Today was official Day one of the conference… Yesterday was pre-conference day of learning, and saturday was… well… Saturday was John hangs out in the Irish pub and does his best to assist the guinness brewery in making a bigger profit while enjoying the house band.
Today was the day I gave my mini presentation on my creation of the Cell Phone interface to the catalog. I absolutly loved the collective light bulb moment from the geeks in the room when I gave them the magic secret I used to make our catalog speak in WML. There was literally a collective inrush of air from the geekier geeks in the room when it hit them. I made 30 copies of the handouts, there were about 18 people in the room, yet by the end of the presentation all the handout were gone, and the rest of the night I had product managers and sales managers all huntign me down wanting more info. So I did live demos on my, or thier phones for a number of them , each one uttering a “WOW!”, “COOL!”, or “OH MY GOSH!!!” when they actually saw it work on their phone.
The product manager for the catalog product we used feverishly scribled notes during the presentation, and I knew as she did it she was going to talk to the programmers to see if they could add the feature I had to create. So I put her on the spot in the middle of the presentation, ‘So you know, if this one thing were a setting we could adjust in the settings file then my script would not be needed and everyone could EASILY do this.’ She looked at me, quickly shot a glance at her notes and looked back at me, caught herself and stated that she was going to look into it. (She was trying to figure out how I knew what she was writing… hehehe)
All in all, I’m pretty well pleased with the way things went today. Tomorrow night is Sing-A-Long night… That should be interesting…
John's Musings 