GPUG Summit 2016 – Wrap Up

I’m writing this wrap up post, as I sit in the Atlanta airport on a nasty 5-hour layover from 5pm-ish to 10pm-ish. I’ve watched the end of the Blue Jays ALCS game 2 at the Delta SkyClub bar (vs. Cleveland Indians, we lost. Boo!). I’ve written the last of my blog posts except this one. I’ve eaten something resembling dinner, a random assortment of free food in the lounge area. I must say, thanks to Delta for letting me into the SkyClub… free food and drinks and more comfortable seating options are most certainly a bonus on a long layover. I even saw towels, which means there may be shower facilities, not that I’m about to go and find those!

I’ve now settled into the last half of my layover in a workstation with a very comfy desk chair, and a power outlet, like an office cubicle. I’ve got my iPad perched in the corner with Netflix (starting to watch a show my mom raves about, “Bletchly Circle”, that I can’t get on Netflix in Canada), and my laptop out to finish this blog post. I’m also going to finish cleaning up the last of the post clean up on the Dynamics Community side of things where it just syndicates anything from my RSS feed, so I have to manually delete what I’ve already removed on my primary site here. It’s about as good as I can make this work while I have to wait!

Post List

Here are the posts I wrote this past week, for reference:

• Pre-Conference
• Keynote Day (now known as Tuesday! )
• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

Leaving Tampa

My flight out of Tampa to home was only at 3:40pm so I had a lot of time in the morning to take my time getting up and packing. I wandered to a local café that turned out to be awesome, called The Bunker, a few blocks from the place I stayed at. They had some cool jazz playing and old time swing, and it was quiet, with a steady flow of people getting take-out coffee. It was a great place to perch and do a little reading before heading back to my place to pack. I wish I had found it earlier in the week as I would have hung out there more.

My place in Tampa

I didn’t post these pics earlier, more out of a concern for safety than anything. It sounds silly now but I felt pretty isolated and being a unique place, it would be pretty easy for someone to find me, and so, I chose to play it safe and not post details of my AirBnB place until today.

It was a pretty cool rental, as I mentioned on the Pre-Conference post earlier this week, but it certainly was tiny! Here are a pic and the link to the site on AirBnB is here. I roughly measured the interior by pacing off distances between the walls like I would pace of yardage on a golf course (LOL). Not scientific but close enough. I estimate this place is about 36 feet deep by 10 to 12 feet wide. That’s tiny! But, it had all I needed.

That all being said, from now on, I am reserving a hotel room as soon as the location is announced for a given conference I might attend and by the time the early bird deadlines for registering will be coming to a close, I’ll finalize my decision one way or another to attend and keep or cancel the hotel rooms. I miss being in the hub of activity. I’m pretty much a total introvert so I didn’t mind being by myself for extended periods but sometimes it’s nice to be able to walk down to the hotel lobby bar and hang out with other people also attending the event. I missed that this week, being 30 minutes away was a bit of a drag.

Step Update

So, as of the end of yesterday, I had walked 94,199 steps so far in the first week. As of writing this in Atlanta, I’ve got about 6,400 steps so far today and the day’s not done yet. That means I made it to my unofficial goal of walking 100,000 steps in a full week. It’s slightly longer than a full week because I am overlapping for a few hours on the Saturdays but still, pretty cool.

By rough estimation according to a couple of online converters, that is the equivalent of over 47 miles. Crazy. No wonder my feet are tired!

So, that’s the end of my first GPUG Summit. It was a long week but thoroughly enjoyable!