Well, I'm back from the conference at the Aviara Four Seasons in La Costa. The whole thing was a lot of fun, and went really well.

I got there Sunday evening, and Diana showed up a little bit after me. We got ready, and headed down to the grand ballroom for cocktails and dinner. We hung out with Bruce and his wife Julie who were both a lot of fun to talk to. Dinner was steak and sea bass, and soup and salad, and was really good. After dinner, we had some guest speakers of Cokie Roberts (ABC news political correspondant) and her husband who's also a radio/tv news guy. They talked about the political climate of Washington, and told stories about senators and whatnot. During the beginning of the talk, there was some pretty bad feedback. After a little bit, Diana tapped me on the shoulder and pointed back to the sound booth, where my boy Bruce was fiddling with things. I went back there and asked what he was doing back there, and he said, half-shocked and half-proudly "I think I fixed it!" Apparently he has background in sound stuff, and the guy working there was a video guy and was clueless. It was pretty cool.

The next morning, I met the other work boys downstairs in a smaller ballroom that was all set up with computers and three big projection screens. The game was up and running on all the machines and on the big screens, but on further testing, some of the machines were no longer talking to the Internet, and therefore, to my work and the game. So we did some frantic, last-minute network switching stuff (which was really the job of the internet providers who were there), and got things up and running, and none too soon. I was pretty nervous when hundreds of people started filing in, but everything went off completely without a hitch. It was a lot of fun, and we got some compliments from the managing partners, which is never a bad thing. That afternoon, me and Bruce and Diana and a couple other people hung out at the jacuzzi and by the pool, feeling proud of a job well done and semi-guilty for not going back to work.

Dinner that night was room service (charged to the room, a'course). We did some quick calculations on how much the company must have spent for room, board, and entertainment for all the guests and employees who were there, and came up with a big number. I'm definitely not used to thinking about business budgets in the millions of dollars vs. personal budgets of a couple thousand dollars. Crazy.

Tuesday morning, back to work!