Heading to Lotusphere
Mat Newman January 28 2011 13:37:42
Here I am in Raleigh, North Carolina, visiting with my friend Michael Beaver in what has become my annual stop-over on my way to Lotusphere (This year's hash is #LS11).It's a beautiful sunny winters day outside, 10 degrees (that's 50F on this side of the world), and I'm sitting in a quiet little corner of the IBM campus watching the Twitter stream pass by as people start arriving in Orlando for Lotusphere. Nice to watch conversations between most of the people I follow happening in the 'day time' for a change :-)
In case you haven't already started your trip, Andy Donaldson has an excellent blog post which is a guide to all the essential tips for the stuff that isn't always obvious while visiting Disney. The stuff about non-pharmacy medicines (eg: Head-ache pills) is one of the big gotcha's, one of my colleagues phoned me last year while I was driving down the i95 asking me to pick up some mouth-wash for him because it was so expensive on site.
I've only got one thing to add to that for anyone who is visiting Lotusphere 2011, forget calls, use data!
Last year was the first time I tried using data on my International Roaming plan in preference to calling home. It paid off. My phone bill for the trip was down $200.00 over the previous period, mostly because I used skype-to-skype from my Mobile phone (cell) instead of international phone calls. The difference was amazing. DATA is cheap on American networks compared to: Flag-Fall + Air-Time + Call charges.
Now that skype is available from both the Android and Apple app stores, I would encourage you to consider using it. One thing though, Skype was blocked last year on the Wi-Fi, so you need to use your cellular network connection. Normal warnings, YMMV, No responsibility, Caveat-emptor, etc.
Really looking forward to seeing everyone in Orlando in the coming days, hope to see you there, and look out for the guy in the Yellow Suit on Wednesday :-)
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