Yesterday was a day-long, rather technical workshop in a very hot room packed with computers and sweaty geeks. Not as glamorous as it sounds. You haven’t lived until you’ve spent a day learning how to optimize threads and caching techniques, trust me. They seem to have employed about a million people, all dressed in black Adobe outfits, holding signs I couldn’t read, and checking to make sure you have your badge on, all while smiling and asking how you are and being friendly and shit. It gets annoying pretty quick. The swag so far has been pretty unimpressive – a crappy friggin’ reusable grocery bag that isn’t big enough to actually be of use as a grocery bag, and a water bottle that’s OK, but, who really needs another water bottle? The badge lanyard has a 4-gig flash drive built into it, and the workshop dude yesterday handed out a business card-size 2-gig drive yesterday. OK, I guess, but, like water bottles, not exactly something I really need. This is definitely going on the evaluation (fewer friendly sign holders and better crap next time, please; oh, and let’s crank up the a/c in the labs, fer crissakes). Today is the first official day of the conference, so hopefully the vendors will have some decent shit to hand out.