After going with some friends and coworkers to NY NY Hotel and having some drinks and playing video poker, we arrived back at The Venetian via taxi just before one in the morning. Only to have my alarm abruptly wake me up at six AM to get my suitcases loaded and dragged to the airport. My wife and I arrived at the airport in plenty of time to make our 8:20am flight and had a little debacle at Starbucks. The first issue is they only serve cold bagels, and have no toaster in the Las Vegas airport Starbucks and the other issue is that my wife ordered a coffee and three times and three attempts there were tons of coffee grounds floating in the coffee which made it non potable.

I spoke to the manager and had our bill refunded and we wound up getting the bagel and coffee at another station. My stomach was feeling a bit sick from the food and drink last night, so I tried to take it easy and just relax and rest on the plane. It is a very short flight being barely an hour from Las Vegas to Phoenix, so I barely had time to boot up my laptop and write up this blog post.

Overall the trip was very good this year, the show could have had more attendance but economic times are tough and companies can’t spend the travel money that they could in previous shows. My own presentation went much better than expected and I am proud that I have done it and come off so strong and represented my company and my own expertise well.

Couldn’t have asked for a more successful CA World this year.

-Justin Germino

Today was my presentation and in fact I write this post just three hours after my presentation was completed and over with.  I had felt a boulder growing in my stomach all week and I barely could swallow as people filled the room, there was a total of nearly fifty people in the room.  I was introduced by a Computer Associates speaker and as I walked up to the front of the presentation I peered over the crowd and my mind became steady.

I just started speaking and speaking and speaking, it was as if I pressed play on a DVD player and I just spoke and went through my material with the precision of a well oiled machine.  I spoke at an appropriate pace, I allowed questions and answered almost a dozen during the presentation and I actually filled up my one hour presentation so quickly that I barely got through all of my material.  I did manage to though and all of it was presented as good as I could have presented it.

When the presentation was ended nearly fifteen people came over to ask further questions and swap business cards, I had emails and pages from people over the next hour telling me that my presentation was one of the best ones they have seen all week and in fact the last two years at CA World some have said.  My topic was very technical which was what this event had been lacking previously.

My boss was very pleased and there were only two constructive criticisms from my presentation which I will take with me and learn from.  The first is when people ask questions, I had forgotten to repeat or adlib the question loud enough for the rest of the audience to hear.  The second was I spent too much time looking at one half of the room and did not equalize my attention to both sides of the room enough.  This was due to me having to stand on the left side of the room so the projector wouldn’t be blocked by my body, but was duly noted.

I am now very relieved and feel I have crossed another milestone in my career and that is being a presenter at a major trade show.  My life experience is richer as a result, and even though I stressed, vomited, worried and was miserable for the previous days I am glad that I have done this.  I represented myself well, my knowledge well and I represented my company well.

Thanks for all your encouraging words and support to my blog fans and my twitter friends.

-Justin Germino

This day wasn’t nearly as much to report as my anxiety and stress about my upcoming presentation have driven me to being sick to my stomach the whole day.  I fight back waves of vomiting while attending conference sessions, and I actually had to break to my hotel room to finally throw up several times due to my stress and anxiety finally overwhelming my poor aching stomach.

I now feel very tired and lethargic and can’t keep much down, the odd thing is I don’t feel worried on a conscious level, to me I am trying to treat it like any other conference call except in a room with people.  I know what to say I know what to talk about, I shouldn’t be stressed, yet my body begs to differ and I cannot escape this agony and pit of pain swelling within my stomach.

I will be sure to let everyone know how the presentation goes later today and I will give everyone an update.  I am estimating the turnout to be about 40-50 at the presentation today at 11am.  Wish me luck my friends, I am going to need it.

-Justin Germino

Today was Monday and the official general public kickoff of CA World I spend the majority of the day bouncing back and forth between sessions and listening to Computer Associates speakers present the various products and general pitching of industry trends…etc  I have a user group meeting for the PLC at 5:15 and had we had a good meeting speaking with British Telecom and discussing our leveraging CA products and what features we would like to see embedded in future versions.

On the personal front we did a little roulette, but it was a bad day at the tables so my wife didn’t want to play much anymore, wanted to save some money for a spa day instead.  I don’t blame her, have a spa day is more fun than losing in the casino.  I was scoping out the room where I will be giving my presentation on Wednesday, and see it has seating for 80 and a large projection screen in the middle.  I felt that twisted knot ball up in my stomach as I started to feel a little anxiety and stress that I will actually be giving a speech to what could be dozens of my peers in the industry.

We are probably going to walk over to Harrah’s casino tonight and eat at the buffet, since there is no buffet at The Venetian it will also save some money as we have been spending a lot at the Restaurants here the past few nights.

-Justin Germino

So I had flown into Las Vegas on Friday and attended the pre-conference Education and CARE meetings for CA World on Saturday and Sunday.  Today is when the official CA World kicks off and for those of you who don’t know CA (Computer Associates) puts together this trade show every 18 months to bring together training, education seminars and networking for information technology engineers and managers alike.  It is a fairly large event and usually over 10,000 people attend the event.

I will be speaking on Wednesday at 11am and giving a detailed overview of how we leverage CA SiteMinder Web Access Manager in our company.  We do make very extensive use of the product and push it to the extremes in terms of functionality and what the product can do and support so we make a good case study.

I have to say the Venetian Hotel which I have been staying at has some nice suites, the room we are staying in has 2 queen beds, 3 LCD tv’s, one in the bed area, one in the living room area with couch and office desk.  And one in the bathroom so you can watch TV while you take a bath or get ready…etc.

I usually leave CNN turned on 24×7 when I am in my hotel roomas I like to stay up on current events and hear the latest news with the economy and world.  I am trying to get blogging done in the early morning and at nights before and after my conference sessions.  I will be focused on attending seminars that pertain to Identity and Access Management and Web Security as that is my expertise.

-Justin Germino