Well, I’m here in Austin. The conference registration process was very interesting. I really can’t tell whether it is one of the most efficient methods I’ve ever seen or one of the least efficient. But I’ve got my precious badge (don’t friggin lose it Bruce) and I’m going over the schedule trying to figure out what I want to go attend. In the mean time I’ve been talking.

Nearly everyone wants to talk. Those that don’t are clustered around power outlets in the lobby; Leeches attached to the walls sucking the life blood of technology. There is a stupefying quantity of technology sitting in laps.

Anyway, for a “warm up day” Friday has a pretty cool program.

I’ll be hitting up:
3:00 pm · Book Reading: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
3:30 pm · Book Reading: Building Findable Web Sites
4:00 pm · Book Reading: Subject to Change
4:30 pm · Book Reading: Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online
5:00 pm · Bankrupt Your Startup in Five Easy Steps
5:00 pm · Battledecks II
5:00 pm · Book Reading: Designing the Moment

Yes. I know there are three scheduled for 5pm. I have (of course) listed them in priority order. While the last one may be the most relevant to me, the first two look like more fun so to hell with responsibility. I’m gonna make my final pick on the fly.

After that? Well, I’ll surely be getting soused on Porter Novelli’s dime. They’re sponsoring the “Friday Night Mix at Six” and one of the Porter Novelli folks from DEMO made sure to make sure that I’d be sure to be there.

Sure I’m sure! It’s your bar tab.

Well, we made it. It’s now nearly midnight.

We’re checked in and fed and after wrestling with our network connections for the better part of an hour and a half I’m finally posting (thank you nameless Dell support guy)! Yay!

Tomorrow we get to dig in and polish the presentation. I’ve a bit of trepidation generated by the fact that we don’t really know what the DEMO stage setup is going to look like. We know that there’s some big video screen and that there’s a table thingie on which to put my laptop. But where they are and how the whole layout works is still causing me to have, as Hunter S. Thompson so eloquently put it, the fear.

We’re still not sure about how to fail-over in case we have trouble with the internet connection. I have brought a copy of our RoR code and our demo data local to my laptop. So if things come completely off the rails (so to speak) we can go with my laptop as both the server and the browser. The worry we have about that is that we wouldn’t likely know anything was wrong until we were in the middle of the demo. Time is tight, six minutes ain’t a lot. We’d really have to make some stuff up on the fly.

Not that we’ve ever done that before.

As I type Charles and I are on the plane flying down to Palm Desert. We’re heading down a couple of days early so we can get rehearsal time in before the big day. The DEMO demo (metademo?) is now 63 hours away.

Travel isn’t so bad. There were the mandatory uncertainty jokes surrounding Seattle traffic and the drive to the airport. Other than that it has been pretty smooth. We have now rehearsed to the point where we can spew out excerpts from our talk at randomly inappropriate times. Like some kind of presenters’ Tourette’s syndrome of inside jokes.

Charles keeps reading through Wired magazine and pointing things out. “Looks like Mint.com is doing well. Do you still use them?” Or, “Hey, we should look into using Google Gears.”

I gently remind him that in less than 48 hours our servers may very well be falling over from load. Or from bugs. Or both.

He sits back, “Yeah, I guess we’re gonna have bigger things to worry about.”

Yeah.