<rave>

The conference

Sarah and I have returned safely from the West Wind Web Connection conference. It was really awesome to finally meet so many of the people that I hang out with on the Web Connect forums in person. Web Connection 5.30 is awesome. The wwBusiness Objects and JSON handling is very powerful and something that will take me awhile to learn, but will totally be worth the time.

I gave a short show and tell about my work with jQuery and Visual Foxpro/WC. There were a lot of questions and I think people were very interested in what I was doing. I’ll try to resurrect my examples page here soon to share with everyone. jQuery got a lot of attention too. I brought the books that Packt Publishing sent me with me. They were passed around most of the afternoon and several people took note of their ISBN numbers to order them from Amazon. jQuery may well soon be part of Web Connection. The excellent Date Picker from Marc Garbanski has already been added and I’m sure there is more to come.
</rave>

<rant>

The hotel

The Arizona golf resort and conference center is a very beautiful place, but for us that was about the only thing going for it. They managed to leave my wife at the mall for almost two hours because somebody at the front desk repeatedly dropped the ball on calling the driver to come pick her up. We were without power for the better part of a day because an underground line got cut. Room service likes to barge in without knocking. Wi-Fi is $9.95 per day and connections are inconsistent. The front desk staff like to use foul language. I’ll define our experience with simply, They Suck!

Update!: Rick Strahl has blogged about his experience and made some very good points about the two way street that is customer service as has my latest addition, Eric.Weblog() , to Google Reader.

</rant>