Monday AM kick-off at ESRI UC

Well, after a long and fun week-end here in San Diego
its time to get down to business so I'm now in the
mainn exhibition hall here at the convention center
waiting for the Monday kick-off session and keynote to
take place. Monday is always a real rush here as JAck
and crew take center stage to show off the latest
applications and give us a glimpse at the road ahead.
Today we'll hear all about ArcGIS 9.2 and 9.x, ArcGIS
explorer should get some decent attention (my guess)
and I suspect we'll likely hear loads about IMS and a
variety of web-enabling solution. Scott Moorehouse,
David MAguire, John Calkins, Clint Brown, and many
other key ESRI staffers will no doubt pump us all up
with their presentations as they always do. The room
is filling up quite fast already as people try to
squeeze innto the few vacant front row seats that are
still around. Back tracking a day or so, I had a
typical Saturday trip to the conference, although I
definitely had some good karma on the first leg of the
journey. A perfectly timed drop-off at the airport,
followed by a non-eventful but rapid process through
INS at the border. I then used my better instincts and
made my way to a monitor to see if there were any
earlier flights to San Diego. Low and behold there was
a 4:00 PM flight (just 45 minutes away). A jog to the
counter where I request switching flights is a no
brainer and easily done thanks to the good folks at
Alaska Air (this makes up for them inflicting some
serious damage on a perfectly good suitcase on a
recent flight from Denver!). I then decide to push my
luck even further and ask for an exit row seat as the
clerk prepares to issue me a boarding pass. He says to
me…. “I have one left and it’s a window seat too”!
Awesome… you gotta like it when things work out. So, a
fast, smooth flight out of Seattle takes us over a
smoldering Mt St. Helens (I kid you not) and I get in
to San Diego at 7:45 instead of 9:35… what a great
start. Sunday was bag pick up day and several of us
took in a ball game at Petco. the Padres won the game
in extra innings which led us to celebrate over at
Dick's for the rest of the evening. An impromotu crowd
of us managed meet up at Dick's where we had a fun but
productive evening greet-up and discussion of what we
expected over the next several days. I'll leave you
now as things are about to get started here.