Spending Time Outside Austin at EECI
posted at 12:00 am
on Oct. 17, 2012
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Normally, this would be a post about the conference I’m at, which is EECI, the ExpressionEngine / CodeIgniter annual conference that is in its last year.
But there’s too much to say about that, and too much that I know that I can’t say, too much at the groundwater level. There are dissatisfied developers, people worried about EllisLab and the future of ExpressionEngine, and while the praise I heard for 96% of the sessions and 87% of the ExpressionEngine software was superlative, that’s not where my heart is right now, so I’m going to leave that.
The conference is being held at a resort hotel about 90 minutes drive outside of Austin. Like Big Brother, but with coders, setin a luxury hotel. It’s fun, but I can understand why Fox didn’t pick this pilot up. The hotel itself was nice, but strangely and completely unable to deal with the needs of the attendees, despite having the facilities to do so. The restaurants and bars were overwhelmed and verging on rude at every meal I tried to have, and the communication, so it seemed, between the conference center, the yatch club (hi, mom, that typo was for you), and the room people was beyond poor.
I was also amused at the room cleaners letting themselves in to my room at 8:20 a.m. That’s surprisingly early, no? I had earplugs in, so I didn’t hear them until they saw and woke me. By amused, I mean startled. By startled I mean, don’t they worry about Texas gun carry laws?
Today was warm and muggy until very very suddenly it poured rain—like from a kind of overcast but warm gloom to, five minutes later, the kind of rain that makes you RUN to a car parked across the street.
I enjoyed the warmth in my bones, and the people at the conference were once again the salt of the earth, the cream of the crop and truly lovely people, and while I had a few internal pitfalls today, it was mostly good, and now I am listening to Steve Earl and Johnny Cash. They are wise men. And now Lucille has come onto my iPod and that means it’s time for me to go.
