Just coming up to breathe from the mountain of work that had piled up while I
was away at the ‘Systems Technical Conference’ held in Los Angeles. It ran over the course of four days (May 12-15th) but they sure did pack in a large amount of content into those four days.
I touched down in LA on the Saturday afternoon (it felt strange arriving at a time that was well before the time of departure) and along with RB headed to the Westin Bonaventure in downtown LA. I spent the rest of that weekend with some friends of mine I hadn’t seen in about 18years! In addition to the massive catchups I had an express tour of the general Hollywood and Beverly Hills areas … of course this included touristy sports like the Walk of Fame, the main strip of the Sunset Boulevard and Rodeo Drive. My mate MK and I both commented on how much the Beverly Hills reminded us of the neighborhoods in BSB we grew up in (okay so we were feeling pretty nostalgic).
I turned up for breakfast at the Los Angeles Convention Center for the conference, bright and early on Monday and what hit me first was the scale of the whole affair. Our Program Guide was fairly thick and indicated the scope and depth the different sessions were going to cover. The sessions were grouped not only into IBM’s major brands to cover technical detail, but they also had a loose coupling with areas of solutions to cover the amalgamation of these technologies. While there were just the two of us from NZ, there was a large number of total attendees – IBMers, from all regions of the IBM world.
One thing that really struck out was the people … all the people from the presenters to the technical experts to the attendees. There was an amazing amount of knowledge and talent. People just geeking out discussing passionately things that interested them, mingling and meeting colleagues who are able to contribute to one’s own pool of knowledge … and one is left with the feeling of how amazing a corporate like IBM can be. We here in NZ really are at the tip of a monolith sized iceberg of technical proficiency, right from pure science research thru to product development all churning with elegant business acumen.
There is just too much to write about regarding the subject matter and there was a fair amount of really good sessions …
I took another week off and went to Portland (Oregon) where I spent the weekend gazing at the Pacific from the other side of the world and discussing social issues from a historical trends perspective with MB. The rest of that week I spent around San Jose, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino and San Fransisco where I got treated to a yummy dinner with RR & RD plus I also got to have a good half day of solid geeking out with JN. I love the intelligent lights installed at his place! Humm
This being my first trip to the States, I was throughly finger printed, photographed and added to their database … I think. It was a very fruitful conference and I sure learnt from more than just the content at the sessions, so buy me a pint at the pub and ill freely go into all the detail that I haven’t mentioned in this post … actually some whiskey instead please.
3 Comments
July 2, 2008 at 8:59 pm
I’m surprised they didn’t bag and tag you.
July 2, 2008 at 9:13 pm
It was a very good trip actually AndrewE … I dont think I found much ado, the airports however were a bit of mystery to me, there were so much obvious optimizations that could be done. What I did find strange however was having to remove my shoes and putting them via the detection machine separate to me passing thru the detector.
March 29, 2009 at 3:21 pm
[...] 11, 2008 by wyzzi The vastness that is IBM is made smaller by events that encourage the exchange of ideas and concepts. The ‘Technical Leadership Exchange’ is one such event. This is [...]