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Wednesday May 17, 2000
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taking care of myself The coddling seemed to work and I woke feeling not too bad although I was still inside the killer beast. That's what it felt like anyway. The first conference event of the day was a speech by Dave Barry. I felt I could miss the amusing speech and relax and get dressed in a leisurely fashion. And prepare for my marketing presentation. The night before I'd looked at it and had been clueless about what I'd said during my dry run. I attended a couple of sessions before lunch. During lunch, I hooked up for the marketing pitch. The assigned room (an auditorium really) was as far from the lunch areaa as possible. And they only gave the attendees one hour for travel time and lunch. The last session before lunch in the subject area had been in this location. That and perhaps my failure to drum up an audience meant that the crowd was light. And looked lighter in the big room. Still, I soldiered on and I was pretty happy with the presentation and I got some good questions. So it goes. I went to two more presentations. Then I had about an hour before a reception for speakers. Actually it was for speakers and IBM developers and since the latter dominate the conference I wanted to try to get my two cents worth in. So I had a hurried dinner (my first food of the day) with a couple of buddies in an indifferent Mexican place in the atrium of the beast. The reception was in a cavernous convention space. I was supposed to sit at a certain set of tables, isolated far away from food, drink and the popular IBM developers. They were serving chicken fingers, brisket sandwiches, corny dogs and ice cream bars. Oh, and beer and indifferent wine. I decided a Heinken might taste good. I was glad I'd eaten a bit and had that out of the way. I only drank the one beer. One of the IBMers said she'd read by pitch and thought it was a good one. I talked to some colleagues and a few customers. I was really tired and when it was almost nine (the alleged end of the event) I slipped back to my room. A little mindless TV, newspaper, checking mail and off to sleep again in the beast. I should have packed before bed because I'm the moderator at two sessions before lunch (the first at 8AM). But I didn't.
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