Monday, January 21, 2008

Lotusphere 2008 - Day 0: Saturday, January 19th

I left the house about two hours later than I expected, and it rained all the way from Charleston to Jacksonville (about 4.5 hours). After that the rain stopped until I got to Orlando. I made it in 6 hours with an average speed of 72 mph. :-) Check in was painful due to some woman who kept saying the same thing: "But I'm a Starwood Elite member!" Apparently she showed up without a reservation and thought she would just get a room.

After I checked in I dashed off to Spoodles for dinner with the Over The Rainbow group. It was absolutely monsooning outside. I brought a small umbrella and I'm glad I did, but I still got soaked from the knees down and my shoes were soggy. When I got to Spoodles I couldn't find Robert (the guy who made the reservations) and they didn't have anything listed for his last name or anything else I could come up with that would have been relevant.

I hurried back to my room at the Dolphin to get Robert's phone number, which I wisely had not programmed into my own phone. I'm a thinker like that. I called him, and of course he didn't answer, so I checked the Google group to confirm the time. Of course, at about that same time I remembered that last week Robert couldn't get a table at Spoodles and had moved the gathering to the Captain's Grille at the Yacht & Beach.

It was now about 7:40 and we had 7:30 reservations. As I was debating what to do Robert called me back. There was a waitlist for the reserved seating, so I headed over and met up with him. It ended up just being the two of us and the food was surprisingly good. We went to Jelly Rolls afterwards for a while. I got back to my room fairly early, unpacked, and started working on an application. I woke up when I fell out of the chair and I went to bed.

Lotusphere 2008 was off to a good start.

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