APM Day One

Breakfast: Another chicken sandwich- but that is ok.

The APM is totally cool this year and I feel a lot less stressed (relatively speaking). I don't have any meetings in the evening and I am definitely not invited to the APM dinner- which is excellent.

I text Zogger (from Seattle) to see if he and his wife are free to have dinner. He texts back: "Got food poisoning!" (Gate Gourmets Revenge??) I call Andrew and Sarah and they are free so I agree to head over to their place on my bike- a very pleasant ride along the river.

By strange co-incidence, when I arrive Andy is finishing up an IRC chat with someone who has just asked the question: "Who was that guy who ripped the stress ball in half on the Cygnus booth at that tradeshow in Boston all those years ago?" I am not sure what it would do to Andy’s street cred if he replied that said guy was ringing his doorbell at that point and he was about have dinner with him. :-)

After a pleasant evening of mellow intellectualizing (and beer) I get a taxi and head back to the APM, joking with A&S as I leave that I expect the APM folk will all be pretty trashed by the time I get back. It turns out "pretty" is a misnomer as I am buttonholed by a couple of very drunken folk who complain I don't talk to them anymore and give me the "You’ve change man!" speech at a rate of 1 sentence a minute. Luckily Zogger (back from the dead) saves me and we quietly slip off to the far end of the quadrangle for a chat.