Tuesday, January 23, 2007

 

Day 1 at Lotusphere

The mad rush to the opening session was on at 7:30 am. I ran right into Andrew Kelly on the way over to the Dolphin. I hoped I could get some breakfast before the session. The place was packed. We headed up to the ballroom and the line was already getting long. I zipped down to the first floor to catch some muffins and coffee for Andrew and I. Ran into Joe Litton and they saved a seat for me. I should have eaten that last muffin because I crushed it with something in my bag and it stuck to my notebook and was in crumbs all over my bag. The session was packed and they had to turn people away. The energy was high and they had a great live band to kick it off. The band featured about 15 singers doing The Who, David Bowie and some other rockin' stuff. Lance Armstrong was the guest speaker. Seeing an American hero on stage gave me goose bumps. He did a nice job with humor and telling stories of his Space adventures. I particularly liked his comment that when they decided to send a man to the moon they could have sent criminals but instead decided on pilots. They had fantastic scientists on the project and he was just a "Technition" who installed some mirrors. He explained that those mirrors were installed to help us determine the distance to the moon and are still in use today. They initially had trouble hitting the mirrors with a laser beam. Trouble was it's like hitting a dime from 2 miles out. The biggest trouble was that they didn't know they had the wrong latitude and longitude from the spot the observatory they were shooting the laser beam from and it had been wrong since the 1800's. It was great when they finally did get it right because they could then calculate the mileage for his expense account. Laugh!
My sessions were ok for the first day. Started out with the famous "Worst mistakes in Domino". Always a great laugh and learning experience. I had to rush over to the Swan pond for paddle boat races. I was horrible and came in last. I went off course a bit. Quick lunch and headed to an LEI session. I picked up one tip there that could really save me in a current project. I need to review the use of views as data selection. Seems there's a way where you can lose data. I have the technote written down to review. I did some product showcase, bought a JavaScript book and a carrier for my iPod. There were a couple sessions on my agenda I'd seen before. "How to make Domino web sites that don't look like Domino" was one of these but I believe I picked up a couple new web tricks there. I skipped a couple sessions and did a usability study in the lab. I did the BOF on blogging and wiki's that had some interesting comments on how to apply these in a company. For fun, I had a few laughs and drinks at Joe Litton's room and then over to the JamFest. Great energy, horrible singing and some good rock tunes. Now, let's start day 2.

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Comments:
Minor correction: Neil, not Lance Armstrong ;-)
 
@Richard,
Wow, nice catch. You know the kind of rush we're in during Lotusphere. I'm a big fan of Lance so it was easy for me to make this mistake.
 
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