Medifast Status: Day 172, Down ~63lbs
SpiceWorld flies by in such a blur. Being a dawn till dusk event really causes you to lose sight of how quickly the time is passing. Any more than two days, though, and we would all be really, really burned out.
Dominica was disappointed that I had no good stories from last night and had such a quiet evening. She has been following along closely in the SpiceWorks community this year to see what was going on and to keep in contact with everyone here. She really wanted to come join us this year but we did not have anyone to watch Oreo lined up and we just couldn’t make it happen. But she is determined to go next year.
My day ended up being crazy busy for the office today and I was struggling to be able to get any time at the conference at all. It was awful. Next year I’m going to make a point of taking more time off because this really ended up being far worse than expected. I was stuck in the hotel nearly all day and constantly on my BlackBerry any moment that I was away.
I wore my new, bright orange polo today. I walked out of the hotel and across the courtyard and ran into Nic who instantly was like “can I get one of those”. I had just five minutes earlier asked Dominica why I had an extra polo in exactly Nic’s size and she said that it was an extra that she had not meant to pack. So I walked back to the hotel, grabbed it and brought it out to Nic.
I tried to see more vendors today, I especially wanted to see Verecloud, HP (because they had the Proliant MicroServer on display) and Buffalo (because they have their new Windows Storage based products on display) but I never got a chance to hook up with any of them. It was that busy of a day.
Lunch today was really awesome. The vegetarian and pescatarian options were really outstanding. I mean the food was truly amazing. Way, way better than what we get at La Cima, for example, and that is saying something. Everyone was raving about it.
I was able to attend an MSP session this afternoon which was really valuable. I’m glad that I was at least able to get into that one thing. That was the only complete session that I was able to attend this whole year.
As soon as the session was over I ran up to talk to the vendors but every single vendor had packet up and only one or two had not left completely. That seems incredibly silly. In the MSP session they told us to run up and talk to the vendors before they left. But they had all left before then. To put in all the time and effort (and money) to present a booth at a conference like this and to leave before the show is over seems like a waste of good opportunity. I was not the only person looking to get some vendor time in at the last minute and other than Unitrends who took time to hang out on both Wednesday and Thursday nights I really did not see any vendors participating outside of their booths which is a real shame because the real value happens outside of that space.
I had to get back to the hotel room and work all afternoon and evening after that point. My Friday night deployment schedule ended up being completely insane and I never had a chance to even talk to anyone. That really sucked. I did have just enough time to organize the “Scott Alan Miller Afterparty” at the Highball before going to do the deployments but everyone had to go there without me hoping that I could join later.
I ended up working until after seven in the evening. What a horrible Friday. It was insanely busy and I never had a chance to step away from my desk in any way at all.
As soon as I was able to step away, and I was only able to leave as early as I did because I asked some of the teams if I could wait until tomorrow for some of the items, I jumped in the car and ran down to Highball. I was quite impressed that I was able to drive myself directly there without missing a turn. I’m starting to know my way around Austin just a little bit.
It was really late by the time that I got to the Highball and several people were already close to leaving. But we hung out for maybe an hour before heading back to the hotel to drop off cars.
After the Highball party was over the last remnants of the die hard SpiceWorld crew walked from the hotel down to sixth for a final night out on the town. We had a good time and hit several venues including, of course, taking Andy and several other attendees out for their very first Flaming Doctor Peppers. Andy got some great shots of the fireball resulting from a Dr. Pepper too! He actually brought his good SLR out for a night on the town! We hit Maggie Mae’s where one of the events from my first SpiceWorld was held and we hit Coyote Ugly for Andy.
We stayed out all night, dragging ourselves in sometime after two in the morning. Once the bars closed down and would not let us in anymore we grabbed slices of pizza (not a good food even in Austin) and headed back to the hotel to collapse. We are all meeting again tomorrow for breakfast at Denny’s.