So, I spent 3 weeks ago in the city of Las Vegas. I wasn’t there for a vacation. I was there for SAP TechEd 2008. I quickly figured out that I was probably in over my head at this conference. While I am an advanced user of SAP, I’m not on the “tech” side of it. I did enjoy myself at the conference, though, don’t get me wrong. I learned several things and had a good time (both at the conference and exploring Vegas).
The keynote speech on Monday night was given by Jimmy Wales. For those that aren’t familiar with that name, Jimmy is a co-founder of Wikipedia. Jimmy talked about Wikipedia and then also about his latest ventures – Wikia and Wikia Search. He’s very interested in open content where everyone can contribute their ideas/knowledge. One of the things he said was that people will generally “police” themselves instead of having to build worst-case scenario blocks into the system. While I do agree with that, I also have witnessed firsthand both at work and in the online community where the bad apples ruin it for everyone. That is why I’m torn on whether or not to agree with his comment. [Something interesting along these lines...My sister is a 10th grader and was working on a project a while back for school. In that project, she had to cite so many sources. She was using Wikipedia to get some of her information. However, the school would not let her use that as a source because "anyone" can edit the content.]
The conference itself ran Monday night (with the keynote speech), all day Tuesday, Wednesday, & Thursday, and then had a few sessions Friday morning. There were multiple sessions given each day. There was a lecture or hands-on class given on quite a few SAP-related topics. I went to a half a dozen sessions during the week ranging from SAP NetWeaver 101 (which was more like SAP NetWeaver Advanced) to how to get SAP certification to social networking (i.e. Twitter) with SAP.
The lecturer in the SAP certification class said the following at the beginning of his presentation. I’ve been sharing it quite a bit at work because it is very true and something some programmers (and some people, in general) can’t seem to understand.
If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, when are you going to have time to re-do it?
On Tuesday night, the conference held an event they called DemoJam. It was referred to at one point as the “American Idol of Techies”. I would definitely agree with that nickname. There were, I believe it was, 6 teams of software developers from companies like SAP and Apple (yes, Apple uses SAP). The developers had 6 minutes to demo something they had coded that was SAP-related. Then, the audience voted and decided who’s product they liked the best. A couple of teams demo’d using SAP with an iPhone. The winner (from SAP) demonstrated a spell checker to use for SAP, on your desktop, and online.
On Thursday night, Cisco hosted The Black Crowes in concert. I have to admit that I’m not really familiar with their music. I really only knew one song they sang – Hard to Handle. They are great musicians, though. The piano player in me loved the solo’s and close-up shots on the video screens of the keyboardist. [One note...Like I said, The Black Crowes aren't that familiar to me. About half-way through the concert, I turned to my co-worker and said that the lead singer looked really familiar and asked if he was married or used to be married to someone famous. It then hit me that I think he was Kate Hudson's ex. I took out my trusty internet connected cell phone and asked Google. Sure enough, the lead singer (Chris Robinson) was married to Kate Hudson and is the father of her son. After we found that out, we were sidetracked paying attention to him. Oh yeah, one more thing...The singer/guitarist in the band looks kind of like Russell Crowe with longer hair.]
I’ll post one or more other blog entries about Las Vegas itself. I just wanted to give a little re-cap of the actual reason I was there first.
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