Full Day at the cool award trip in Arizona - Defying Limits

This first full day of CTRE after a night of relaxed reception last night started with an early breakfast, seemingly too early but what can you do!
We then had a 4 hour morning session. The main speaker was Frans Johansson author of the medici effect. A great presenter, I was sort of taking notes mentally in the delivery. His main point is that real ideas and innovation comes from diverse and apparently unrelated teams. Much of what he said was preaching to the converted. The theme being defying limits.
I already had by defacing my badge with my moo sticker.


Then we had SJP (the IBM chairman/CEO) pop along and give a more financial related pitch. It was a good one, he was as per usual relaxed and natural on stage. Threw in a good few jokes as well.
Next was all the new fellows, then some extra awards of 20-30k awards to people for cool things and patents.
It was a good sport to guess what them music they played for each award. e.g. telecoms people they played "hanging on the telephone" and automative "Cars" by Gary Newman.
Then it was the afternoon activities after a very very quick lunch.
For us a hummer ride in the Arizona desert.


We were on with a few other people, Daz, Andy Bravery and fellow metaverser Paul Moody.
This was very cool, mainly because our driver was from a race car driving family aswell as having some good tales to tell and being a very in control driver off road.
Tonight is off for a quiet meal, its our 13th wedding anniversary on this 13th of may. Seems to have been pretty lucky so far.
What has been cool has seeing so many faces and names I have heard of or interacted with in some way. IBM Fellows and VP's all over the place.
As with all these things there are people who really should be here too, but there are about 500 IBMers from the technical community here. Whilst this clearly is a jolly I hope that its something other people will see as a good thing, we get to swap ideas and put faces to names, spread the word and get more people aspiring to stuff like this.
The main message was to just do what we all do already, ignore the rubbish, the pointless processes etc. Just try things and it will pay off in the end. So I feel I am here with a load of slightly rogue operators, kindred spirits. Which is a good thing.

Of course the one thing that really annoyed me was that in the relaxing room they have some sweets and soda's etc.
However I was disappointed at this.



Now on my rock and roll rider I specifically asked for the blue m&m's to be removed! dont they know who I am !