Aside from the early start, so far so good. The conference has been running pretty much to time and I’ve seen people wandering around with “two minutes” and “stop now” signs. The badges are done right. We got nice, spacious tote bags with our reg packs. My only real complaint is that the whole thing is too heavily programmed – 7:00am to 9:30pm with very little time out. Lunch and dinner are provided, and they have speakers at both events.

Fortunately the first plenary session of the morning is about the energy industry in the Gulf (we are in New Orleans, after all), which is of little interest to me. My original plan was to hit Cafe du Monde for breakfast, but it is pouring with rain and I forgot to bring an umbrella. Starbucks has been a very inadequate substitute.

Internet access in the Sheraton is interesting. They have a range of daily plans priced according to the download speed, so if you really want to watch movies you can, but if all you want to do is blog and get email you don’t have the pay for the premium service. I’m on the cheapest ($10/day) plan and it is working fine. What they don’t have, however, are multi-day discounts. Boo.

If anyone is interesting in knowing what I’m actually doing here, there will be coverage of the conference on my company web site.