I’m out in Portland for the Supercomputing conference. This is my favorite conference of the year for a number of reasons:
* Everyone is here. I can stack up face to face half hour conversations with a dozen people in my industry
* The right people are in the booths. I can talk to the project manager and the VP of sales for a the products that I care about
* I’m known here. I walk around and see a decade’s worth of colleagues, customers, employers, professors, and so on.
* The best technology is on show. I just took a picture of a completely water cooled motherboard.
It’s also annoying as all hell:
* Grad students are terrible presenters
* Sales and Marketing types give me hemorrhoids.
* Certain buzzwords are tied to the stake and flogged mercilessly (Grid, Cloud, Green).
* Thousands of geeks plus free beer = massive ass-hattery.
Having a good show. Thinking big thoughts.
