Saturday, July 13

Spent the past week at the ESRI conference in San Diego. Five days in the Hilton overlooking San Diego Bay. With superb weather. An easy climate to be homeless in. Coming back to Okemos isn’t easy. Don’t know where I’m going once I retire but I can guarantee it will not be Okemos.

Overwhelming conference. This is THE conference for people in my profession. About 15,000 attendees from around the globe. Monday consisted of massive plenary sessions. Including the singer Will. I. Am. He created a foundation to help kids from the low income neighborhood he came out of get into technical fields. Four of the kids presented their GIS work to 15,000 GIS professionals. It was impressive.

Me at the conference taken from our hotel room.

A closer view of me at the conference.

Tuesday through Thursday consisted of concurrent sessions and meetings. The first time slot for Tuesday had 53 different concurrent sessions. There were over 500 different things happening that day. Wednesday and Thursday were just as busy. I did a paper presentation Thursday afternoon. That late in the conference I figured it would be me and the moderator. Had easily over 40 people in the room. They didn’t throw stones at me so I guess they liked it.

Thursday night ESRI rents out Balboa Park for an evening get together. All kinds of music and food. We had access to all the museums. There was a photo arts museum with a display of the top photojournalism photos of 2012. This was the first time I was at a major photo exhibit that was all archive inkjet prints and no darkroom produced photos. In the fine arts museum was an exhibit of Arnold Newman portraits. Absolutely stunning. I’ve seen a lot of them in books or magazines so seeing the original prints was a real treat. These were flawless darkroom prints.

Balboa Park architecture at dusk.

There was some chalk artist that did a big drawing on the sidewalk. She was explaining how it represented the transitory nature of our impermanent world. I bugged out and went to see the juggler with glow in the dark bowling pins. Pretty cool.

Too cool.

A lot of good booty was given out at the vendor show. I got water bottles, a first aid kit, Frisbees, beach balls, squeeze balls, a boomerang, ear buds… Not as good as last year when Molly scored a Spock doll and inflatable frogs. And I never did find the company giving out the rubber ducks. One vendor was handing out Hagen Daz ice cream bars. That’s about one notch above crack dealers. Once you’re hooked they own you.

The area around the conference center is quite nice. Right on the waterfront with a promenade and attractions. A couple of million dollar yachts were moored in the marina by the promenade. Right by the conference center is an old area of San Diego called the gas light district. Like most old city center areas it had a heyday followed by decline. In the not too distant past it was a pretty seedy area. In the past couple decades it’s been rejuvenated and is full of restaurants and shops. None with scrapple though. The Comecon convention is going to follow the ESRI convention. We saw Spiderman crawl down the side of the Hard Rock Hotel a promo for Comecon.

Lise along the promenade. (half-blinking)

Some guy on the promenade balances rocks. There are is no glue or pins. He just picks them up and works them until they balance.

One hotel showing the reflections of another hotel.

Flying home on an airplane with a bent wing.

The day before we left for San Diego Lise and I went to Shiawassee Wildlife Refuge for some birding. The only new bird for the year was dicksissel. That puts me at 219 and Lise at 214. There were some other cools things too; including some farmer on the road to the refuge that was might proud of his John Deere collection.