I finally got home from ILUG at midnight last night. Warren, Bill and I drove back from Dublin with a stop over in Belfast on Sunday night at Pauls with the AV kit to return. By the Saturday evening I think we had all pretty much hit the wall so we just had a couple of quiet drinks along the way, no major excitement.
Now looking back to ILUG week itself, it was pretty manic the whole time. We had a huge amount of help from all sorts of people but Kerr Rainey deserves special mention, and also Mark Myers who helped out with room monitoring for a couple of days.
While we were driving back from Belfast to Edinburgh yesterday Bill asked what was my favourite bit of the week, I really struggled to come up with just one thing so I thought I’d put together a list and see what anyone else wants to add…
– The amazing people who turned up on Tuesday to help with bag stuffing and anything else that needed doing, it was really hard work, but at least the Malteser cake which Leah brought made up for it
– The conference venue staff, especially the AV guys who were still there on Tuesday night at midnight when I left and were back in before eight o’clock the next morning to continue helping us.
– Kerr Rainey deserves a special mention for helping Warren and me out with all the roadie type work, including all sorts of odd things like running extra long VGA cabling through ceilings which really went above and beyond the call of duty.
– ILUG marked the first time I had done any public speaking for a long, long time and, bizarrely, I actually enjoyed it. Especially the Speed Geeking, it really is quite challenging to get your content into the 5 minutes and then repeat it 12 times in an hour. (by the way, several people asked for the little database that I demo’d, so I’ll make sure that it makes it into the download area which I need to write this week which will be available once you have filled in the conference evaluation form. Paul will announce the site once it has been written and tested 🙂 )
– Unfortunately I didn’t get to spend much time in the sponsors area but whenever I was down there it seemed busy, Speed Sponsoring was a great success by all accounts (that’s sponsors and delegates) and I was really pleasantly surprised at how well attended the sponsor sessions were. Looks like people got a lot of value from them.
– Finally, it’s really worth singling out Paul, Eileen and Warren for special thanks. I’m not sure if people know quite how much effort goes into the organisation of such a big event in their spare time, well pick a number and double it. All of the green tee shirt brigade helped out but those three in particular really put in an enourmous amount of effort.
Now I really need to get up to speed with the real world, there’s been lots of good news about the iPhone yesterday which I am just catching up on, oh and I suppose I really should do some work at some point, we have a beta of LinkJam to get out after all.
