!
6pm speaker dinner, good venue, good fun, good folk, good talk. The chicken pot pie was BBQ flavor, not to my liking. Maybe I didn’t read the menu carefully enough?
8:30pm to the hotel room we’re sharing with Meredith Ryan-Smith (@coffegrl). I hop on ustream chat to participate in the watching of our pre-taped DBAs at Midnight webshow. Technical difficulties abound, but a few loyalists hang on. Pass out.
Saturday
I wake at some ungodly early hour (my first tweet of the day was 4:45am, 5:45 am on my personal clock). I obsess on slide decks and demos till we’re all up and ready to go. Lisette and I grab munchies, Starbucks, and promptly get lost on the way to the venue (1 mile away), despite GoogleMaps on the Blackberry and a GPS.
SQL down, NoSQL up!
7:50am arrive, become perturbed at lack of street sign. I like being reassured that I’m entering the right driveway. Nice campus, easy registry, big whiteboard with clear schedule/directions, beautiful day, big empty speaker room. Plus Fusion IO is giving away an iPad. I promise Lisette that if we win, it’s hers. Fusion IO lets her put in a separate entry (and we didn’t’ even ask!)9:00am set up and start running down the clock on my 9:15 session, Forgotten T-SQL. REALLY nice, intimite venue – I’m at a table instead of a podium, practically in the front row – and the 30 or so seats fill up completely. Lisette hands out our MidnightDBA business cards to all. The session goes well, the people are involved.
10:20am we grab sodas and muffins on our way to “So You’ve Inherited the DB from Heck”, by Troy K (www.24and5.com). This is something I’ll be talking about in my Code Sins session at 2, so I’m interested in material I can steal/reference. He’s got some interesting scripts I’ll have to check out, but I also have some suggestions on the presentation…people don’t write clear suggestions on feedback forms often enough! Lisette watches Wayne’s World on my laptop. Good thing I brought earbuds for her.
11:30 lunch was yummy…choices of good sandwiches, potato salad, chips, etc etc. I love these guys’ soda selection!
2pm my Code Sins session went quite well!
Wrap up. Kiddo won the flip video cam from Confio software!
After party. We stay only briefly, though it looks like everyone is having a good time. Both the kid and I are a bit worn out, so we head back to the hotel for some downtime before tomorrow’s flight home.
Impressions
Nice, laid-back, well run event. My only real complaint is about the lack of street signs, but that’s a minor event. I was also surprised that there were only two sponsors present, but it was kind of a nice change. Lunch was nice, the volunteers knowledgeable and helpful, the lunch yummy (did I say that already? I like lunch…), the layout fine, the speakers and sessions good. It was a little weird not having internet connectivity, but I didn’t find it an issue this time around.
Well done, Colorado, especially for a first event! Well done, indeed.
-Jen
