Thursday, October 26, 2006

Southwest Fox 2006, Part 3

I started the last day of the conference by repeating my IntelliSense session, then went to hear Rick Schummer present Fishing with a ProjectHook. Although I've worked with ProjectHooks since VFP 6, Rick showed some really cool uses for them, so I picked up several tips from his session.

The conference wound up with several drawing for prizes and a farewell to everyone. About 20 of us went for lunch in the hotel. I ate too much pizza, so I went to the exercise room to wear some of it off, then had a short nap and watched the Oakland Raiders and Arizona Cardinals (actually, it was the other way around; the game was kind of dull so I nodded off). After a few drinks in the hotel bar with a good sized group of VFPers, Tamar Granor, Craig Berntson, Rob Eisler, and I went to the ASU area for some very tasty Greek food.

Rob and I stayed an extra day to see the Grand Canyon, which neither of us had seen before. Joining us on the tour was Tore Bleken from Norway, who'd been there three times before. This time, he took a helicopter tour in addition to the regular tour and said it was well worth it. Rob and I spent an hour hiking along the South Rim, then did some shopping. It was a long day (they picked us up at 6:30 am and dropped us off at 8:00 pm), over 500 miles of travel, but well worth it -- I definitely want to go back to do some hiking and white water rafting. Tore and I had a very nice dinner at the hotel restaurant (Rob wasn't hungry after a stop at Burger King on the return trip, which I passed on).

Final impressions: what a great conference! The topics were different from the usual fare, especially Christof's sessions, and I made tons of notes of ideas to implement. The speakers all did a great job, and I can't wait until next year's conference.

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