Short stories from the 2008 PDC:

• On the bus heading to the attendee party at Universal Studios, I overhear one person advising another on how to put on the band that grants admission to the park: “Be careful not to catch any hair on the glue. Otherwise it’s a real pain in the butt.” Dude, I don’t know where you put it, but the admission bracelet goes around your wrist.
• The Windows 7 networking folks are showing off two new features: DirectAccess and BranchCache. I’ve seen them and even though they’re not flashy (I mean, how flashy can you make networking?), they’re wicked cool features for corporations.
• It’s great talking with people and discovering all the great things they’ve been doing, how they’ve put together the various pieces with clever bits of glue to do something amazing. I can only imagine that the inventor of LEGO feels this way.

Bonus chatter added 9am:

• On same evening as the Ask the Experts session was a Lakers-Clippers basketball game in the Staples Center arena next door to the convention center. I overheard some of the event staff organizers discussing where they can legally set up their security perimeter to prevent rowdy basketball fans from entering the convention center and drinking the free alcohol. Apparently, parts of the convention center are classified as public space.
• On the last day of the conference, one of the parking garages is converted into a giant suitcase storage room. Peering into it recalls the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
• Girish Raja is in charge of wireless connectivity at the 2008 PDC. The keynote room was the biggest puzzle. Back in 2005, you only had to worry about people getting wireless connectivity once they stepped out of the keynote room, but now, you have hordes of people who need internet connectivity during the keynote. I’m looking forward to seeing further entries discussing the logistics of providing that much wireless bandwidth for a conference like the PDC.
• Sriram Krishnan had a tough sell: He had to convince people to come to his talk even though it took place at the same time as mine and Anders’s. (Though from looking at the attendee feedback, it looks like he did just fine. In fact, he did better than me.) I was chatting with him afterwards, and he noted that the keynote demos for cloud computing were a nail-biter because, well, it’s the cloud. Anything can happen—it’s the cloud.
• Last week, I mentioned in mixed company (which to technology nerds means not men and women but rather geeks and non-geeks) that I couldn’t join them for an event they were planning because I was going to be at the PDC. One of the non-geeks asked, “What is PDC?” My reply: “Pretty Dorky Conference.”