Well, I did in deed make the trek to Philly .Net user group on Wednesday. I thought I gave myself plenty of time, but it’s amazing what a inch or two of snow can do for traffic back ups. The last 30 miles of the trip took me almost 3 hours! I planed on getting down in time to grab a bite to eat and be there for the 5:30 PM start time. I ended up getting there about 15 minutes into Rocky’s scheduled 7:00 PM start! This sucked.
The venue was pretty cool (once I made it inside!) I wasn’t exactly sure where in the building the conference center was going to be located, so I drove past the first entrance to the parking garage in hopes to get a glimpse of a sign or something that specifically said “here it is”, thinking that I could just drive back to the garage entrance I passed if it was the correct one. Well a few hundred feet after going past the entrance to the garage (remember, it was snowing, the wipers where going, etc), I felt a little bump in the road under the snow as I made it up onto a walkway from the garage to the conference center doorway. And low and behold, as I sit on a walkway in my Chevy Suburban (thinking maybe I'm in a place I shouldn't be), I’m looking in through the front doors at Rocky standing there speaking, arms up in the air like a giant (physically and metaphysically) with two huge screens behind him displaying “Data != Objects”. I knew I had arrived ;-)
The session was a lot of fun. I’ve been a Rocky fan for years, so there was really nothing new I heard him say or do here. But, it was cool to see and here him speak it all in person. There was a sense of humor side, that you don’t always realize when your reading things here, or here or here. For example, “…the UI Guy’s job just sucks anyway…”, well I guess you had to understand the context and hear it in person to get the chuckle.
So, the driving sucked, I spent way too much time in my car, but it was real cool to meet Rocky. Don’t know if I’ll try to make the trek down again, unless there is some pretty compelling reason. I guess I’ll stick to more local user group meetings, and lobby that we can get some giants to come by too.