NAB Adventure Redux

After my first adventure in Vegas, I skipped the event entirely my Junior year, but I returned to attend the NAB convention in Vegas again my Senior year.  I went with two other guys, and just rented a cheap room in Vegas, that looked like it was close to the Strip.  That was deceptive, as it was not easy to get to the strip from there, and while I had reserve a room at the Travelodge, the building at that address was called the Vagabond Inn.  It lived up to its name, and was full of the kinds on interesting characters that you will only find in the slummy part of Vegas, a short distance off the strip.  The guys I was with didn't want to waste money on a cab, so we decided to walk to the strip to look around that evening.  It looked close, and was probably less than a mile away, but there was no direct route to get there.  There were fences to jump and railroads to cross, and we had all sorts of interesting adventures.  I am pretty sure we had to step over a sleeping homeless guy to get through one spot, and across the back of a strip club once we were closer to "civilization."  We eventually made it to the strip itself, and spend most of the night looking around.  We didn't want to take the same route back, so we ended up on narrow overpasses and running across freeway off-ramps to get back to the hotel.

I think we took a car to the convention the next morning, and the event itself was relatively mundane.  It had been arranged that I was supposed to interview someone for my professor, for an article he was working on.  But when I found the guy, he wouldn't give me the time of day, which was a very strange experience.  I had met him before, and I ended up working with him a couple years later, but that must have been a heck of an off day for him.  We survived the rest of our time in Vegas, and I even made enough gambling with their money, to pay for our meals.

I was beginning to get to know a lot more of the people in the industry by that point, and had been working on a variety of random projects with people I had been introduced to through my internship.  I did a day or two of work in a number of different facilities, on a wide variety of tasks.  It never ceased to amaze me how much people in the industry didn’t know about the technology they were using, or in many cases, just attempting to use.  I had the benefit of not being held back by the mindset of the old way of doing things, and had done all of my video work on computers from the beginning.  This perspective continues to serve me well to this day, in developing new ways to use existing technology that other people don’t see as easily.

I did a lot of work with Adobe software, and once I was invited into their beta development program, started connecting with their engineers more.  Much of the work being done in our office was for them, and did much of that myself while my boss was distracted by some outside personal issues that year.  I ended up commuting down into Hollywood at least three days a week, while doing a full schedule of classes back at school, so I kept pretty busy.