There was a lot of food. The conference center is a really nice building, built less than a year ago. It has lots of standard windows looking into a lobby that spans two levels. One main conference room going up two floors. Three smaller conference rooms on each of two floors. It has it's own kitchen so the food was freshly made. Continental breakfast. Lunch was salmon the first day and chicken the second, with vegeterian entrees and like half a dozen different desserts (I had some sort of strawberry cheesecake with caramel topping which was very good, lots of people took two helpings, the bastards). At the 15:00 break there were cookies. And you could always go and get coffee or tea or various drinks. Very well done. (Thursday night we all got an email saying something like "the food at the conference center is for attendees only; today there were too many people and we ate the food that belonged to other conferences".)

I woke up at 05:00 the first day and left at 06:00. No traffic until I got to the 880/92 offramp and then it was very slow until the toll booth. It only took me 90 minutes to get to work so I had lots of time to get tired before I left for that day's session. The second day I decided I wanted more sleep, though since I went to sleep later I probably the same amount (it's hard to make yourself go to sleep earlier than usual). I woke up at 06:00 and left by 06:40. Traffic was heavier, as I slowed down at the Caldecott Tunnel, at the 24/580 Interchange, at the 980/880 join, then way before the 880/92 offramp. But with a bit better driving I still got to work in an hour and forty minutes.

As for actually staying awake, the first day wasn't bad. I think I didn't even doze off, though I zoned out a couple of times. It helped that I was trying to name all 50 US states. This is an activity that I do about twice a year, during times when I'm at one place with nothing to do and have to stay awake. I used to do it during Finals in college and high school and at a few other times. For about 15 years I've probably tried it 30 times, always spur of the moment and since I'm not trying to memorize the US states it's always a challenge.

This is the first time that I've actually finished it. All 50 states, the last being Maryland. The first few times I did it I just wrote down random states and got only in the mid 30's. After that I started doing it geographically. You can picture the US and name of the states, starting in the west and working towards the east. With that method I got in the early, then mid-40's. But my best score was still only 46. This time I had all day to think about it, and it nearly took me all day too. The first 40 were easy. Then I was stuck for almost an hour until I remembered Alaska and Hawaii which pushed off a spurt that got me to 46. The last four took me a few hours as I would pay attention to the presentation but in the back of my mind I'd be going over the letters or previous states or whatever to jog my memory.

So now that I've done this personal feat, what's next. How will I while away my time next time I'm stuck at some hideously boring event? Well, I'm not too sure, but I'm thinking of doing state capitals too. I actually did that this time and got about 20. Then I looked it up and there are a lot of capitals that aren't obscure cities. It helped that the previous night I saw On the Record and Bob Costas, who got the capital of South Dakota wrong, tried to make it up by spouting off several obscure capitals.

Did I learn anything from this training. Personally, I would have to say very little. Most of the standards are in the GUI and web applications and database applications side. Luckily Simon and I work with standalone servers; we're practically our own tier. So most of the standards don't apply to our group and since Jax's team shields us from the rest our team is sitting pretty with nothing to worry about. Yes, I do remember trying to adhere to these standards as they were evolving when I was working on Dynamic Reports. That was hell as every code drop there was something else wrong; some part of the tech stack that I depended on had changed and since I was using an old version of the tech stack (I had a very customized on of a kind test system) I didn't notice until P1 bug reports flew my way. Nope, don't miss that at all.