They call it a user conference

It always alarms me just how much this conference throws at you. There's some 14,000 people who come to this thing. Classes about GIS all day. GIS people everywhere. I'll hear more GIS talk just walking around at lunch than I might hear in a year at home. They start out trying to get every one all stoked up with the cool coolness of the cool software and how it's going to save the world. Then they give us alcohol and turn us loose iin a big room filled with hundreds of maps. The fact that nearly everyone is jetlagged and drinking on a mostly empty stomach and is then stuck into what amounts to a room full of GIS porn just makes the whole thing sot of surreal. Then everyone goes out for a real dinner or maybe just some more drinks and then they go back to their hotels. It starts all over again the next day, and the next. Thankfully Thursday will be the last day of presentations. Even a junkie can only take so much.