The New Road

Webvisions, Part I

I'm up at the Webvisions conference in Portland. It's beautiful up here and the people have been great so far. I did a workshop this morning on Ajax (slides, code).

After that I had a chance to work out then have a walk around. The local bookstore, Powells, is amazing. It's like a warehouse. Far bigger than any other bookstore I have ever been in. And that one didn't even have a technical section. The technical bookstore was in a whole other location. I visited that one as well and had some fun looking over their museum of old personal computers. They had a C64, TI-99, original Mac, Apple II and so on. And they were just sitting out waiting to be played with. What a blast from the past.

I also stopped by Lululemon Athletica, which is a chain of stores just in the paciific northwest and canada that sells athletic gear. They specialize in lightweight loose fitting stuff for dance/yoga/tai-chi/martial arts work. The prices are high to be sure. But the materials are amazing.

The hotel I'm staying at is a trip. It's got that trendy W feel to it. Lots of modern furnishings and modern prints and such. Turns out I screwed up on my reservation and arrived a day early. So they had to give me a suite for the price of a regular room. Now I have a king sized bed, two bathrooms, each with a phone. A huge LCD flat panel screen to watch TV on. A little sitting area and such. It's very posh. I feel kinda spoiled.

Tomorrow I give a short talk on podcasting in the afternoon then I'll probably do a bit more walking around and maybe get to the airport early to see if I can catch an earlier flight back. The Portland airport is actually quite nice so it's not a big downer to stay there for a couple of hours. Plus I got a good book on tape and I wouldn't mind getting back into that.