Web 2.0 Conference part 1

I'm up in San Francisco this week for the Web 2.0 O'Reilly conference. Someone had the bright idea to start this conference on a Sunday. That person is evil.

Thought I might take some notes while sitting in these sessions.

So far, the trip has been pretty fun. Anne came up to the city to mooch on a free hotel room and see some friends. We flew up Saturday so Dan and I could hit up some kiting, and hit it up we did! A storm blew through in the morning and by early afternoon it was 9m weather in Alameda. As we didn't have 9's, we flew our 12s. There was a Naish kite demo at the beach, so I flew a few demo kites. I've never really thought Naish kites were very interesting, and now I'm sure of it. The day was fun, very choppy, gusty and overpowered.

Conference on Sunday was brutal. This conference is supposed to be about Web2.0 but really it's just about web applications with a slight trend to talk about AJAX or the like. Sunday's sessions were 3 hours long! I could only make it through one of them. We tried to kite again, but just stood around in our wetsuits for 2 hours. Bummer.

I'm sitting in the second of like 5 sessions on Monday. Here are some thoughts;

* These chairs suck real bad.
* There are a lot of people here and they really have us packed in. No empty seats, people sitting on the floor. The rows of chairs are so close together that no one can get in or out.
* Tiny coffee cups! What the heck??! Coffee is the only thing to get us through this stuff, give us more!
* They've named sessions some long fancy sounding title, but they turn out to be one big marketing speech for a single product. Example, session title, "Securing and Optimizing Web 2.0 Application Delivery" what the real title should have been, "Citrix talks about their NetScaler devices"
* The free bag sucks real bad too. I actually packed light and didn't bring a backpack since every conference gives you some schwag pack on day one. The time they gave us a tiny purse thing that can barely hold my laptop. Lame.

more to come...