Thursday, the final frontier

Well, I thought I’d wrap up what happened on Thursday. Basically I hit a couple of sessions on Workplace and skipped out on Gurupalooza and the Beat the Developers session. Meet the Devs is generally one of my favorite sessions of the entire conference, so I was bummed to miss it, but I needed to wrap up some other stuff during that time. I heard that it didn’t disappoint. Especially the couple minutes of standing ovation someone got for asking the following (paraphrased):

“If Ambuj calls it Sametime and Quickplace, and Mike Rhodin calls it Sametime and Quickplace, why should we call it anything different.”

Priceless. Unfortunately Ed had to defend IBM’s position on that one even though he clearly didn’t want to. Oh well. Maybe IBM will learn for the future.

The Workplace sessions I hit focused quite a bit on the rich client, and I asked a question that I wanted clarified. I wanted to know if rich client would work in Workplace Services Express as well as Workplace proper. The presenters answered that yes it would, but it was after 30 seconds of huddling and getting clarification from other IBM’ers in the audience. The fact that they didn’t know this immediately kinda scares me, but if it’s true, Workplace Services Express is going to rock. I’ll have more on that in another post.

After the Stephen Wright closing session, a bunch of us milled around outside the room, and we got this picture. A very cool group of people indeed.

I did some souvenir shopping, and then met a bunch of folks for dinner at Shula’s. The food and company were fantastic. Jess, Melissa, Rob, Andrew, Devin, Chuck Dean (winner of the 42″ plasma) and Kurt and Jerry from Holland all turned out. We had a long leisurely dinner with a very wide ranging conversation. It was the perfect way to wind down the week.

Not content to simply go to bed (I had to be up at 4AM to get ready to leave for the airport) we decided to hit Kimono’s for a final time. I had to do an especially cheesy rendition of “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor for Rob. My goal was to have him spewing beer from his nose, but I didn’t quite do it. I do believe he has been fairly scarred however! 🙂

The highlight however was Jess. Man alive, that girl can SING! She did “Turn Off The Light” by Nellie Furtado, and it was simply amazing. And that song is FAST and Jess didn’t miss a beat… I was blown away. Then, she wanted me to duet with her on “Bring Me to Life” by Evanesence. Let’s just say that she rocked once again, but I was horrible. I guess it didn’t help that my words never showed up on the karaoke screen… 🙂 Oh well, I’ll have to practice up for next year!

I finally bid everyone adieu at about midnight, spent the next hour finishing up packing, and then slept for 3 hours before getting up and heading home. I’ll have final technical and personal wrap ups in the next few days. All in all, I had a blast, and learned a ton in the process. There’s never anything quite like Lotusphere…