This past week I attended the Adobe MAX 2007 Conference being held in Chicago’s huge McCormick Place Conference Center. This was a tremendous event for a heavy user of Adobe products (like myself), and was easily the best conference I have ever attended.
Here are some pics (and you can view the full photoset here):
During the conference Adobe released new and highly anticipated versions of many of their software products, the most exciting for me being Flex Builder 3 Beta 2. They also demo’ed some prototype software they are working on for future release, such as an application called Thermo that allowed a developer to convert a designer’s comp into an actual front-end user interface with relative ease [here's a video clip].
Each night of the conference included “After-hours lounges” featuring 8-player LAN Halo 3 on Xbox 360’s, and 4-player LAN Quake 4 on high-powered PC’s. I sampled both with pleasure.
Here are some random observations I made during the conference:
- More guys had pony-tails than girls did
- More female attendees were divorced than were married (I assumed – based on their age, lack of any “ring”, and propensity to prattle on about their kids)
- Many of the featured conference speakers sported the casual look (jeans and a button up shirt)
- There was constantly a source of food and drink from 8am until midnight each day
I'm a Christ-follower, compelled by my faith toward reason, which points directly toward conservatism. This world's daily onslaught of lunacy offends my intellect and senses, so this is my venue to blow off steam.
I like it! thanks…..:))
Sounds like the Novell conference I used to attend every year (Brainshare) although I never asked any of the females about their marital status.
I’m not an Adobe user, but I get to repackage their apps every year for campus distribution and I have two complaints (no, three):
1. Adobe is the undisputed king of bloatware. Even MS takes second place.
2. Their apps are extremely unfriendly to those of us who have to do “enterprise installs”, although to their credit, that’s begun to change a bit with CS3. They’re finally beginning to allow XML scripted silent installs and with a little tweaking I can even swap out keyed versions of the actual .exe’s in the installer.
3. their tech support, though not the worst, is also far from being the best. I’ve had at least two instances in the past few months where I’ve had support issues escalated and never heard back from them again.
Not that anybody cares about this, I’m sure…
@ capo :: Okay, I edited my post to better reflect why I thought the women were divorced… thanks for pointing it out.
I actually didn’t hear one woman say she was divorced, but more than half (by anecdotal observation) of attending women were >40, wore no “rings”, yet during conversation found ways to bring up their children (at times bragging about their grown childrens’ high-paying jobs).
Hah
You’re much more observant than me. I never notice rings, hair, clothes…. Jewelry of any type has to be pretty ostentatious (or unusually attractive) before I notice it. But I’d be quick to check out what phone, laptop, PDA or MP3 player they had. Same deal when my wife and I are watching some musical act on TV. She’ll comment on their hair, their clothes, their sleazy half-dressed background singers… I’ll be saying stuff like “yup, all SM58 Betas. And that’s a Taylor 314CE. Looks like the drummer is sub-mixing through an old Mackie 1604…”
Is this the support page for that paintball mod for that Quake game?
Ha. I didn’t read this prior to the edit. But it’s amusing that somebody might think you were cruising the female attendees. Amusing to me. I’m sure not to everyone. Not that I endorse that kind of thing.
We have to play some Magic. If I wait much longer, I’m just going to make another deck and I think 11 is already a bit much.
Some of us (not divorced) women are proud of our grown children’s high paying jobs.