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A Warpstock '98 Special Report
The entire Warpstock convention was transferred in mid-planning, as you've probably heard by now, from downtown Chicago to Itasca. No fighter ever took a harder right to the jaw and kept standing than did the Warpstock crew. Add "tenacity" to their list of attributes. Sure there were glitches. Most pre-Friday arrivers were sent two miles down the road to the Wyndham Gardens due to a hotel overbooking snafu. The W.G., I'm told, used to be a Ramada Inn, the same one in which O.J. Simpson cut his finger on a broken glass after being telephoned about his wife's demise. Now there's a story to take home with you. The hotel also overbooked its showrooms, and at the last minute all vendor spaces were reassigned to a different location. There was plenty of grumbling during the Friday night setup, but by Saturday morning everyone seemed happy. At the Friday night preregistrant check-in, another minor problem came to light. All preregistration badges were issued to the person who ordered them, not the person who was supposed to be registered. This was mildly amusing since it meant that both you and your wife would have the same name, for example, "Adam". The errors were quickly fixed with overlay stickers. Judy McDermott's dinner at Bob Chinn's Crab Broiler on Friday night was the unofficial start of the festivities. There were a good fifty of us in attendance, and the table I was at also showcased Dan Casey from V.O.I.C.E., John Ratti from the Warpstock crew, lecturer Lynn Maxson and several others from all points of the U.S. Seminars returned to the published schedule by mid-Saturday after a shaky start which left one of the three lecture rooms out of sync with the other two. And the published schedule was a bit quirky this year with the omission of the names of the lecturers, the descriptions of their topics, and even a few of the vendor names and volunteer credits. The only ongoing problem with the schedule was the start and end times of the lectures, since the calendar lines didn't line up with the time column and there was constant confusion about what was supposed to happen when. Nevertheless, Warpstock marched on. The beautiful weekday weather turned to a pounding rain on Saturday morning, and that slowed down some of the arrivals. One lecture was canceled but the others in adjacent rooms picked up the slack. More than once I found myself hopping between rooms every ten minutes, trying gallantly to absorb everything. On the vendor floor, aisles were sometimes packed so tightly you couldn't get through. I picked up a copy of Simplicity For Java at the special show price, and I'll be using it alongside my VisualAge For Java and the free JDK. Hopefully next year they'll schedule a couple of hours of vendor-only time, so you won't miss a seminar if you want to peruse the vendor tables. The software demo room turned out to be a full-blown auditorium, where product after product was shown for consideration. The printed schedule included a list of vendors but didn't include any contact info (url or phone number). If you didn't think to pick up all the literature at the vendor tables you were stuck with no way to contact them. Everyone showed up for the Saturday raffle, and it took what seemed like eons to give away the prizes heaped on several tables. Stan Sidlov was the emcee, and more than half of the expectant audience won something. At slow times during the raffle, handfuls of software packages were simply thrown into the crowd. Sunday was more of the same, with things running smoothly from start to finish. I classify this year's Warpstock as an A+ success. Put a yellow sticky note on your calendar right now for Warpstock '99.
For other Warpstock '98 articles see the
Warpstock '98 Article Index.
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