tl;dr; It was really nice. The venue was really good. The main room was at least twice (some people said three time) as large as the other venue. It was crowded, but not "subway at rush hour" crowded.
Let's start with the bad:
- Food poisoning. We went to the "canteen" in the main room for a quick snack. We only picked up a pack of peanut M&Ms to hold us until dinner. Even though the date on the packs were 2025, it was obvious that they weren't stored correctly and the one M&M that we ate was certainly off.
- Loud neighboring party. There was a big wedding going on in the ballroom next to VCF and sometimes their "music" system intruded into the VCF panel room. More of an annoyance, but someone should have told them to turn it down a bit.
- The wedding also blocked certain hallways for a while. This was a minor annoyance, though, as there were other (but less direct) routes from the con to the rooms.
- The traffic! It took me 1 day (each way), to physically recover from the drive. Chicago area traffic is horrible.
But that's about all I have to complain about.
Lots of cool displays and loads of nice people. Everyone was very polite and pleasant.
My goal was to git rid of stuff (and not accumulate more). I succeeded.
All the stuff I brought to the auction sold for a good amount. We "donated" at least $400 through the auction. All of the stuff that I dropped off at the free table disappeared by Saturday morning.
So, what did we see:
1. Adrian from Adrian's Digital Basement on YouTube.
1. David from 8-Bit-Guy on YouTube.
1. Veronica, Geri Ellsworth, June (Nybbles and Bytes) - but they were there as more of con-go-ers, not to talk/display.
1. TexElec had a table.
1. A nice Osborne display. An 01, Execute and even a Vixen! All working!
Most of the talks were interesting, but not real useful to me. They still had lots of good information, though.
One of the things I got from the YouTuber channel was the realization that most LLM AIs are really nothing more than high-powered versions of Eliza.
