willgrey: Sunshine State

So I find myself in Orlando for a WebSphere Portal technical conference this week. We flew down yesterday afternoon, after explaining what my laptop's docking station was to a friendly but not technically-inclined TSA officer. I've only been here once before, for Space Camp around ten years ago, so it's all a bit new to me. Florida is very humid at the moment. My glasses fog up immediately whenever I step out of an air-conditioned car. The clouds are very low, though, which looks pretty cool. There are an astounding number of palm trees. We're staying at a hotel that is in a small village consisting entirely of other hotels and restaurants clinging to Disney World like a barnacle to the hull of a wooden ship. A completely different hotel in a completely separate but very similar village, where I sit now, is actually hosting the conference. They've already given us a very nice buffet breakfast attended by tuxedo-clad waiters. We just left the keynote speech, delivered by Larry Bowden, IBM's VP for Portal Services. It was mostly your typical marketing-speak vision statement type of thing, but he did mention a lot of the new features in Portal 6 that we'll be using in the upcoming months. For the next few days I won't be on IM much, but I'll be checking my email and my cell phone is always on. I'll be back with more later.