Tag: user conference

I’m heading out to San Diego early tomorrow morning. I’m driving this year rather than flying, mostly because I’ve done so much of it over the past year and I’m just tired of the hassle. Anyway, I plan to head out by way of Interstate 8 from the Phoenix area and I’d like to leave early enough that I don’t run into any monsoon storms. That way I’ll get into San Diego early enough to pick up my badge and swag. See you guys there, and if anyone wants to get a hold of me, just send email to james.fee at google.com as I’ll be checking it often.

I’m lucky enough to have either lived in Southern California or Arizona over the past 30 years so I’ve always had a quick trip to the ESRI User Conference. For me the biggest question usually is do I leave Sunday or Monday morning. Some bloggers are already heading out (here, here and here). Ed, as you land at Sky Harbor, look down at Sun Devil Stadium and I’ll wave back up at ya!

See you all at the blogger meet up.

Just a reminder (I’m sure you’ve seen it everywhere) to upload and tag those photos you are taking at the User Conference with the esriuc05 tag. If you just signed up for Flickr it could take a day or two for the pictures to show up, but once you are “approved” they show up that instant. Tag those photos of your trip to San Diego or getting ready for the conference as well at the baseball game, golfing, the fun run or just having a good time in the gaslamp. It is all good, the more photos the more interesting it will be for everyone. Also don’t forget to add the esriuc05 tag feed to your RSS reader so you won’t miss a thing.

Well by this time next week, most of us will be enjoying yet another ESRI User Conference. I believe this is my 10th and 5th in a row. My focus on the UC has changed over the years, but I still enjoy going. I’m just amazed at how big it has become since moving to San Diego from Palm Springs. There are a couple things I’m looking forward to and I thought I’d list them here in no real order.

• ArcSDE on PostgreSQL – I’ve got no problem with Oracle, just that many of our clients just can’t afford it. PostgreSQL would fit that bill perfectly. I’m not too high on MySQL so I don’t care too much about support of the RDBMS, but PostgreSQL would be super.
• Open ArcWeb Services – Given the press that Google Maps has gotten, I’d love to see Jack announce that they will open up a reduced functionality version of ArcWeb Services for free. Then all ESRI has to do is convince people to start using it (blog about it!).
• Meeting everyone at the blogger meet up – I’m looking forward to meeting many of you.
• ArcGIS 9.2 – I’ve seen some peaks at what might be announced with 9.2 and I’m quite interested. I’m going to try and go to as many Technical Workshops as I can.
• ArcGIS .NET Developer Special Interest Group Meeting (dead link) – Art Haddad has posted some interesting thoughts on his blog over the past week. I’d like to see more of what he’s talking about.
• Jithen Singh on ArcGIS Server Implementation – I’m always interesting in “real” implementations of ESRI software. We usually have tight deadlines and it sounds like Jithen did too.
• ESRI Developer Network – We’ve got one subscription and getting ready to order another. I want to make sure we get the most out of EDN so I’ll try and spend some time with folks over at the EDN Island (can I assume you’ll have an island?).

Oh I’m sure they’ll be more that will creep up during this week as we learn more about what will be announced. I’d also like to stop at the Thales Navigation booth and take a look at the MobileMapper CE GPS unit. We are getting ready to replace our old one and I like what I’ve seen from Thales.

I’m sure you’ll see this in your email inbox, but just in case you didn’t here is the link to ESRI’s answers to our questions.

ESRI International User Conference 2005 – Preconference Survey Q & A (dead link)