1/19/2012

Greetings from Florida…

The weather here continues to improve each day.  When I arrived on Saturday it was chilly with lows in the 40′s and highs in the 60′s.  Today it was clear skies and in the upper 70′s with lots of sun.  Bit better then Des Moines – they had a high of 36 today… Not that I’m rubbing it in or anything

Florida...

Des Moines....

Blog entry is being typed up from my 101 Dalmatian room at the All-Star Movies Resort.  I’ve call this place the “Disney Ghetto”.  It’s not that bad, but just feels cheap and low rent compared to other Disney resorts.  The dining experience here is a food court like at a mall.  My room is clean and modern and the hotel is quiet and not very busy.  Been taking a tour bus shuttle from the ghetto to the Swan and Dolphin where the conference is at.  Takes 10 minutes and is a non event.

Outside my hotel room...

The conference has been lots of fun and went by very quickly.  The opening general session is their big spectacle “rah rah” speech on Monday morning.  They opened it with the group OkGo performing three of their songs.  Was a good way to wake up at 8 in the morning.  Each year they have a celebrity speaker, but keep it a secret as to who.  This year it was Michael J Fox.  He talked about how social networking has been a large part of his Parkinson’s foundation.  It enables people with Parkinson’s to work together with others for support and researchers around to world.   Also went into his personal life, what it was like to slowly acquire Parkinson’s and the cool things he has done in his life.  This blog entry by another Lotusphere attendee (TurboTodd) does a very nice job of summarizing his speech:  Turbo Todd’s Blog Entry.

OkGo...

Michael J Fox....

Remainder of the week I attended lots of technical sessions.  The big push of the conference is around enabling businesses to have the tools for social collaboration.  Their vision is like having FaceBook, Google Mail and a file sharing system (SharePoint/DropBox) mashed together in a single business system.  You then join communities around work functions, and then able to be productive by having social interactions augmented by other business tools.  Found it to be a logical extension of what the Lotus products have done in the past.

The remainder of the sessions centered around geeky programming and administration topics.  Saw lots of demonstrations of new techniques, extensions and different ways to accomplish once complex tasks.  Took lots of notes using iPad during the sessions using an app called VooDoo Pad.  Made it easy to organize everything by topic…

Waiting for a session to start...

On Wednesday evening the conference had rented SeaWorld from 7:30pm until 10:00pm.  Was not a huge amount of time, but was able to see most of the park, have supper, do a few tame rides and catch their 30 minute Shamu Rocks show at the very end.  The park felt quite empty because most of the attendees were in line for the big roller coasters rides – Kraken and Mantis.  The Shamu shows was impressive.  Can’t imagine how much time and effort it takes to train the wales to go through their series of tricks.  Shamu was not as large as I envisioned, but was still cool to see…

Coworkers waiting for the show to start...

My view of the tank/stage during the show...

The closing general session was today.  They had Andrew Zimmern from the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods as the celebrity speaker.  He talked about his adventures with  different African tribes and how he is a better person when he travels, experiences new cultures and food.  He was quite personable and took lots of questions from the audience.

Crappy iPad picture of Andrew....

So the conference is done… Took my last shuttle ride back to the Disney ghetto.  Glad I got to go – gave me a chance to understand what IBM/Lotus is doing to stay relevant as the web/technology continues to evolve.  It’s encouraging to see they are building off of the core skills I have (Java, JavaScript, HTML, XML, CSS) and using newer technologies (DoJo, Server Side JavaScript, XPages).  Now feel like I have some direction for skills that I should continue to work on to stay employable and productive as a programmer.

Tonight I’m just going to relax at hotel room and grab a bite to eat at the food court.  Have not spent much time at the resort so will be good to walk around and explore what I missed.  Tomorrow will take a taxi over to the timeshare and wait for John, his Dad/Step-Mom, Sister/husband/3 kids and her inlaws  to arrive that evening.  Will have a total group size of 11.  (If I counted correctly  )  Hope the timeshare has laundry facilities – my clean wardrobe is down to one change of clothes..

General plan for vacation next week is 5 days at Disney, 1 day at the Kennedy Space Center and just hang around the timeshare.  Should be a great (albeit expensive) week…