I’m at John Wayne (SNA) airport, waiting for my flight home.  I’m actually early, since my flight won’t leave for another hour and a half, but I’ve always been terrified of missing my plane, so here I am… Lucky for me, I found this really quiet spot next to the food court and decided to write in this blog, just to kill some time.

SolidWorks World was an awesome experience for me. This year was actually much better than the last one, when I attended for the first time. It was nice to see a lot of familiar faces, and meet some new people, plus, this year I had the opportunity to get in quite a few hands-on training sessions. Those are the best!  If I could have my wish, then every single session at SolidWorks World would be a hands-on session, but I do understand that it is just not possible. Still, they are just perfect. In fact, if I ever did a presentation at SolidWorks World in the future, I would love for it to be a hands-on session on some topic for beginners. That would certainly be a blast and would probably take care of most of the trauma of presenting, since the attention would be focused on the exercise and not the presenter. Anyway…  I learned a lot from those sessions and you can be sure that in the next several posts I’ll be sharing that knowledge with you, as well. I believe the video, or at least pdf files or powerpoint presentation, of the sessions will also become available for all SolidWorks users in March, but I’m not quite sure of the exact date.

There’s still so much I haven’t told you… I’ve showed you pictures, yes, but I haven’t got a real chance to tell you about some interesting products I saw at the Partner Pavillion. Those posts are coming soon too!

What else? Oh, yes, the Tweetup! On Sunday night, I attended my first Tweetup event, organized by Matt West, who works for SolidWorks and is always  taking good care of us bloggers. It was quite the gathering at the House of Blues.  There were lots of friendly people, drinks and nice conversation, always centered around SolidWorks, blogging and tweeting, of course.  Since the place was a bit of a walk from the hotel, I hitched a ride with Alex Ruiz, Matt Lorono, and Guilherme Kastner, in Alex’s car. Others had to walk for 10 to 20 minutes to get there, so I considered myself quite lucky, specially because Alex had promised a ride back to the hotel after the event was over.  A couple of hours later, however, I wasn’t feeling quite lucky anymore, when Alex gave me the keys of his car and told me I would be the designated driver, since apparently him, Jeff Mirisola and Matt Lorono had had a few drinks and none of them could drive.

To tell you the truth, neither Alex nor Matt looked affected by alcohol at all, but Jeff refused to ride in the car if Alex was driving, so I had to drive and put up with the  horrible and cruel jokes about my driving skills coming from the guys in the back seat. Oh, I think I’ve been scarred for life! Oh, the pain! OK, now I’m being a real drama queen, but I must admit that it was quite funny, because I had never driven a car like Alex’s and I kept making mistake after mistake that certainly didn’t make me appear as an experienced driver at all. We all made it in one piece, but this is definitely the last time I’ll be driving somebody else’s car… or driving somebody else out of a bar!