Utah trip (BrainShare 2006)

Last week I returned from a 10-day trip to the United States, primarily to attend the annual Novell BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. I've never been to Utah before and all I knew was that it was the origin of the Mormon (Latter-Day-Saints) church. We have a well-known Mormon temple in Hamilton so I had at least an inkling of what the LDS church was all about.

After a 12 hour flight to Los Angeles via Air New Zealand, I arrived tired and haggard at LAX. During my 5 hour layover, I took a taxi (US$25) down to Venice Beach and took in the sights. The brisk sea breeze was quite refreshing and the lifeguard towers look just like they do on "Baywatch". The guard on duty didn't look anything like David Hasselhoff (or Pam Anderson, dammit).

I walked along the beach where there seemed to be a preponderance of blue surgical gloves abandoned in the sand (I didn't ask...) and globs of tar and oil. I stuck my hand in the Pacific Ocean so I could see if was any different on the eastern side. It wasn't.

Got on a short (1.5 hours) jet flight from LAX to Salt Lake City (first experience of shoe removal before boarding) and arrived after dark. I checked in to the Sheraton City Center hotel and dived into bed. I woke up the next morning to find that it had snowed overnight.

Luckily, Helen had just bought me a new possum-fur beanie and gloves just in case this happened and I appreciated the warmth.

I had a walk around downtown S.L.C. on the Sunday. Not much happens in that town on a Sunday. Perhaps we are all supposed to go to church or something.

There are all these statues around the big temple which are supposed to portray wholesome images of the joys of LDS church membership, but some of them are a bit creepy and all figures are distinctly whitebread if you know what I mean...

This one looked particularly funny in terms of the snow globs. The boy looks like a cotton-tail rabbit and the woman needs some famous NZ possum-fur nipple-warmers.

The conference itself was particularly well organised (with 6000 attendess, it has to be) and they just threw food and drink at you the whole time. I don't think I paid for any meals between arriving and departing which means my MasterCard bill was quite spartan for having been away for a week to an overseas location. I won't put in any images of the conference as the official ones are so much better than mine.

However the conference parties were a bit different. I partook of the oxygen bar at the "BrainWash" party. The gas was bubbled through all sorts of different "flavours" with different properties. Perhaps I'm just not in tune with my physiological responses but I didn't feel any different for having breathed any of the flavours of oxygen. Having the nasal-cannula stuck up your nostrils wasn't that comfortable either. It's not something I'd rave over but if you get the chance, give it a go... You never know, you might feel some "buzz"...

The weather did improve over the week and by Tuesday I was happily walking around in just a t-shirt (and trousers of course, hey, this is Salt Lake City, you know). The views of the Wasatch mountains became quite spectacular.

The conference session were mostly pretty good but aimed at a more infrastructural audience. Got to talk to a few product managers and learned some interesting stuff about future directions. However by day 4, I was ready to jump ship. So I took a trip to the Great Salt Lake itself.

I tasted the water and I can confirm it is very salty. Nothing lives in it except brine shrimp (AKA "Sea Monkeys" from the adverts at the back of those american comic books from the '60s & 70s)

That's enough of Utah.

Next stop, San Francisco...