Sunday, September 21, 2014

It's Nerd Week!

This week Nick is attending his fourth Spiceworld conference, which is basically a big nerdfest for some software and community called Spiceworks. I don't really pay that much attention when he talks about it, but I do smile and nod my head. This year I decided I wanted to tag along to see what it was all about and meet some of his fellow Spiceheads that I've spoken to online, so here we are in Austin. Thankfully I don't have to attend the boring lecture stuff during the day time, but my guest pass allows me access to all the fun dinners and parties in the evenings. So I will be free all week during the day to do whatever I would like while he learns or whatever it is that they do all day.

We are staying at the Hampton Inn, located in downtown Austin. Nick literally walks out of the hotel and one block to the convention center, which is very handy. No waiting on shuttles to get him there and back for everything. We are on the 9th floor, so we have a pretty decent view of PF Changs and the convention center itself.
Nick is some sort of local Spiceworks leader that hosts meetings in the DFW area for other users, so tonight there was a welcome event for all the leaders and a guest to attend. We got to take a duck boat tour of Austin and Lake Austin before heading back to Uncle Julio's for free fajitas and the fixings. It wasn't my first time on a duck boat - I remember taking a duck boat ride somewhere on a family vacation when I was a kid but I'm not entirely sure where we were. I'm thinking somewhere in Arkansas, but that could be wrong. It was pretty fun, even though I felt like a total tourist dork while people were staring at us as we drove around town and especially when we drove into the lake itself. But how often do you see a giant truck drive into a lake...or a boat drive around town for that matter? I guess we were worth a few stares.
After dinner we took a walk for a bit to get some exercise, but that didn't last longer than 30 minutes or so because we didn't feel entirely safe and it kind of smells downtown...so we came back to our hotel room at 9:15. I worked out and Nick worked. We are such party animals.

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