The Other Realm Writer...

It's taken me a full day to recover from traveling back and forth across the country for CEC, although, there are times today, I find myself staring at my screen with my brain taking tangents between work and personal projects. Being off kilter is frustrating for someone who is usually so focused. Anyway, I wanted to post some cheers and jeers for CEC. (We did this after attending a Metal Music Festival in August, which was a success, so I thought it might be fun to start my own post for CEC.)

CEC Cheers:

• Wizards & Dilbert - it's nice to see a mesh of geeks. It's good to sweep aside preconceived notions Although, I do agree, we need more women engineers!!!
  
• Networking - In such a diverse and iWork focused culture, getting together to meet the voices we talk to so frequently is a huge plus
• Airports & Hotels - spotless in taking care of us and getting us too and from our destinations, not to mention the killer theromstat in my room allowed me to kick the heat up to unbearable heights for the average human.
  
• Classes - Diverse and engaging. I can't say there were any speakers that rated low on a presentation scale for me

CEC Jeers:

• Foods - Sodium and more sodium does NOT constitute a breakfast. It does guarantee that our arteries will clog and thus factor into our brains slowing down. Lunch, wasn't so bad, just rushed, but to be expected with 3,000+ attendees
  
• Schedule - there needed to be a little more down time so that brains could absorb the information we were gaining. General Session should have been split into two daily segments - have some speakers over lunch or something
• Performance Art - while I wasn't insulted, some of the evening entertainment on Tuesday evening was truly art, someone should have thought about a few of the performers *chuckle*

Overall, I came home with a renewed interest in what I've been doing for Sun. Huge plus. Perhaps it was the comraderie of our team that I missed. We've all been spintered into various departments here, and I think some of us were feeling adrift, which could be a factor of our new culture. A few conversations have hopefully fixed that, at least within the original core team. If that's all it takes to get things working again. Good! The teams here are great. They are smart people who just want to do the best they can at what they do.

If not, I'm sure we'll start figuring out other ways. Innovate.
*wanders off muttering about VR with thoughts of how to get true web video conferencing working without all the hiccups*

Namaste