Tuesday morning at the ESRI user conference and a super session

Hello, sorry about the absence... yesterday afternoon was quite busy, as can be expected, with the afternoon keynote presentations blending right into the fabulous evening map gallery social hour(s). As usual the map gallery delivered, with hundreds, no thousands of maps on display. the works of what seemed like every county in the US, non-profits, public agencies, military, emergency response crews, you name it... how does anyone pick a favorite?? I have to say that I was captivated by all the work from last years response to hurricane katrina (on display front and center in the gallery this year). Equally impressive was the BC experience map by STM. Funny as the actual BC experience is located close to my hometown in Victoria BC but I have yet to experience it - until now! On display was a 1/4 size model of the 3D map made up of hundreds of panels derived from millions of elevation points. you really need to see this model to appreciate it as it is an exact scale model of the Province of BC, with the curvature of the Earth precisely modeled - that's how big this map is. The map gallery closed and we capped off the night some seafood. Waking up at 7 this AM (ya i know I slept in) I started the day with a nice walk through the gaslamp, a healthy breakfast, and now a "super session" from Clint Brown where he'll be discussing the gedatabase, geodata design, open geospatial data management, and federated data management.. I'm missing the talk on what's new in ArcGIS 9.2 so I hope Clint delivers.