Andre’s Blog

It’s been 1 week since I left Vancouver, and I’ve been back once since:)  I flew down to San Francisco last Friday night to spend the weekend helping out get the bus ready and checking out iPhoneDevCamp.  I also took the opportunity of being state side to pick up a couple iPhones, one myself and one for Alexei who’s been busting his ass lately.  The iPhone kicks ass but isn’t perfect, more on that later:)

The first leg of the trip started at 5:45am at Adobe HQ in SF.  We hit the road about an hour later bound for the Seattle.  Everyone was stoked, not necessarily about the early start but to see the bus, get together and hit the road. I’d previously met everyone who got on that bus that except for Kevin Lynch, Lee Brimelow and Robert Scoble.  Lee was a character from the start, armed with megaphone we was cracking jokes right away. I like! We picked Kevin Lynch up in at the airport in Portland.  It was pretty cool to meet him and chat a bit.  I was surprised and stoked to see him get right down to coding. I spent most of the bus ride working on my slides and coordinating with Dave and Alexei for my demos.  We got to Seattle late Monday night where Downey, Ted, Kevin and I went to grab a bite at a local greek restaurant near our hotel.

Seattle’s event was an all day event at the Elysian Brewing Co., which was a great venue.  I got there just in time for Kevin’s keynote. He went over the RIA landscape and what role AIR will play.  I spent the rest of my day preparing my presentation and ensuring our fisheye and SalesForce.com demos would go off without a hitch.  Dion of Ajaxian.com joined us in Seattle until Portland.  After AIRCamp I presented in the Ignite event which Ryan Mc’d, I did a talk very similar to the Ignite event at the Web2.0 Expo on RobotReplay.  I think it was very well received and people had lost of questions about it after:)  A couple other Ignite talks I liked were Ted Patrick’s on building a chat app in Twisted and Python and Dion Almaer’s on Google Gears.  There was about 150 people at the event and everyone seemed very interested in AIR.

We left Seattle at the civilized hour of 11am headed for my hometown, Vancouver, BC.  The border wasn’t as bad as I was prepared for considering we were on a bus.  It took about 45min.  The Canadian border guard was surprised to find a bunch of computer geeks inside and not a band…hilarious.  We got to Vancouver around 3pm, and I quickly and rushed over to do CTV studios on Burrard to do an interview of BNN about how Nitobi’s developing business applications for the iPhone.  The Vancouver event was hit, tonnes of the local tech crowd was there.  We had it at Cellies, it was a bit hot but we managed.  We had 3 Vancouverites in the speaker line up: Duane Nickull, Doug Schmidt and yours truly.  I can’t speak for others but the feedback I got was that people really liked seeing real world examples of AIR.  vancouver was the first time I demoed the Multivista AIR that managres photo documentation for the construction industry.  Dave, Ian, Jake, Brian and I then proceeded to drink way more beer than we should’ve!

Next stop was Portland. 9am sharp was when we met in the lobby of the Sheraton, let me tell ya I’ve felt better;-)  After a detour on Granville, having to get off the bus and into customs at the border, traffic in Seattle and Portland we got to Kells Pub just in time to set up for the event.  I think Portland was the best venue and most engaged crowd on the tour yet. People even cheered when I dragged a Vcard on my offline AIR SalesForce.com client then hopped back online and showed up in SalesForce:)  I watched Lee’s session after mine and he got even bigger applause for his demo that took screenshots of Video and threw them onto the desktop:) It was rad.  We then chilled in a few hotel rooms until our 1am schedule departure.  The trip to Vegas involved watching Spinal Tap and Ryan Stewart drinking a 1/2 gallon of some Oregon Microbrew. Most of us slept most of the night and then try to get some work done during the day.

It’s 9:08pm.  And we’re just pulling into Las Vegas right now.

PS.  All the photos in this post were taken with my iPhone;-)

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 14th, 2007 at 7:27 pm and is filed under AJAX. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.