Rails Conf Day 0 [Ground Zero]

May 17th, 2007

This morning woke up and decided to forage for food. Jade asked the bell man where there was good food. He mentioned the Cadillac Grill. We walked for about 3 miles and never found this famous eatery. So we ended up landing at Starbuck's right across from the hotel. The gang of nine then headed to the convention center to get registered nice and early. We had several tickets that needed to be transfered so it was prudent to get that out of the way. They didn't have "fatboy" sizes left so Jay and I got tickets for redemption of shirts. We decided to head on out to Powell's bookstore shortly after registration. We hopped on the metro and headed out. It wasn't long before we got a twitter and plans changed. We decided to meetup with Robby and crew for lunch. We jumped off the metro and quickly got lost. We walked South for a few blocks then north for a few blocks and finally found the destination. Of course, we had been out of office nearly 12 hours so the world started to fall a part. Both Jade and myself got panic calls from the office that things needed fixing. We took care of business and gobbled some lunch. It was cool to hear some of what Geoffery has going on with Peepcode.
After lunch several of us headed up to Powell's Technical bookstore after wandering the streets of Portland. Powell's is a thing of wonder. Kleetus, Jay and myself took a quick walk through the park and then hooked up with Irish, Young, Heidmo and Lindsay at a comic book/art store. We were accosted by the "crack lady". Talk about interesting people.... We then went down to 360 vinyl so that Irish could get his drum and bass fix in. We amazingly ran into "crack lady" again. She tried to push some meth on us. We laughed. Feet were tired and so we caught the metro and headed back to the hotel.
We stopped at the Red Robin right outside the hotel and grabbed a beer and talked about disruptive technology, twittering, sms messaging and the impact on the zen of life. The kind of great conversations people don't stop to take the time to have anymore. Young and I promptly ended it with an SMS fight that we both agreed was good fun! The entire gang of nine then met at the convention center to meet with one of our larger clients. We chose Thai for dinner and were back on the metro to have a meeting. The gang was now about sixteen. Dinner was excellent and so was the company. Good times were had breaking bread and mingling about. Meet several people face to face that have only interacted with via phone. It's always nice to put a face to a name. There was plenty of good joking and tech talk happening. Despite some opinionated French snob at the table. (We love you Matt)
Rather than go back to the hotel we headed to an old skool arcade called ground Kontrol (with a K for those not observant cough). We shoved quarter after quarter in the machines playing our favorite games of old.... Jay, Kleetus and I had a marathon session playing Gauntlet. We SO NEED A GAUNTLET MACHINE AT INTEGRUM! Then there was an Integrum Dance Dance Revolution Dance Off held upstairs. All I know is Jay kicks some serious ass at DDR. The rest of us need some help. We all decided it was too early to just go back to the hotel. So, we decided to stand on the corner and "decide" where to go. After a good 20 minutes of this "deciding" we just headed to Dante's where a killer AC/DC cover band seemed to be playing. The place looked hip. Unfortunately they didn't think Jade was over 21 and that his ID was fake so we got "denied" 404 ID NOT FOUND!
This progressed to another street corner where we stood and debated for another 10 minutes. Finally someone just walked into Ash Street which had a live band playing. We had a few beers and hung out watching local bands. Several of the guys started the "round of shots". Team Integrum was having too good of a time. Unlike the poor hippie outside that seemed to get hauled off for receiving pleasure from his co-pilot while driving. Many of us were done and so went back to the metro to head to the hotel.
Unfortunately Portland has 3 lines. Red, Yellow, Blue. The ONLY line that wouldn't get us to the destination was the yellow line. Of course, that is the line that we took. We were lost. We ended up spending 20 minutes waiting to re-catch the proper train and get back to the hotel. By this time we were starving so we decided to grab a 4th meal (Taco Bell). We walked about 2 miles to Taco Bell and then we realized they only had the drive thru open. Naturally, they wouldn't serve us so we walked to Denny's and macked down some food before heading to bed. So excited for the conference to "really" start tomorrow. Off to bed its going to be a long day.