Washington DC trip - November 2006

Because of the industry my company is in (healthcare), we have a tight-knit community for a customer base.  To help facilitate communication between us and our customers, as well as between our customers themselves, we have a customer-hosted meeting twice a year called the Click Compliance Consortium (C3).

I attended my first one, held in Washington DC in November, 2006 and hosted by Johns Hopkins.  Along with Kevin Wong (a coworker at the time), we gave a presentation on cloning using background tasks to improve site performance.  I'm not sure it made much more sense to the attendees than it does to you.  ;-)

Though I have video of my presentation, it's rather long, boring and too large to download.  But I will relay the funny part... a certain few customers challenged me to use certain words in my presentation, including: crouton, viagra, linoleum, tiger, elephant, lipstick, mascara and substantial.  Some were easier than others, obviously.  I never did fit in lipstick or mascara, but I got through the rest of them.  About 10 of the 80 people in the audience were falling out of their chairs... everyone else was just amused at the bizarre behavior.

The next C3 is June, 2007 hosted by Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.  I already have my plane tickets.

Here are some pics of me and my coworkers site-seeing in DC.

Murray, Andy, Tom and Kevin heading out from our hotel.	White House.	Backside.
Treasury Department.	Backside.	Viet Nam war memorial.
We headed over to the Washington Monument.	I didn't realize it was circled with flags until we got much closer.	I had to lay down on the ground to take this picture of Kevin.
We also stopped by the WWII memorial.	Once you stepped into the memorial itself, the sound of the water was pronounced.	I'm not sure what it was, but something about the design of the memorial seems to have an impact on people.
Each of us became quiet... somber.  We split up and walked around solo.  I could think only of my grandfather.	Later, we talked about how it affected us.  Everyone agreed there was something unsettling about it.	You can see the Lincoln Memorial at the far end of the Reflecting Pool.
It's really long.  I didn't realize that until I walked it.	Finally at the Lincoln Memorial...	And there's Abe.