Mid-week report

Today's post won't be really in-depth and I'll have to post pictures later, but, I did want to check in. Monday was a great day with lots of fabulous people. I popped by the AUGI Local Chapters Leadership Conference just to say hello to some friends and then it was back to my room for a little while to work on the Salary Survey a bit more. Then Mike and I decided to take 5 and meet up with the MyFeedBack (beta) guys and some others down at La Scena. We ended up heading out to dinner fairly late and walked far too much. Yesterday was excellent. I had some AWESOME classes. The opening session blew me away with these 360 screens and surround sound. WOW is all I can say about that. I went to a subscription breakfast right before that that showed some pretty cool developments with the products, such as Autodesk's recent acquisition of Robobot and how it works with Revit Structure (something I'd spoken with Peter Jamtgaard about the previous evening during dinner. Sitting next to him and Shaan Hurley was fascinating, great discussions). My next session was 'Using FMDesktop for Space Management on a Shoestring Budget'. Great stuff, and the presenter gave some good resources and perspective that will come in handy for me later on, I'm sure. Next I had the opportunity to be in the class 'A Survey of BIM Programs at US Federal Government Agencies'. That was very interesting stuff, and also provided some resources that I'll be delving into more later. My last class was 'Building an ROI (return on investment report) Case for Autodesk FMDesktop. Again, something I'll be saving for future reference. This was a smaller class and there was a lot of good discussion. I got to meet some guys I'd spoken to on the phone, or whose work I had read. Afterwards was the AUGI Annual Meeting with the official turnover of the wishlists to Autodesk, which is always exciting. The new AUGI President was announced as Chris Lindner. He gave a great talk. The sponsors were thanked, the new Top DAUG t-shirt design was shown and the winner introduced. We were told about the new Country Chapters around the world. As always, I took plenty of photos, so I'll post them somewhere soon. THEN, of course... the Beer Bust. I hung around the AUGI booth and met all sorts of friends and colleagues. FINALLY got to meet my friend and fellow blogger, Robin Capper, from New Zealand. We've always managed to miss one another before. The exhibit hall was truly impressive, the AUGI booth had a new and fabulous international corner, and the Top DAUG and Stump the Chump areas were hopping all night. This morning started out with a breakfast reception for AUGI writers (AUGIWorld magazine and AUGI HotNews eNewsletter). So, turns out HotNews has a subscribership of over 95,000 people so far!!! That should probably increase as the articles are starting to be translated into other languages for the new country chapters. It was really good to get together with and meet face to face the other people who do such a great job either as the production staff or the volunteer writers. My next class is the Facility Manager Handbook. I have taken this course before, but, appreciate a recap and learning about any new resources available. I'd love to do a list of all of the great people I've run into like I did for Sunday, but, there are just too many... I think Matt Stachoni wants to see his name here though, so I'll say 'hi' to him just so he feels appreciated.