You would have thought no one ever saw someone eat 3 lbs. of crabs before...

Hey folks... I've been back from TODCON almost a full day now (got back into Washington DC at 7:00pm last night). So I thought I'd give you a brief synopsis of my trip and what I did, what I thought and what I experienced the last couple of days at TODCON.

Thursday (leaving for Orlando):
My one big purchase for this trip was a Washington Nationals baseball jersey. I promised myself I wouldn't purchase any Nationals merchandise until Major League Baseball got their proverbial act together and named an owner and, since they did that two days before I had to leave, I was good to go with my capitalistic morals still intact.

Got to the hotel a few hours earlier then everyone else, so I got my room and walked around the lobby where I ran into Ray and Danielle Mickey. So, we helped Ray set up the registration table with all the books, t-shirts and name tags for all the TODCON attendees. For the t-shirts, I PROMISE I'll put the t-shirt design up on my web site today or tomorrow (I swear!). While Danielle and I were organizing the name tags, I grabbed Tom Green's name tag and re-inserted the generic name tag sample that comes with all the plastic holders. You've seen them before... they generally have a picture of man or woman with the office supply logo on them. So, in essence, Tom's tag has his name on the front and a picture of some generic secretary-looking lady on the back. I made a bet with Danielle to see how long it would take Tom to discover this. I won the bet with "half a day".

Later that night, many of us went to Roy's - a Hawaiian restaurant where Vicki Berry blinded us with her digital camera. The women is dangerous with a camera, folks! She's posted some of her TODCON pics here.

Friday:
After the sessions for the day, a group of us went out searching for a good ribs place. Unfortunately, after walking endlessly around the strip mall, we found out the place went out of business so we opted for a steakhouse instead. By that time though, I was too hungry to notice what the name of the place was but they had some gooooooood steak.

One of the TODCON attendees that came with our group was Hassan Ellis. Eating and talking with Hassan is an example of one of the nicest and coolest things about TODCON - it's a chance to meet your peers and "talk shop" in an intimate and pressure-free way that no other conference can. As Paul Davis is fond of saying: You sometimes learn MORE from the "after sessions" then you do DURING the actual sessions. TODCON gives you a chance to discuss and compare each other's working habits, techniques and general advice to one another.

By the end of the evening, we came to the conclusion that Hassan was "separated at birth" from the actor, Richard T. Jones ("Judging Amy) and we all had a good laugh about that as others at the conference told him the same thing (even though Hassan didn't know who Richard T. Jones was).

Saturday:
The morning session, we all got to talk with Scott Fegette and Paul Gubbay (formerly of Macromedia and now Adobe) about all of our "wishes" for all the tweaks, changes, improvements and other things related to the Adobe line of products. My "big wish" was that if we were all going to play "Taps" for Freehand, at least make Illustrator a lot more "Freehand-ish" so it's much more intuitive and easier to use. That and I wanted them to add "bendable triangles" in Fireworks so triangles can be manipulated the same way they currently are in Freehand.

That night, it was decided that seafood would be the place of eats that night. At first, I was reluctant to go since Ray said the place didn't have crabs - imagine that... a seafood restaurant that didn't serve crabs!!! Talk about the horror! But I decided to go any way.

Thankfully, the restaurant did, indeed, serve crabs. In fact, they had three main choices of snow crab legs to choose from: 1.5 pounds, 3 pounds or all-you-can-eat. To everyone's utter horror and shock, I chose the 3 pound selection and casually explained to all the dropped jaws at the table that I come from a long line of crab eaters and in the Flick family, we take our crab eating VERY seriously. Three pounds of crabs is nothing but I chose that instead of the all-you-can-eat selection because I would still be eating there if I did.

I'm telling you... it's like people never saw someone eat crabs before! Amateurs.

Later on, many of us decided to take the Trolley back to the hotel since it was about 5 miles away. Me? I decided to get off 4 miles away from the hotel. Mainly because I had to do some "tourist shopping" to bring back something for my wife and kids.

And... walking four miles wasn't a bad way to burn off three pounds of crab.

Later on that night, I went swimming at the hotel with the Interakt gang where two ducks decided a hotel pool was a nice place as any for a 1:00am dip as any!

Sunday:
Sunday was the debut of the Orlando Jumpstart. I designed the layout while Zoe, Sheri and Jim helped organize and put together. As in Las Vegas last year, we wanted to show a preview of the Orlando Jumpstart and give everyone there a taste of how it was put together and what some of the things you can do with it.

All in all, it was a great session and my first since speaking at MX North a few years ago. Quite a few people came up to me and told me how much they enjoyed my particular part in explaining the design process and commented that they would certainly be interested if I decided to ever do a full session on something at future TODCON. So if you were at this year's TODCON and attended our Orlando Session, what are some things you might like to see from a guy who mainly uses Photoshop, Fireworks, Freehand and Dreamweaver? TODCON 9 is, sadly, a full year away but like I always say, you can never start preparing too soon!

Anyway, that was some of my memorable moments at this year's TODCON. What were yours?