National Harbor 2009

The conference began early Sunday morning with an excellent class on PROC REPORT. It's funny, after so many years away from higher education, to find how shorter my attention span seems to be these days. How did I ever manage through 6 to 8 hours of classes a day? Nonetheless, I was able to manage for the 4 hours and got a lot from the class. After that, I put up my two poster presentations and headed off to the water taxi to enjoy the (briefly) spring-like weather.

On the water taxi

View from Hampton Inn in National Harbor

Guarding the conference center

One of the more interesting features of the harbor was the bridge between National Harbor (Oxon Hill, MD) and Alexandria, VA. The water taxi passes right underneath the bridge. The approach is pretty spectacular.

Sunday night was the Opening Session of the conference, which seemed extremely schizophrenic to me, more like a three ring circus than a coordinated presentation. But, it's not really intended for the geeks among us, so there it is. I keep hoping for a reprise of the wonderful Cirque du Soleil event at SUGI 29, but no luck! Monday, the conference began in earnest with the Technology Session with a keynote by Dave Barry. He really is amazingly funny. I laughed so hard I cried.

Then it was on to being a session coordinator, then presenting my two posters. Tuesday, I presented on ODS TAGSETS.RTF and attended some really great talks - then found out that one of my posters won First Prize and Best Contributed Paper! Brain full, I packed my stuff in preparation for an early morning departure.