I was in the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco Monday and Tuesday this week for the SUGI, the SAS User Group International. This is basically a computer software conference hosted by SAS Institute - the "world's largest privately held software company" - which makes software devoted to the analysis of data. Their software is good, and I use it for my job, so I will refrain from comments and snide remarks ...
In any case, SAS threw out some serious dough for this conference. I attended the opening session on Sunday evening. After Oscar-like presentations by the CEO and directors (complete with very colorful backlighting on a huge soundstage in front of an audience of 5,000) they had perform, if I remember it correctly, the Japanese drummers to highlight Japantown, the 3 Tenors (I couldn't see Pavarotti but they were professionals) to introduce "Little Italy", i.e. "North Beath" neighborhood, and the lead singer from Jefferson Starship, Mickey Thomas (who sang "We Built This City"). I'd say I enjoyed the 3 tenors most. It was humorous to see the entertainers trying their best - and they gave it a good effort - to get 5,000 statistical programmers and data analysts like myself "pumped up" about the software we use. The place was rockin' indeed!
Then, on Monday morning as I arrived to the conference, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder, and turned around to see ... my old supervisor from Kohl's Department stores from 1999! I hadn't seen him for years. That was kind of a shock. I kind of left that place in a hurry back in the beginning of 2000 only to find myself in a dead-end IT project in Germany, wishing I'd been more careful. Well, he seemed to have forgotten about it. Maybe because of this encounter, I went and watched Kohls' presentation to the assembled audience later on (today). They talked a lot about their campaign to use computer analytic tools from SAS to put the right size products on their shelves. I was more interested in what systems they used and how they implemented them. More of the engineering stuff, you could say. But, in front of the audience of mostly retail employees, they revealed precious little that I could use in my job here. Oh well...
The conference goes on tomorrow but I think I've had my fill of seminars and tutorials. It's a luxury of my job that I can go to these things but even they have their limit. I look forward to a regular day at the office tomorrow.
