Shedding Some Light

Day minus 2 is the arrival day. Therese and I got up early because I was trying to finish up a beta for one of my customers (didn’t happen, which was a big disappointment) the night before. The night before I could not focus on the monitor and noticed I was just staring at it getting nothing done. Unfortunately I collapsed from pure exhaustion. The nightmares were not as intense as last year though, which must be a sign we are more prepared this year than last.

I did not sleep well because there was still so much to do. I packed things up the day before, but there is always the nagging worry about forgetting something. Two full carry-ons with the critical stuff: badges, extra materials for more badges for on-site registrations, lanyards, names for drawings, some of the MSDN Subscriptions we are giving away, all the marketing materials for White Light Computing we put in the bags, sign tripods, cameras, camera tripod, and some of the special WLC “ninja” mousepads. Some of the less critical stuff put in checked luggage included the wireless hubs.

Our flight was uneventful, which is always good. Normal wait time for luggage at PHX is usually around 30-45 minutes, but ours came quickly. Direct route to the rental car place where we picked up our Chevy Uplander. We need a mini-van to pick up all the stuff manufactured locally, as well as picking up speakers from the airport and getting them to the hotel.

Next up was picking up all the outstanding conference materials. The shirts (speaker polos, t-shirts, and the white polos ordered by anyone who wanted one) and the conference bags were produced in Tempe near the airport. How about those bags? We decided we wanted to do something green this year, something to help the environment so we ordered reusable grocery bags for everyone. I think they turned out really nice. I was expecting a smaller logo, but it really stands out on the neutral background. Speaker shirts and conference bags were the only thing ready.

Off to FedEx Office (it will always be Kinko’s to me) to pick up the session boards so people know what is going on in the different rooms for the different time slots. The gentleman who helped me asked what I used to print the signs as he thought they looked really nice. I told him it was a custom software package created with Visual FoxPro. His eyes lit up and he told me how he once was a FoxPro developer back around the turn of the century for a local hospital. So I can tell you the signs were printed by a Fox developer. I print the signs based on tables maintained by Doug and Tamar for the speakers and their session. The report is output to a PDF and emailed to Kinkos.

Last stop before the conference hotel was Staples to pick up some late printed materials for WLC. We arrived at the conference center a little later than I thought. Therese reminded me we took an earlier flight last year. We unloaded our stuff and picked up Doug for the trip to Costco to buy binders, paper, and water.

When we got back to the conference center we headed to dinner. After dinner we took delivery on a full pickup truck of stuff delivered to us in the weeks leading up to the conference. Thanks to Mr. Perez (dad of Frank who works at WLC) for warehousing all the materials sent in advance.

We went to bed early Tuesday night because we were tired and knew we needed our rest for the conference.