I stepped off the puddle jumper plane from LA to San Diego (en route from Philadelphia) and squinted into the bright light, scowling at the light breeze. 71 degrees? Seriously?
I’m a firm believer that the West Coast was invented to mock East Coasters. “See how happy you can be when you don’t need to sweat in 100 degree weather or shovel four feet of snow off your Subaru Forrester? And oh, by the way, here we actually use our sunroofs.” Uncomfortable pause. “And, come on. A Subaru Forrester? Do you wear anoraks too?”
It wasn’t always this way with the FileMaker DevCon. It used to be that you’d crawl out of your transportation device of choice into a humid steam bath and say to yourself, “yeah, okay, this sun thing is nice, but at least I don’t live 20 miles from downtown huddled in an air conditioning bubble”.
No longer. FileMaker DevCon these days is now held in places that make me envious.
It’s not fair. You know we put up with our ridiculous weather patterns for the opportunity to be smug and superior. Thank you, DevCon, for depriving us Northeasters of one of our small pleasures in life.
We might actually get happy, for one thing.
Anyway.
Roll down a half mile to the hotel, and blam. 1200 FileMaker developers. Mecca. Chad Sager (@simulacroton) and I…eventually…after a while…get our bags into the room, and then hit the ground running. Hook up with Alan Deffenderfer (from Maryland) and Jason Mundok (@jmundok) after Jason’s Agile presentation, early (or is it late) dinner and some idle musing about what might be revealed… then…
KEYNOTE PRESENTATION!
I have to say, this was the most exciting keynote I’ve seen in years. Amazing stuff. We learned about (you didn’t seriously think I’d break non-disclosure here, did you? I will say there were no non-disclothesure moments, thankfully. Anyway, I like my job, so no secrets will be divulged here. Sorry.) and that was just fantastic, hands down.
Then on to the welcome reception. Caught up with Graham Young at Englishcomp, great guy who got me started on my first FileMaker projects back in the late 90’s. Chatted up Andy Gaunt of FMPug.com, picked up my iPad giveaway tickets (you do know about those, don’t you? You don’t? Go track Andy and Heather down at their booth. You’ll thank me, yes you will). Somebody’s already won one. Was it me? Dunno, left my tickets back in the hotel rom.
Then off to bed. No, wait. Too tired for tweetup. Too tired for tweetup. Seriously, how much punishment can a man take?
Apparently there’s beer for those kinds of injuries. Hit the Tweetup, organized by Chris Kubica (@chriskubica) and chatted up my fellow tweeters! Then bed.
Day 1 of FileMaker DevCon to come! But first…coffee. You’ll have to pry that Starbucks cup out of this East Coaster’s cold, dead hands.
Colin Keefe
IT Solutions Consulting, Inc
http://www.itsolutions-inc.com/
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