It's quite a drive (5 hours of driving, 6 when you factor in rest stops and a meal), so we took some extra days off so that we could arrive early and be fresh for the tech talks, and to recover afterwards.
Overall: It was worth doing once, but I don't think I'll do it again. It cost a good amount of time, energy and money to go. I don't regret it, but I don't think it's worth it to me to do it again. Maybe if they get someone really special to speak. Like one year, they had Don French, who was one of the father's of the TRS-80.
So let's focus on the good first. Great speakers on interesting topics. Lots of cool equipment. Some Model II/12/16/6000s as well as the expected Model I/III/4 systems, and CoCo's, plus some extra stuff (like a DT-1).
But we also have to talk about the bad, and I don't like doing this, but it needs to be said.
Venue: First off, the hotel and the staff were wonderful. They got a perfect score. The problem with the venue is location. There's 1 coffee shop near by that was... OK. Not Herman's Boy that's for sure. The area was not nice, especially at night. So that limited us to where we could go and we like to walk. Most other restaurants were a need to drive and that's hard with all the construction even with GPS.
Next, the normal "Con Vibe" wasn't there. Normally at a convention, there's a bunch of geeks who don't know most of the people there. What ties us together is a common like of whatever-the-con-is-about. Tandy Assembly is more like a meeting of old friends and "outsiders" are not accommodated. That's not to say that were weren't made to feel welcome by some. But we weren't "in the know" and we were kept in the dark a bit.
For example, on Friday night, after the tech talks, we headed to the hotel restaurant for dinner. We didn't know that Tandy Assembly had a buffet. It wasn't written anywhere. We weren't told about it. We didn't see anything about it until later when we brought in our auction stuff. Normally, such a thing is for the show "guests of honor" and the people who work to put it on, but it seemed it was open to all attendees Friday night. It would have been nice to know about it before we went off to dinner.
Unlike many cons, we didn't take over the hotel. I was rather surprised at the lack of attendance Friday, but we figured that it was a work day and we'd get a lot more people on Saturday, but we didn't. Now, this is a good/bad thing. Personally, I like the lack of crowds (ex: we won't be at VCFMW until they get a bigger venue), but there were so few people that we didn't get to meet many people - because there weren't that many to meet with.
To close on a upbeat note: It was nice to meet Ian, Jeff Birt, and a few others that I've only seen on YouTube. So, like I said, it was worthwhile to go. I don't regret the time/energy/money we spent.
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