Birdland

This is part of a series based on my travels to the 2008 Webmaster Jam Session. I am writing this portion about the time leading up the the main event as I sit at the airport ready to head home. So this is more of a recap of the past couple of days rather than a live-blog play by play, for that, check out my twitter stream.

It’s just after 5 PM and in my paranoia to not miss my flight, I managed to arrive at my gate just under 2 hours early. So I am taking a moment to reflect on the last couple of days visiting Atlanta for the 2008 Webmaster Jam Session.

In order to tell this story I have to start with a little background, a coworker and I attended last year’s Jam Session in Dallas. I had a blast and learned a bunch of new stuff that applied directly to my job. In addition to that, I was able to meet a bunch of people that do pretty much exactly what I do. So when I saw the announcement for this year’s Jam Session, I knew immediately that I wanted to attend.

A couple of days prior to leaving for Atlanta, I was reviewing the sessions that I wanted to check out while there. A couple of the sessions stood out to me, titles like “Managing your Personal Brand,” and “Design Disrepair” were ones that I wasn’t planning to miss.

My trip started early in the morning with an initial flight to Denver, where I spent a couple of hours swimming with joy in their free wifi.

Excuse me while I rant

I’ve been to a couple of airports as a web professional and am always either really happy because the airport has free wifi or really sad when they don’t.

Tucson and Denver both offer free wifi, but Atlanta doesn’t. ATL, you’re on notice…

I eventually arrived in Atlanta and due to first my inherent cheapness and second rumors of a gas crisis, I decided to ride the local public transportation system. I was impressed with the speed I was taken to the Downtown area, to add to that, my hotel was one block away from the downtown station. Very nice indeed.

After a little freshening up, I made my way to the Sheraton, the “unofficial” host hotel to meet up with my fellow web geeks.

I’ve been following most of the speakers and organizers of the conference prior to the event and so when I got to meet them face to face I was able to strike up a conversation easily. Wanting to get a fresh start in the morning I excused myself and headed back to my hotel.

Stay tuned for my next post where I will recap the sessions of Day One that I attended.