Remembering FlashForward 2008
It’s been a busy past couple of weeks at PermissionTV. I was fortunate to be able to go to Flash Forward 2008 to represent our company at our booth in the exhibit hall. I had twitter’d most of the event, but here’s what happened on the flight down, while I couldn’t connect to the internet:
2:23 – I’m out of the office and the journey to San Fran begins. I miss Beantown already.
3:00 – Car parked and check in at Terminal B on one of those fancy automated check-in machines. Took me a long time to find my tracking number, which is different from my iternary number, which is different from Expedia’s confirmation number.
4:20 – Call from Jon – dinner at Todd English’s Bonfire. Grated cheese on my fries and mashed potato on my burger? wild!
5:00 – Greg North joins us for dinner. iPhone party!
5:50 – Dinner over and we head to the gate where we meet up with JZ. Team PTV has assembled.
6:10 – Greg is getting impatient. when are we boarding? never imagined he would be a guy to be worried about timetables.
6:30 – On the plane. JZ is a ways away. JB is 2 rows up.
6:35 – final call home to let everyone know that I’m about to take off.
7:15 – Take off!
7:37 – Guy in front of me reclines the seat. What kind of evil person reclines the seat on a 6 hour flight when the guy behind him is 6’7″? The shortest guy on the plane – that’s who.
7:47 – Trying to write a few blog posts to have in the tank. It’s pretty hard to keep the blog up to date 1 post at a time.
7:52 – It’s pretty easy to tell who’s going to Flash Forward. Like the young guy wearing the sunglasses on the plane. When you’re cool, the sun shines on you 24 hours a day (and indoors apparently).
8:04 – Right about now, kids are in bed and my wife is not long to follow. I wish I was with them instead of staring at the back of this guy’s reclined head.
8:15 – 1st unwatchable in-flight tv show ends – New Adventures of Old Christine, a repeat.
10:30 – finished watching 3:10 to Yuma on ye ol’ laptop
10:42 – Recliner boy mercifully moved his seat up, but the old lady next to me fell asleep (passed out) and is sprawled onto both of the seats on either side of her. I can barely fit the laptop on my lap to type. My ass hurts from the awful position I’ve had to maintain. This flight needs to be over.
10:55 – Just got back to my seat after a quick walk up and back the cabin and talk with JB about some web page layouts I asked him to bring on the plane. Never an off position on the genius switch!
11:18 – Working on a blog post. Laptop battery still alive with 19% / 1 hour to go. After that, I guess I’ll be forced to watch “Made of Honor” inflight movie. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
11:26 – typed of a list of bands I’d like to review on indiewind.com.
11:39 – finished first of eight blog posts I hope to write on this trip. Can’t fight with the laptop anymore though. Time to shut down and listen to tunes.
Compelling stuff. The rest of the action can be found on Twitter.
I wasn’t able to get into the auditorium, where all the good stuff was, but I got frequent updates from everyone I met, including:
- Sean The Flex Guy: Someone we’ve followed on Twitter for awhile. Nice to put a face to name.
- Tony MacDonnell: Is CTO and Lead Developer at Teknision, a company we’ve worked with in the past. Tony and I had a good discussion of how to implement Scrum in a project-based dev shop. I think we ended up agreeing, but can’t be sure. It was getting toward the end of the night and we had a few adult beverages at that point.
- Caleb Haye: An RIA superstar who is also a former FlashForward presenter (Austin, 2006). Caleb was working at an empty exhibitor table when he saw me walking by and asked about PTV. An ironic twist on the “exhibitor pitching the floor” routine.
- Lance and James, Flash Developers from the Air Force 367 Training Support Squadron. “The Fightin’ Flying Flash Developers?” (couldn’t resist)
- Gregory Sogorka, Director of Surrealist Operations at Nabbr, wins Best Title in the Room award. Nabbr is a cool platform that distributes video content across a massive network, targeting “Gen-Y.” Darn those kids are so kewl.
Most of the people I talked with didn’t like the format, didn’t like the magician, and thought some of the presentations sound vaguely familiar to last years’. Overall, the vibe was – not as good as 2007, which wasn’t as good as 2006. With those criticisms aside, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and enjoying their time in San Francisco.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth to say Hi!
