To those who noticed, my apologies on the delay! I managed to post Day 1 of my travels at the airport waiting for my flight home. Upon landing, all those pesky responsibilities that come with life and had been successfully left behind suddenly came rushing back in! I'll do my best to be slightly more timely with the last two posts...
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Morning came early today. It typically does after a long day traveling... Thankfully I had the brisk, half-mile walk to the convention center to wake me up! One of my favorite parts of the convention so far? Free food. All my meals are paid for, including this morning's breakfast!
The conference officially began with today's general session. Supposedly there are nearly 6,000 people in attendance! I walked into a giant auditorium, surrounded by a dozen larger-than-life screens, crazy lights, and Green Day blasting through the speakers. Awesome.
Every year the big secret is always who is going to be the guest speaker. Past years have included Sir Richard Branson (of Virgin Mobile/Airlines/Records/Galactic fame), James Cameron (Avatar), and the Mythbusters team. My expectations were pretty high, but SolidWorks didn't have any problems delivering! Today's speakers were Jim Lovell, astronaut commander of Apollo 13, and Gene Krantz, the NASA administrator at that time!
It was a pretty cool experience hearing the story of how they rose up as an organization to answer JFK's call in 1961 to land a man on the moon within the decade and accomplished it in 1969. And of course to hear about one of the single most amazing technological heroics in history - getting the Apollo 13 crew safely back on earth! Definitely gonna have to go rent the movie when I get home...
Lovell made the comment that he knew they were in for trouble when the Apollo 13 launch was delayed and rescheduled for 13:13 CST. I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing my hotel room number was 1418. That is, until I got in the elevator later that day and discovered that Holiday Inn is one of those hotels that skips the 13th floor for that very same superstition, meaning my 14th-floor room was actually on the 13th floor! Uh oh...
Very carefully watching my steps, I headed to my first class. Quite a diverse line-up today! One on using the program to create surfaces, a very captivating talk by a Microsoft VIP on current trends in technology and innovation, another that talked about 3d printers (if your company makes stuff - anything! - you need one of these!), and the last one covered creating life-like images from your models. My favorite was the last one - so cool making your models look like they belong in a movie!! Plus, I was struck by the very intriguing potential of using rendering/ray-tracing technology that already exists for photo rendering and applying it to some of the thermal work we're hoping to do more of this next year...
Sorry, geeked out a bit there! Oh, and did I mention more free food throughout the day? Delicious!
I finished lunch pretty early (it helped that our class got out early as well), and since the Alamo was only two blocks away, I decided it'd be the perfect time to sneak out and take a tour!
The final class finished just early enough for me to hike back to the hotel and drop off my stuff before heading out to the CSWP event, having been added to the guest list nary 24 hours ago. We were packed into buses and shipped off to an undisclosed outdoor bar/concert area, where we were all given free Nerf six-shooters and herded towards the free buffets and open bars.
The event was supposed to include a paintball shooting range, but supposedly the paintball guns were lost during shipping. I'm still somewhat new to corporate world, but I think that means they ran into liability issues... Oh well. Instead they set the shooting range up for the Nerf guns, using large cardboard cutouts of Elvis, Harry Potter, John Wayne, and even Darth Vader!
And if using your own revolver wasn't exciting enough for you, they also had double-barrel shotguns and even a fully automatic belt-fed machine gun!
After plastering a few iconic figures with suction-cup hickeys, I figured it was about time to head back to the hotel. I love a good party as much as the next geek, but 15-hour days get a little tiring, and this is about as close to a vacation as I'm gonna get for the next few months! Once I got back, I took a moment to admire my spoils:
Not a bad day... Free stuff, free food, music, cool and inspiring speakers, exploring a new place, awesome tech stuff, new friends, and even a bit of learning! Not bad at all.
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