What I loved about Surge Con 2011

Recently I have been getting some flack about the lack of "personal" updates on my blog - people keep saying I am too serious.  Silly people.But to appease them (or at least one of them who suggested I write about my weekends and people I meet) I am writing a post about all the fun and fabulous things I did this week at OmniTI's (who are very awesome scalability consultants) Surge Conference.Here is a list of all the things that were really awesome:

• Real people showed up to my talk, and some even asked questions.  This made me happy, because every time I get up on stage I have this fear no one will show up and the AV guys will be the only ones in attendance.  So if you came, thank you.  You are wonderful and I hope you weren't bored or found your laptop to be more exciting (despite the wealth of porn at your fingertips).
• I got invited to a real party in a hotel suite.  That has never happened.  Seriously.  It felt really special to be included, even if "they" gave me chocolate that was really hot like chilies.  Oh and then a whole bunch of people listened to me go on and on about interviewing and SEO - they were very polite.
• I was on a Big Data in the Cloud panel, and like the last panel I was on - they brought me donuts.  In the future, if you ever ask me to be on a panel you will now have to bring me donuts.  It is officially a tradition.  And the donuts were really good (oh that and the tasty cakes coconut juniors - I really wish they had those in Seattle).
• Artur and I got to have a lengthy discussion about network flow algorithms in routers, the way hardware works, and the miracles of modern medicine.  And he gave me some really great presentation tips.  Artur, the next time we see one another I owe you a drink.
• Bryan Cantrill talked about porn on stage.  That was pretty awesome. Although it was also fun to be on a panel with him, Robert, Baron, John and Philip (yes, I know what you are thinking, what was I on doing on a panel with such other smart people - you can blame it on Robert).
• Geir gave a great talk (and his was my favorite last year), and once again had beautiful shoes in his slides.  Although I still wonder how he decided which pair to feature in his slides?
• Both Robert and Geir called me out in presentations I somehow managed to miss.  I swear it is a conspiracy.
• Talking search, column oriented data stores, and SSDs with Greg from Blekko - it is fun to talk with someone solving the same sort of problems.
• Hanging with Bryce.  Enough said for that bullet point.
• Of all the smart things one can say on a panel, I talk about how my family thought that cloud computing was using a computer on an airplane. Doh.
• All of the great people I met in person, on twitter, etc.  It was so amazing to have such intellectual conversations with everyone.  It was also great to see Mandy, Joe, Wez, and Ted.  And meeting new people like the guys from Etsy, Adam from Cloudant, and more.  There is seriously too many to mention.  The hallway conversations were almost as good as the talks.
• All the great technical talks.  All the presenters I saw had great information and I learned something (or thought of something interesting) in *every* talk I attended.
• The award winning women's restroom (and yes, it probably is a little weird I took a picture in the bathroom).

 All in all it was a great conference.And a big thank you for all of the hospitality from Theo and Robert and the rest of the OmniTI crew.  Thanks so much for having me - seriously, I had the best time and it was so much fun to be a part of it.