The trip to San Diego ended up being a good one.  No flight delays and great weather definitely helped, but being able to spend a couple of days talking to some really smart people from companies in a variety of industries was really the highlight.  If I’m going to spend four days away from the family it’s great to be able to learn a lot in the process, and the best way to learn is to surround yourself with people smarter than you are.

It’s also fun to have a "small world" moment.  One of the people I met this week grew up a mile from one of the neighborhoods I lived in while growing up in Northern Virginia and since he’s a year younger than my brother they actually went to elementary school together.  He now lives in Atlanta and since I had a layover in Atlanta we ended up on the same flight home, and when we ran into each other at the airport he invited me and another person from the conference into the Delta Lounge as his guests.  Drinking free cocktails is a great way to pass the time at an airport.

In one of the conference sessions I attended I set next to a guy from a health care company and in the course of the group discussion he talked about a technology that had turned into a home run for his company. Ends up they had licensd it from Wake Forest University.  That conversation helped reinforce to me how big a player WFU is despite its diminutive size and I’m darn glad we have it here in Winston-Salem.

Finally, on the last day of the conference I was trying to figure out how to kill the five or six hours I had until my flight.  A couple of other conference goers had cars and were staying for the rest of the week so they offered to drive a bunch of us into the town of Coronado from the hotel, and then after doing some sightseeing and dinner they offered a ride to the airport to those of us flying out that night.  So we got to walk through Coronado, see the beach, have a nice dinner and then have a comfortable ride to the airport.  And as I mentioned before we also got to hang out in the Delta lounge.  Nice!

Makes me wonder if fate has a nasty trip in store for me to try and even things out.