Pages
Blog
Los Angeles
A little late on this one, but I've been pretty busy between work, remodeling a bathroom (Pictures coming soon!), and getting ready for the baby (Under 2 months away! Ahhhhhh!)
I was asked on October 15th at work if I'd be interested in possibly going to Los Angeles for Adobe MAX, a developer's conference. Someone else was planning on going, but they might have a conflict, and they wanted to know if I'd be interested in going, to be the backup person. Of course I was interested! I went home for the weekend, talked to Laura about it, and come Monday, found out that I was in! So we got the hotel and flight arrangements switched, and come Saturday, I'd be heading to LA.
We left for LA Saturday morning, got in around 11am LA time. I had a window seat, the seat next to me was empty, and there was a girl in the aisle seat. For the first half hour or so, she read some magazines and I just sat there listening to my iPod. Every time the plane hit any turbulance at all, she would give the armrests a death grip and looked pretty freaked out. I asked if she was alright, and she just hates flying. We talked for pretty much the rest of the flight. Her name was Abby Wathen, she is an actress, headed back to LA after filming a movie in Cincinnati for the last month. She gave me some advice on things to see in LA, I told her a bit about what I did... turns out, she's been thinking about getting a website. What a coincidence! I gave her one of my cards, and we've been emailing back and forth about getting a website up and running for her.
Once we landed, we rented a car. I was the driver, as Julie didn't really want to drive in LA. What the hell, it can't be worse than New York City, right? Other than Saturday, we were going to be spending most of our time at the conference anyways, which was walking distance from our hotel... so we wouldn't need it too much. So we got our car, and went straight to In-N-Out Burger! Neither Julie or I had ever had it, and we both wanted to. It didn't quite live up to my expectations, but it was a damn good burger. Of course, my expectations were so high, I'm not sure any burger could have lived up to them.
After In-N-Out Buger, we drove up to the Santa Monica Pier, walked up and down the beach a bit, walked out to the end of the pier to look around, and walked back towards the car. From there, we went to Hollywood Boulevard. We walked up and down the Blvd for a while. Checked out Grauman's Chinese Theatre (Where all the hand/foot prints are in the sidewalk), the Kodak Theatre (Where the Academy Awards are held), saw quite a bit of the Walk of Fame, and of course, the famous Hollywood sign.
After this, we headed to our hotel to check in and get some dinner. We were staying at The Standard. The hotel was very "modern"... lots of whites, red and blacks, dim lighting, text upside down... it was a bit odd. We checked in and got up to our rooms... I've never been in a hotel room before that had a glass wall seperating the bathroom from the rest of the room. It's a good thing Julie and I had seperate rooms! The bed was basically on the floor... the television was on a short table about 20 inches off the floor, making it very difficult to watch while laying in bed... and the only chair in the room was an ugly plasic chair at the desk. I was less than impressed with the room. We were both pretty exhausted, so we went to bed pretty much after dinner. Oh yeah, and parking at the hotel was a nightmare. The hotel itself only had valet parking, but they "worked with" the garage underneath the hotel. Unfortunately, the garage underneath the hotel didn't have employees that spoke english or knew what the hell was going on. It was going to cost us almost $40 a day for parking, and we'd have to go down twice a day to pay, as opposed to paying at the end of the week. We decided that the next morning we'd just return the car at a spot a couple blocks away. Problem solved.
The conference started on Sunday... we had a session from 9-5. The conference was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, which as I mentioned, was about a mile from our hotel. They did have a bus... so we rode that the first day. Because of all the stops, it would have been quicker to walk... which is what we did the rest of the week. Got us some exercise also, which couldn't hurt.
The conference was pretty good... I learned some cool stuff, got on my way to learning a new programming language, and brough back some pretty sweet swag! The conference was sponsored by Adobe, which is the maker of Flash. Some of you may know the trouble between Adobe and Apple, as the iPhone and iPad don't support Flash... while just about every other device does. Adobe definitely took some shots at Apple during the week. I guess it was good for us, because at the "Welcome" general session on Monday morning, they gave everybody attending the conference a free Motorola Droid 2, which runs the Android operating system, which supports Flash. It was something we could use as a tool for creating apps using Adobe products... it came in helpful during some of the sessions. A few days later, they were doing another general session talking about their new Google TV product. At the end of it... they announced that each attendee would be getting a free Logitech Revue Google TV! By giving them out to developers, they were hoping that we'd use them to create some good apps to help populate their app store before it gets too popular. Free Droid and Google TV!? Hell yeah! Thanks Map Your Show! Feel free to send me to any other conferences in the future!
On Wednesday night, I also met up with a friend of mine from Ball State... Jennie Keller. We hadn't seen each other in around 8 years, so that was fun. We went out for dinner at a nice italian restaurant somewhere in LA (She drove, I have no clue where we were... hehe).
Those were the highlights of the week... the rest of it was pretty much spent in sessions or at the hotel. Overall, good trip, and very educational. Hopefully I get to go back to it again in the future sometime.